But Stevens had also made Alaska into his own version of a political machine, one in which taxpayers from the Lower 48 were footing the bill. As his profile increased, so too did public scrutiny. A 2003 investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that Stevens had funneled millions of dollars in single-source contracts to clients of his brother-in-law, the lobbyist William Bittner. In 2006, investigators from the federal government started probing the senator's relationship with a former aide, Trevor McCabe, who represented companies that had won nearly $700,000 in contracts thanks to a project Stevens had written into legislation. The structure Stevens set up replicated itself in Juneau, Alaska's capital, where his son, the former state Sen. Ben Stevens, has been fingered as a recipient of political bribes. The Stevens machine in some ways mirrored the one run by Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff in Washington, where ex-aides to powerful politicians set up shop as lobbyists and directed their clients to send campaign cash to their former bosses in exchange for federal contracts. But in Juneau, with public scrutiny far less intense, things had become far more brazen.
The mess that now threatens Stevens and the rest of the state's congressional delegation began, as is so often true in Alaska, with oil. On Aug. 30, 2006, teams of investigators from the FBI, IRS and Justice Department, probing allegations of bribes paid by an oil services and engineering company called Veco, raided the offices of six state legislators, shutting the blinds, picking through files with rubber gloves. They uncovered a practice that had never been terribly well hidden: State legislators were allegedly taking bribes from Veco and associated companies in return for sending government contracts their way -- for building state prisons, promoting state fish products, and servicing state-run oil fields.
Stevens himself was implicated when it emerged that Veco had helped manage the construction of an extension that doubled the size of his Alaska home; investigators are trying to determine if Stevens paid full value for the construction. The state's junior senator, Lisa Murkowski (who was appointed by her own father, Frank Murkowski, to replace him when he left the Senate to become governor in 2002), got in trouble for buying a lot of land from a real estate developer friend that a watchdog group charged had been sold to her below market value. She has since sold back the land. Alaska's lone representative in the U.S. House, Don Young, is in hot water for directing earmarks to two companies that contributed to his campaigns. To date, one state legislator has been convicted of taking bribes, and four lobbyists and executives have been indicted for giving them. Bribes were blatant, and floor votes in Juneau were being directed by lobbyists over the telephone. In the state Senate, lobbyists were caught handing voting instructions across the banister meant to separate legislators from the public.
When the details finally began to emerge this year, the Democrats, a meek and politically sidelined force in Juneau, started issuing a collective cri de coeur, urging the state's representatives to take back the Capitol from the lobbyists. "This is our floor. Our floor," the House's minority leader, Ethan Berkowitz, announced to the chamber last fall. "No telephone call's supposed to change what we're doing." (Some of the implicated Republicans, meanwhile, had hats printed up that read "CBC," for "Corrupt Bastards Club.") But reform hasn't arisen from partisan competition, as it did in Washington. In a neat symbolic fit, the agent responsible for Alaska's current moment of reform and modernization is a woman, a breed once nearly as rare in far Northwest politics as a Democrat. Sarah Palin, a libertarian and hockey mom from the fast-growing suburbs of Anchorage, began her political career -- as an appointed member of the state's Oil and Gas Commission -- by hacking into the computer of another commissioner, Randy Ruedrich, chairman of the Alaska Republican Party. Palin was seeking the evidence that she would eventually use to charge him with an improper relationship with lobbyists. (Ruedrich would later settle state ethics charges against him by paying a $12,000 fine.)
It is difficult not to see Palin's ascendance not just as a challenge to the state's establishment but also as presenting a crudely cut choice between the state's cronyist, resource-economy past and its future. She beat Frank Murkowski, the incumbent, in the GOP primary; voters began to sour on Murkowski as soon as he picked his daughter to replace him in the Senate, and then grew angrier over his grubbing for a private jet and other perceived ethical lapses. He left office the least popular governor in the country. Since her election as governor last November, Palin has made a public point of cutting down on Alaska's excesses, and challenging the easy habits of its past -- getting the state to put Murkowski's infamous jet up for sale on eBay, canceling pork projects and firing patronage appointees. By early this summer, with the scandals plaguing the rest of the Republican Party, Alaska Democrats had made some headway in the polls. But Palin's approval ratings are over 90 percent. Whether in the long term Alaska's economy can modernize and the state can wean itself from government welfare remains to be seen. But as Stevens hits back at the FBI through press releases, the senator's old legislative aides plead guilty, and his son endures a federal investigation, the moment is beginning to look like a pivotal point in Alaska's history. Perhaps the rough edges are being ushered out and something more modern and nationally acceptable has begun to move in.
What is happening in Alaska is not simply the collapse of one ancient Republican power and the rise of another, in Palin, that is more fragile and conditional. It is the assertion that for all of the country's divisions into red and blue, the national culture does exert a crude centrifugal tug, a tendency to iron out protruding regional discrepancies. The plaintive, humbled sounds coming from Alaska right now are those that always emerge when the exception succumbs to the rule.
About the writer
Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes about national affairs for Rolling Stone.
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