Yup.........It's AMAZING, Ain't
It?..............Donchaknow..................
"Newsweek
From the magazine issue dated Oct 15, 2007
Now This Is Woman=92s Work
There are more female governors in office than ever before, and they
are making their mark with a pragmatic, postpartisan approach to
solving state problems.
In 1998, voters in a focus group were asked to close their eyes and
imagine what a governor should look like. "They automatically pictured
a man," says Barbara Lee, whose foundation promoting women's political
advancement sponsored the survey. "The kind you see in those ****traits
hanging in statehouse hallways." They most certainly didn't visualize
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a former beauty-pageant winner, avid hunter,
snowmobiler and mother of four who was elected to her state's highest
office last November. Or Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, a badge-
wielding former federal prosecutor and onetime attorney for Anita Hill
who has redefined the debate over illegal immigration in her state.
While this year's political buzz has been about Hillary Clinton's run
for the White House and Nancy Pelosi's ascension to Speaker of the
House, women leaders like Palin, a Republican, and Napolitano, a
Democrat, have gained significant power in the lives of millions of
Americans at the state level.
New research shows that voters give female governors significantly
higher marks than their male counterparts on such qualities as
honesty, cooperation and caring=97as well as toughness. And at a time
when the national debate has become poisonously partisan, governors
like Napolitano, 49, and Palin, 43, are making their mark with a
pragmatic, postpartisan approach to solving problems, a style that
works especially well with the large numbers of independent voters in
their respective states.
In Alaska, Palin is challenging the dominant, sometimes corrupting,
role of oil companies in the state's political culture. "The public
has put a lot of faith in us," says Palin during a meeting with
lawmakers in her downtown Anchorage office, where=97as if to drive the
point home=97the giant letters on the side of the ConocoPhillips
skyscraper fill an entire wall of windows. "They're saying, 'Here's
your shot, clean it up'."
For Palin, that has meant tackling the cozy relation****p between the
state's political elite and the energy industry that provides 85
percent of Alaska's tax revenues=97and distancing herself from fellow
Republicans, including the state's senior U.S. senator, Ted Stevens,
whose home was recently searched by FBI agents looking for evidence in
an ongoing corruption investigation. (Stevens has denied any
wrongdoing.)
But even as she tackles Big Oil's power, Palin has transformed her own
family's connections to the industry into a political advantage. Her
husband, Todd, is a longtime employee of BP, but, as Palin points out,
the "First Dude" is a blue-collar "sloper," a fieldworker on the North
Slope, a cherished occupation in the state. "He's not in London making
the decisions whether to build a gas line."
In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Palin said it's time for Alaska to
"grow up" and end its reliance on ****k-barrel spending. Shortly after
taking office, Palin canceled funding for the "Bridge to Nowhere," a
$330 million project that Stevens helped champion in Congress. The
bridge, which would have linked the town of Ketchikan to an island
air****t, had come to symbolize Alaska's dependence on federal
handouts. Rather than relying on such largesse, says Palin, she wants
to prove Alaska can pay its own way, developing its huge energy wealth
in ways that are "politically and environmentally clean." "
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