It rained a lot in Alaska this summer—even more than usual—and it was a cold summer, too. The sun doesn’t set on much of the state between mid-June and mid-July, but the weather was such that if you came from Outside, which is how Alaskans refer to the rest of the United States, and you happened to visit on a day that was fair, people would thank you for bringing the sunshine. If you were there to inquire into the political situation, people thanked you for that, too. They thanked you for coming, for hearing them out, and for not treating their story as a national joke. Many Alaskans enjoy being disconnected from the Lower Forty-eight, which is sometimes referred to as if it were a foreign country. There is pride in this sense of apartness, and that pride has been stung repeatedly since 2006, when the F.B.I. began raiding state lawmakers’ offices in an ever-expanding anti-corruption campaign. There have been indictments and guilty pleas. Oil-industry executives who were caught on videotape in the Baranof Hotel, in Juneau, the state capital, giving cash handouts to a state legislator have coöperated in pointing out other state legislators who liked to get paid before voting on oil-industry tax rates. Last year, the F.B.I. hit the home of Ted Stevens, Alaska’s six-term senator, and he became a favorite figure of ridicule on “The Daily Show”: an angry little man, with an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Magoo, who had once made himself seem even older than his eighty-plus years by describing the Internet as “a series of tubes”; Jon Stewart called him a “coot,” and portrayed him as a bully and a crook. As I travelled around Alaska in mid-August, Alaskans wanted me to understand that, sadly, he might well be all of that—and a very good thing for the state, too.

Palin was elected governor just as the corruption scandal broke, and quickly took the opportunity to proclaim herself a reformer. Illustration By Barry Blitt

I booked a flight to the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport shortly after Stevens was indicted on, and pleaded not guilty to, seven felony charges for failing to report more than a quarter of a million dollars in gifts from the same oilmen who had bought much of the state legislature. I had to change planes in Las Vegas, but when I got there I was told that my flight to Anchorage had been cancelled, on account of a volcano in the Aleutian Islands that had erupted and “burped”—the technical term—a gigantic cloud of ash into the lower stratosphere. The cloud had drifted in a northeasterly direction and occupied much of the airspace over the Gulf of Alaska. More than five thousand travellers were stranded as a result. The next day, when the cloud moved and I completed my journey, I learned that, after a similar belch of ash choked out all four engines of a K.L.M. flight into Anchorage in 1989, Ted Stevens finagled an earmark on an appropriations bill to secure federal funds for the Alaska Volcano Observatory, whose missions included the monitoring of volcanic activity and its attendant hazards. The Alaska Volcano Observatory became a punch line on “The West Wing,” mocked as a ludicrous example of congressional pork, which is how it might sound until you think about your plane crashing.

So Ted Stevens may have saved my life—and that was something a great many Alaskans could say as they looked about at the roads and bridges, the hospitals and flood-control systems, the satellite weather and global-positioning relay stations, the sprawling Army and Air Force bases, the rural landing strips and postal air-cargo flights that sustain existence in Alaska as it enters its fiftieth year of statehood. Much of this infrastructure was the result of Stevens’s work on the Senate Appropriations and Armed Services Committees and its Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, and he made no apologies for his transactional approach to politics.* On the contrary, as he brought Alaska the highest number of federal dollars per capita in the nation, he boasted that he was doing his job. Still, Stevens’s decision to launch a reëlection campaign in the middle of a federal investigation required more than ordinary moxie.

The oilman at the center of the corruption scandal, Bill Allen, had agreed to testify against Stevens. The two men had once shared ownership of a racehorse, and had counted themselves good friends. Allen, a former welder and oilfield superintendent who came to Alaska from Texas and built a billion-dollar oilfield-services company, Veco Corporation, liked to be around other powerful men. He liked them to need him, and he had already claimed under oath that he had bribed Stevens’s son, Ben, a former state senator with a reputation for profiteering from government contracts his father had a hand in. For instance, Ben Stevens had received seven hundred and fifteen thousand dollars over three years from the Special Olympics, as the chief executive of the 2001 Winter Games in Anchorage, for which his father had brought millions of dollars in federal aid. Conflicted interests also hung heavily over Ben Stevens’s dealings regarding Alaska’s fisheries. He has said that he has done nothing illegal, yet the speculation in Alaska was not whether, but when, indictments would drop on him, and how they might affect his father’s fate. (Everyone was waiting, too, for charges to be filed against the state’s only congressman, Don Young, a man so ornery that he makes Stevens look affable. Young, who is seventy-five and has been in office almost as long as Stevens, was also running for reëlection, and he had so far spent more than a million dollars from his campaign war chest on lawyers, an expense that he would not explain except to say that being investigated gets pricey.)

With so much trouble encompassing Stevens, the desire for a seventh term had a brazen air of unreality about it. At his age? Why not go gently? That would not be the way of Ted Stevens, the dominant figure of Alaska’s fifty-year existence as a state. He is a man given to rages—he has said that they are an effective way to get what he wanted, and “I don’t lose my temper. I always know where it is.” He is also a man used to having enormous clout. On the eve of the millennium, he was named “Alaskan of the century,” and he is known as Alaska’s Senator-for-Life. Before his last run for office, he told the Anchorage newspaperman Michael Carey, “I just want people to understand the commitment I’m making if I stay on. This is a period I could go out and make a million dollars a year, without any question.” Stevens had by then made a lot of people rich. Evidently, he felt underpaid, and Bill Allen had been there to help out. This time around, his humble pitch to voters is: I’ve always been there for you; now I need you to come through for me.

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“It’s the most momentous political season I’ve lived through in Alaska,” Pat Dougherty, the editor of the Anchorage Daily News, the state’s largest newspaper, told me—and that was three weeks before the governor, Sarah Palin, became the human cannonball of the Presidential campaign and blasted into overlapping orbits of political and tabloid super-celebrity. Just about everyone in Alaska knew that Palin was on John McCain’s list of potential running mates, but no one in the state’s insular, Republican political world had seen any indication that the campaign was checking her background. That made sense to Dougherty. Palin was forty-four years old and had served only a year and a half as governor, and he said, “The idea of her as Vice-President is ridiculous. She’d be way in over her head.”

Then again, two years ago Dougherty hadn’t considered Palin ready to be governor, even after she prevailed in the Republican primary against the deeply unpopular incumbent, Frank Murkowski, who had previously spent twenty-two years as Alaska’s junior senator. “We endorsed the Democrat in her race,” he said. “We didn’t think she had the experience.” Looking back, Dougherty allowed that he had underestimated Palin. After twenty months in office, she enjoyed an eighty-per-cent approval rating—the highest in the nation—and although he said he wouldn’t yet call himself an admirer, he described her performance as “great spectator sport.” Dougherty was particularly impressed by her tough, you-deal-with-Alaska-on-Alaska’s-terms attitude toward the big oil producers on whom the state’s economy largely depends.

Palin was elected governor just as Alaska’s political establishment was being realigned by the Veco bribery scandal. She had no role in exposing the corruption, but she was swift to see opportunity in the moment of crisis. The tainted politicians were being held to account, but hostility to the oil companies behind the corruption remained high. Since the nineteen-seventies, and the construction of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline, major oil producers had enjoyed extraordinary influence over Alaskan lawmakers, and had pretty much dictated the terms on which they did business with the state. Under Frank Murkowski, the big oil companies had negotiated terms for the construction of a new pipeline that would allow for the extraction and conveyance to market of thirty-five trillion cubic feet of natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope; and it was in the context of the legislature’s votes on the gas pipeline that the F.B.I. had begun its corruption sting. When Palin arrived on the scene, Murkowski’s gas-line deal was dead, and she adopted another approach, cutting out the big oil producers in favor of a Canadian pipeline company. She counted it a great victory when, this summer, the legislature approved a framework for proceeding with the project.

“We’re not just gonna concede to three big oil companies of this monopoly—Exxon, B.P., ConocoPhillips—and beg them to do this for Alaska,” Palin told me last month in Juneau. “We’re gonna say, ‘O.K., this is so economic that we don’t have to incentivize you to build this. In fact, this has got to be a mutually beneficial partnership here as we build it. We’re gonna lay out Alaska’s must-haves. Parameters are gonna be set, rules are gonna be laid out, a law will encompass what it is that Alaska needs to protect our sovereignty, to insure it’s jobs first for Alaskans, and in-state use of gas’ ”—her list went on. In the past, she said, “Alaska was conceding too much, and chipping away at our sovereignty. And Alaska—we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” And she said, “Our state constitution—it lays it out for me, how I’m to conduct business with resource development here as the state C.E.O. It’s to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans.”

Alaska is sometimes described as America’s socialist state, because of its collective ownership of resources—an arrangement that allows permanent residents to collect a dividend on the state’s oil royalties. It has been Palin’s good fortune to govern the state at a time of record oil prices, which means record dividend checks: two thousand dollars for every Alaskan. And because high oil prices also mean staggering heating bills in such a cold place—and because it’s always good politics to give money to voters—Palin got the legislature this year to send an extra twelve hundred dollars to every Alaskan man, woman, and child.

But, even as Palin enjoyed populist acclaim for her grand gestures—sharing the wealth and standing up to Big Oil—it was far from certain that the natural-gas pipeline, which she claimed as her proudest accomplishment, would ever get built. Palin had committed the state to risking half a billion dollars to help move the project forward, but there was no commitment from the producers to ship their gas through the line; without that, no one was willing to finance its construction. As Palin boasted of putting the big boys in their place, it looked increasingly likely that she would have to plead with them to return. In the meantime, Palin the reformer had been caught up in her own scandal, known as Troopergate.

The allegation was that Palin had dismissed her public-safety commissioner, a respected and well-liked officer named Walter Monegan, because Monegan had resisted pressure from her office to fire a state trooper named Michael Wooten. Wooten was Palin’s ex-brother-in-law, and his divorce from Palin’s sister Molly had involved an ugly custody battle that was not entirely resolved; it appeared that Palin had used her public office to settle a private family score. On July 28th, a bipartisan vote in the state legislature commissioned an investigation into the matter, at a cost of up to a hundred thousand dollars. Palin had invited it. “Hold me accountable,” she said. She promised full coöperation: “We would never prohibit, or be less than enthusiastic about, any kind of investigation. Let’s deal in the facts.”

On the day I stopped by Palin’s office in Juneau, she did not seem bothered that Alaska’s newspapers were filled with stories about Troopergate. Palin had just called a press conference to discuss the latest twist—a tape-recorded phone call from Frank Bailey, one of her closest aides, who could be heard trying to influence an officer to sack Trooper Wooten. “Todd and Sarah are scratching their heads, you know,” Bailey said, referring to the Governor and her husband, Todd Palin. “Why on earth hasn’t—why is this guy still representing the department? He’s a horrible recruiting tool. And, from their perspective, everybody’s protecting him.” Bailey, Palin’s director of boards and commissions, went on to convey the Governor’s displeasure, and urged action against Wooten. “She really likes Walt a lot,” Bailey said on the tape, referring to Monegan. “But on this issue she feels like it’s—she doesn’t know why there’s absolutely no action for a year on this issue. It’s very troubling to her and the family. I can definitely relay that.” At her press conference, Palin said she realized that the recording could be regarded as a “smoking gun.” She claimed that she had never asked Bailey or anyone else to make such calls on her behalf. “However,” she said, “the serial nature of the contacts understandably could be perceived as some kind of pressure, presumably at my direction.”

Palin, who studied journalism in college and worked for a time as a sportscaster, has an informal manner of speech, simultaneously chatty and urgent, and she reinforces her words with winks and nods and wrinklings of her nose that seem meant to telegraph intimacy and ease. Speaking recently at her former church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, she said, “It was so cool growing up in this church and getting saved here, getting baptized by Pastor Riley in Little Beaver Lake Camp, freezing-cold summer days that we had at camp—my whole family getting baptized when we were little.” She sounded the same when we met, high-spirited, irrepressible, and not in the least self-conscious. On the contrary, she is supremely self-confident, in the way of someone who believes that there is nothing she can’t talk her way into, or out of, or around or through. There was never a hesitation before speaking, or between phrases, no time for thought or reflection. The words kept coming—engaging, lulling, distracting—a commanding flow, but without weight. Yet, for all the cozy colloquialism, she cannot be called relaxed. She’s on—full on.

She said that one of her goals had been to combat alcohol abuse in rural Alaska, and she blamed Commissioner Monegan for failing to address the problem. That, she said, was a big reason that she’d let him go—only, by her account, she didn’t fire him, exactly. Rather, she asked him to drop everything else and single-mindedly take on the state’s drinking problem, as the director of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. “It was a job that was open, commensurate in salary pretty much—ten thousand dollars less”—but, she added, Monegan hadn’t wanted the job, so he left state service; he quit.

As for Frank Bailey’s phone call, Palin professed not to understand what it had to do with anything. “We just found out about it a couple of days ago,” she said. “And yeah, it’s very disturbing, and it’s an issue, and”—she began to speak as if Bailey were in the room and she were having it out with him: “You blundered, Bailey, and you know you did.” She said, “I’ll be talking to him,” and the next week she put Bailey on paid leave and ordered him to coöperate with the investigation. But that did not explain Bailey’s phone call. After all, Palin told me, “my husband made a call also. But, you know, there were death threats against a member of my family.” She said, “About my husband, his First Amendment rights, even—was that taken away once his spouse was elected governor?”

Palin continued, “Our security detail, when I first got elected, met with us and said, ‘Do you guys got any issues with any threats?’ ” To which Palin replied, “ ‘Yeah, well, by the way, there happens to be—the only threat that I knew of was one of your own troopers.’ And they’re, like, ‘Geez, this doesn’t sound good, you need to go tell your commissioner that.’ So I did. I shared that with the commissioner. So did Todd, and then Todd followed up to say”—at this point, Palin seemed to be quoting her husband: “ ‘We were interviewed back in ’05 before Sarah was even a candidate—what ever happened to that investigation, that interview? We know that the trooper’ ”—Wooten—“ ‘got to see the interview notes; well, we never have, and that’s kind of a scary position for us to be in. We complied with your request to bring you information on this trooper forward, and did we put our family in jeopardy by letting him see the interview notes about the illegal activities?’ ”

Palin insisted that Wooten “did have illegal activities. We witnessed them, and people have come to us with complaints. He Tasered his eleven-year-old stepson. This trooper, he was pulled over for drinking and driving and a witnessed open container in his car, and he did threaten to kill my dad—I heard him—and illegally shot a moose, which is a big darned deal here in Alaska.”

Trooper Wooten has admitted to Tasering the boy and shooting the moose, and he was disciplined for these things within the department, but, under the union contract, he could not be fired at the Governor’s whim. (He had been cleared of the threat to Palin’s father, but disciplined for drinking and driving, which he still denies.) It was obvious that this continued to frustrate Palin. She also seemed to forget that you should not talk about your affairs when they’re under investigation. Troopergate was the one subject about which she seemed keen to explicate the details. She wanted to persuade me that firing Walt Monegan had nothing to do with Trooper Wooten; that it was in no way a conflict of interest or an abuse of power. But, as she spoke, she seemed to be saying something else—that her vendetta against Wooten was wholly justified.

Compared with Ted Stevens’s impending criminal trial, the Troopergate investigation seemed like a sideshow—an added dash of intrigue in Alaska’s sensational political summer—except for the fact that Palin had always liked to present herself as a new kind of Alaskan politician, the kind who cleaned up after others’ shenanigans, not the kind who needed to be cleaned up after.

Palin’s record as the mayor of Wasilla, a town forty miles north of Anchorage, told a somewhat different story. According to “Sarah,” a biography by Kaylene Johnson, Palin had got into politics after she befriended the man who was then mayor and his police chief at a step-aerobics class. She made them her allies and ran for City Council. Then she challenged them for control of City Hall, and drove them out. As she purged her former friends and patrons, she denounced them as “good ol’ boys,” although her takeover of Wasilla had been aided from the start by Alaska’s Republican Party establishment.

Palin’s style of governing was unorthodox and at times impulsive. Although she boasts of a record as a fiscal conservative, she raised the sales tax while she was in office. She left the town saddled with millions of dollars in debt from the building of a new sports complex, and with legal fees, because she had failed to secure title to the land on which the complex was built. Casting herself in the Ted Stevens mold, however, she had proved herself skilled at collecting federal earmarks for Wasilla, bringing in twenty-seven million dollars for her small town in three years.