Some more depressing video from outside a Sarah Palin rally. For my parents and their friends: were people attending a mainstream political event—that of a vice presidential candidate—ever this abhorrent, or is it just that we have the ability to record this stuff and share it that it seems so much more prevalent?
We weren’t sure what to expect of the residents of Juneau. After the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain’s VP pick, the vast majority of stories Lindsay and I read about Alaskans portrayed them as Alaska-first/America-second, libertarian-except-when-it-comes-to-what-Uncle-Ted-(Stevens)-can-do, dismissive of if not violent toward women, and suspicious of outsiders.
We knew Alaska would be a beautiful honeymoon spot, but we were worried about how locals might feel about a Holyoke alumna and MIT employee—both of us Obama supporters—dropping in less than a month before the election.
I’m not sure we could have been more surprised. The local Obama headquarters…
…was next door to Governor Palin’s mansion:
And granted, this was Juneau–which is liberal by Alaskan standards. But shopkeepers wore Obama buttons, Obama-Biden signs were in lots of lawns and front windows (compared to just two McCain-Palin signs), and the all of the local paper’s original reporting had to do with Troopergate, a scandal that a few days ago resulted in a unanimous bipartisan decision from an Alaskan legislature committee that Palin committed ethics violations.
However, everyone we talked to still loves Governor Palin. Die-hard Obama supporters took umbrage at people coming from “outside” and judging Alaska, Alaskan politics, and Alaskan citizens through the lens of a presidential campaign. Palin’s done a lot of good for the state, they say. But none of them wanted to see her as vice president. One person–a shopowner we ran into a couple times–put it simply: “We’ll take the hit. For everyone’s sake, I hope she stays our governor.”
Politics aside, the handful of Alaskans we got to meet were some of the warmest people we’d ever met. We were invited to dinner by a mother and daughter we met on a hiking trail. We got all sorts of great restaurant tips from a high school guidance counselor (carrying an NRA tote bag) who sat next to Lindsay on the flight from Seattle to Juneau. And we had a moving conversation with an incredibly sweet man, who happened to be a Vietnam vet and who will, for us, likely forever be the face of PTSD: who knows how the conversation got there, but he talked about having to save the lives of his fellow troops by calling in airstrikes that he knew would necessarily kill civilians. It’s worth pointing out that this is the same man who would, when Lindsay and I were in town during the day, make sure we had rose petals on our bed and a fire in the fireplace.
