But now, according to a poll released by CNN, it looks like she’s causing a 2-point drag on the ticket.

Palin’s popularity overall is down:

Fifty-seven percent of likely voters questioned in the poll say that Palin does not have the personal qualities a president should have. That’s up eight points since September. Fifty-three percent say that she does not agree with them on important issues. That’s also higher than in September.

Palin gave McCain a bump during the Republican National Covention and immediately after. Her speech at the convention had all the elements of an old-fashioned stemwinder.

But as we’re coming to the finish line, it’s less clear if the Alaska governor was a smart choice.

According to Think Progress, as governor, Palin vetoed $275,000 in funds for the Special Olympics Alaska.

Think Progress also points out that Palin has claimed she allocated additional funding for special-needs education, though the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mike Hawker, says she had nothing to do with it.

The crowds I watched in Florida, North Carolina and Virginia roared their approval at Palin’s talk on special-needs children. But most of the talk that resonated was more symbolic than specific. “John [McCain] and I have a vision of America where every innocent life counts,” she said. “Where everyone has a chance to contribute and every child is cherished. And that’s the spirit I want to bring to Washington, D.C.”

For her supporters, maybe it isn’t the actions for special-needs children that matter so much as what the undercurrent of her words means.

Paul Volcker and Barack Obama at the center of a panel in Lake Worth, Fla. that includes, from left to right, Gov. Bill Richardson, Gov. Jennifer Granholm, small business owner Victoria Villalba, Gov. Ted Strickland and Google CEO Eric Schmidt (Flickr: Bridget DeVries)

The announcement that Paul A. Volcker is a key economic adviser to Sen. Barack Obama – cited by the Democratic presidential nominee during the last debate and appearing with him at a campaign event in Florida last week — was met with surprise in some circles.

Volcker, 81, is celebrated as the Federal Reserve chairman who broke the plague of global inflation in the early 1980s. But he did it be engineering a violent crackdown on excess credit — at one point the short-term bank rate jumped to 20 percent — and the 1982 drop in gross domestic product was one of the sharpest in the postwar era.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Volcker is certainly no liberal. He was appointed to the Fed in the last year of President Jimmy Carter’s term — but with a visible lack of enthusiasm. Carter insiders called him the “the candidate of Wall Street.” Double-digit jumps in consumer prices were destroying financial markets, and Volcker was the sheriff whose job was to restore order.

Volcker’s brand of conservatism, however, is far different from the quasi-religious, free-markets ideology espoused by the former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and the recent crop of Wall Street barons. Though Volcker had refrained for two decades from criticizing the policies of his successors, he unleashed a blistering, and wide-ranging, criticism in an April speech at the Economics Club of New York.

The most reported section of his speech was the criticism of the forced merger/bailout of Bear Stearns, which Volcker said took the Fed “to the very edge of its lawful and implied powers.” He forecast that it would “surely be interpreted as an implied promise” to do the same for everyone else. And the Fed has duly increased its unorthodox lending by about $800 billion since Volcker spoke.

Volcker’s harshest words, however, were not directed at current Fed policy — he fully acknowledged the gravity of the crisis — but at those of Greenspan, the erstwhile ‘Maestro’ of Wall Street. For it was Greenspan who proudly presided over the Hindenberg-like bubble that officialdom is struggling to cope with. The “bright new financial system,” as Volcker called it, “for all its talented participants, for all its rich rewards – has failed the test of the market place.”

And he went on: “[T]oday’s financial crisis is the culmination, as I count them, of at least five serious breakdowns of systemic significance in the past 25 years — on the average of one every five years. Warning enough that something basic is amiss.”

“It is hard to argue that the new system has brought exceptional benefits to the economy generally. Economic growth and productivity in the last 25 years has been comparable to that of the 1950’s and 60’s, but in the earlier years the prosperity was more widely shared.”

Paul Volcker (barackobama.com)

Volcker lamented the passing of the banks and insurance companies where employees and partners shared pasts and futures, and expected to live with their loans for many years — unlike today, when garden-variety credits are chopped into anonymous pellets, grist for the complex bonds and derivatives that have spread financial havoc throughout the world. Volcker left no doubt that it will take strong leadership, not blind reliance on markets, to restore order.

Volcker’s conservatism fits into the institutionalist tradition of the great Irishman and British parliamentarian, Edmund Burke. It has nothing to do with the Ayn Rand-style of market libertarianism that mesmerized Greenspan.

Burke’s traditionalism is easy to mock — he could not imagine Britain without its royalty and opposed Irish independence. But, remarkably, he was also the leader of parliamentary support for the American Revolution. He came to that position, he said, only because the obstinate mismanagement of the American question by the king and his party had made the “Colonies, who were once not only submissive, but most affectionate to their Mother Country…totally estranged, discontented, disobedient, riotous…and almost rebellious.”

Volcker’s embrace of Obama may be such a Burkean moment. At the conclusion of his April speech, Volcker was asked whether it was true that he had actually endorsed Obama for president. He said it was indeed true and gave his reasons.

“I do have some fairly strong feelings,” Volcker said, “and I don’t like the direction this country has been going in for some time, in many directions. Economics may be part of it, but it is only a small part of the problem….

“People have been taking surveys of American people every year for years. One of these things where they ask the same question. Do you trust your government to do the right thing most of the time? Not a very tough examination…..20 or 30 years ago, the positive response was 70 percent. Now the positive response is 25 to 30 percent. I think that tells you something.”

And it tells you even more that not only would a man like Volcker make this statement, but that he and Obama have developed a clear affinity of views.

Charles R. Morris, a lawyer and former banker, is the author of “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers and the Great Credit Crash.” His other books include “The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy” and “Money, Greed, and Risk: Why Financial Crises and Crashes Happen.”

In the 1,325-voter sample, Obama leads Sen. John McCain 52 percent to 36 percent. The lead remains 15 points among likely voters.

Obama’s support includes a 17-point advantage among independents and a sizable lead in every age and income group. The candidates are tied among white voters, while Obama leads 90 to 1 among blacks. The only voter categories in which Obama trails McCain are subcategories of the white vote: white evangelicals, white men, whites over the age of 50 and whites with no college education.

Among voters in the battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, Obama holds a comfortable 53 to 35 lead.

Looks like Nov. 4 could be an early night — but as they say, it ain’t over till it’s over.

Sen. Joe Biden (WDCpix)

Increasingly incensed at being shunted to the media sidelines while his Republican counterpart’s every utterance makes global news, Sen. Joe Biden, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, has clearly decided to fight fire with fire.

“The current world economic crisis has come about because people keep dropping quarters that roll away and fall over the edge of the earth,” Biden claimed today, in a speech before an group of astrophysicists. In the same address, the veteran Delaware senator called for a blue-ribbon federal commission to study why the same thermos that keeps cold liquids cold also keeps hot liquids hot.

Casting aside his usual carefully reasoned arguments on geopolitics, the national deficit and other key election issues, Biden — whose new plan for boosting a faltering economy is to transfer all the money in the nation’s millions of Monopoly sets to the federal Treasury -– seems instead to be aiming squarely at the lowest common intellectual denominator.

“He may never become a media darling like Gov. Palin,” admits one campaign insider, “but hey, Joe offered to appear on “Saturday Night Live” a month ago and they said he wasn’t interesting enough. He’s got to start playing catch-up.”

“Playing catch-up” would seem to include Biden’s assertion that Palin “pals around” with known witches; his call for an extension of the “Star Wars” space-weapon program to attack highway speeders, and a new plan to catch Osama bin Laden by calling his cell phone, pretending to be a pizza deliveryman and asking for directions.

“I think that threw a scare into the Palin camp,” one Biden aide confided. “It also threw a scare into the Obama camp,” he admitted, “but we can’t let them win the dimwit sweepstakes by default. From now until Nov. 4, Joe’s going to be fighting brainlessness with brainlessness.”

This may explain why Biden today charged that Palin is actually smarter than he is — stating that he doesn’t know the difference between a moose, an elk, a caribou and a musk ox , even if he can’t see France from the living room window of his Delaware home.

Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the author of “All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall” and “Zany Afternoons.”

Gov. Sarah Palin at the Republican National Convention (WDCpix)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Since Gov. Sarah Palin became the Republican vice presidential candidate, she’s been shaped to fit a new image.

From debate boot camp at Sen. John McCain’s Arizona ranch to a high-end makeover costing $150,000, the Palin on the national campaign trail is not the politician that voters here remember. The governor of Alaska seems transformed after a team of seasoned advisers helped craft a new political persona for her.

Standing on stage in red designer heels, her tone has sharpened and her partisan rhetoric has heightened.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

In Alaska, Palin supporters and critics alike have said the woman they see stumping in swing states and being interviewed on national TV is not the hockey mom-turned politician they once knew.

In talking with voters around Alaska, from Anchorage shopkeepers to government employees, as well as lawmakers and political insiders over the last three weeks, it’s clear that Palin has been re-branded, both in message and style, for the national arena. Critics and supporters agree that they see a change.

Recent news coverage of Palin demonstrates that she didn’t reinvent herself, but that members of the McCain campaign shaped her. Palin was heavily coached in preparation for the vice presidential debate with Sen. Joe Biden. She was kept from the press for weeks before granting any interviews. Her first appearance with Katie Couric was marked by a series of canned, though often jumbled, talking points. Even her new sleek, pulled-together look was taken care of by McCain adviser Jeff Larson. Larson is also in charge of the campaign’s robocalls.

Over the next two weeks, it appears that Palin will be surrounded by more, not fewer, McCain staffers, according to an email from a campaign spokeswoman Caroline Gransee. Gransee noted that the Alaska governor’s campaign plane may start accommodating fewer members of the press to make room for more staff.

This thick insulation of strategists around Palin is something new for her.

Palin rose to power in Alaska with support from a small paid staff and an army of volunteers, but without the help of a robust strategy team. She relied on her own judgment and that of her closest adviser: Todd Palin.

Interviews with people close to the governor, political observers and long-time Alaska politicos found that Palin was never surrounded by an entourage of advisers and strategists. Instead, Palin relied on her own instincts and leaned on her husband for an outside perspective.

A former top political aide to Palin, who requested anonymity, said in an interview that the governor has an innate political sense and turns to her husband for advice. The adviser now works in the private sector, but says he is still a friend of the Palins.

“The two Alaskans that advise Sarah Palin are Sarah and Todd Palin,” the aide said in an conversation. “Her husband is her No. 1 adviser.”

The former aide also said that this is not so uncommon for politicians new to the political arena in Alaska, noting the absence of long-time political families or major think tanks.

Others involved in Alaska politics disagree.

Longtime GOP strategist Art Hackney has served as an adviser to both Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young, the state’s lone House member. Stevens is on trial on charges of failing to disclose gifts worth $250,000 from the oil services firm, Veco Corp. The jury is currently deliberating. Young is under federal investigation for his ties to the same company, though he has not been charged with a crime.

Hackney, a Republican, is not a Palin supporter as either a state or national candidate. “Most of us [in Alaska politics] just scratch our heads as to who she gets her advice from,” Hackney said. “With Palin, it’s Todd Palin and some of her friends … that none of the rest of us would know.”

Palin hired several of her old friends from Wasilla to join her administration. She put one family friend, Debbie Richter, who attended college for one year, in charge of the state’s $40-billion oil and gas dividend fund program. A lawyer from the Wasilla area, Talis J. Colberg, serves as her attorney general.

One former aide, John Bitney, went to high school with Palin. He was fired abruptly after he began dating Richter, who had recently divorced her husband, a longtime friend of Todd Palin’s.

Bitney now serves as chief of staff to the state Senate president. In an email message, Bitney said he is not familiar with who Palin keeps in contact with from the campaign trail.

Palin ran as an insurgent candidate in 2006, just as the state was enveloped by a wide-ranging political scandal involving a federal probe into the dealings between lawmakers and the oil services firm, Veco Corp. A few weeks before the election, the FBI raided 12 legislative offices, including that of Stevens’ son, Ben Stevens, the president of the Alaska Senate at the time.

It’s not surprising that Palin would decide not to align herself with old-guard political advisers, though Hackney said she did approach him once about the possibility of working together. He said he turned her down because he did not believe she had enough experience to serve as governor of Alaska.

“Normally someone who rises to this kind of political career would have people around them with expertise who can advise them,” he said. “There isn’t such a defined group around her. Basically, the Palins shoot from the hip.”

Todd Palin’s role in the governor’s administration has become increasingly apparent.

According to a report released after an investigation into whether Sarah Palin abused her power in pressuring her commissioner of public safety to fire her former brother-in-law, Todd was present during official meetings, made requests of members of Palin’s administration and was copied on emails about state business.

“I have heard criticism that I am too involved with my wife’s administration,” Palin wrote in a statement he submitted as part of the investigation. “My wife and I are very close. We are each other’s best friend. I have helped her at every stage in her career the best I can, and she has helped me.”

Todd Palin is the only Alaskan traveling with Palin as part of her national campaign.

So in this stage of her career, it looks like he is still in his role as chief adviser.

Sen. Barack Obama (WDCpix)

It may be hard to tell from the current political chatter, but Sen. John McCain’s campaign problems are not just because of the flailing economy or because of the Republican presidential nominee’s own making. The McCain/Palin ticket is perhaps also struggling, at least in part, because of the Obama’s senior communications staff’s choreographed attack on the Arizona senator’s running mate and his domestic priorities, according to new data.

An analysis of the Obama campaign’s recent press outreach reveals that the Democratic presidential nominee’s aides focused intensely on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in early September — attacking her even more than McCain — and then pivoted back to focusing on the top of the ticket.

While most negative attacks risk alienating swing voters, Obama’s aides argue their broadsides focus on McCain’s policies — as opposed to his character — without tarnishing Obama’s brand.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

So far, the attacks appear to be resonating without diminishing Sen. Barack Obama’s standing among key demographics. The Illinois senator’s unfavorable ratings have not broken the low 30s since he won the Democratic nomination in May. In contrast, Sen. John Kerry’s unfavorable ratings had hit the 40s by this time in the 2004 campaign. (McCain’s negatives have also increased since he won the nomination.)

To quantify this strategy, I tabulated the Obama campaign’s major press releases, memos, fact sheets, as well as news articles his aides sent to national reporters — from two key periods.

One data set is from the week after the Republican National Convention, when the race with McCain was tight and politicos were buzzing about the possibility of Obama losing the election. The second data set is from the week ending Monday, Oct.6, when both campaigns were spinning two presidential debates and trading some of the sharpest attacks to date.

These word counts tell one story of Obama’s offensive.

When Palin burst on the scene with her fiery convention speech, the Obama campaign, recognizing that Palin was the story, tried to diminish her with a flurry of attacks. She netted more references than McCain in Obama’s press release data.

By last Monday, however, the campaign was bearing down on McCain’s domestic plans. (More after the images.)

Obama campaign press release data from Mon. Sept. 8 – Mon. Sept 15:

Obama campaign press release data from Mon. Sept. 29 – Mon. Oct. 6:

It was a successful effort, as I wrote at the time. (See Nervous Dems Give Obama Stupid and Redundant Advice.) Palin’s favorable ratings have since taken a hit, certainly pushed by all this tough analysis.

Lately, of course, politicos are interested in back-and-forth on Charles Keating and William Ayers — which is probably going to continue. But the recent data is striking for its focus on two other priorities: kitchen-table concerns and McCain’s credibility.

There were more than 300 combined references to health care in the recent week’s press data, and the campaign used the word “tax” a whopping 351 times — an average of 50 times a day. The topics are linked because Obama is hammering McCain for a proposed tax on employee health-care benefits.Health care has become the “good cop” in Obama’s approach to the economy. His advisers recently explained the thinking — and the polling — to The Times:

[a health care emphasis] resonates more than other issues for Americans who are worried about their economic condition. It is a less-threatening way to talk about the economy — showing pictures of shuttered banks, for example, could create more worry — that aides said tested well across demographic groups, but particularly among older voters who have been slower to warm to Mr. Obama.

Obama’s aides carried on another battle recently last week: McCain’s credibility. That tack has helped inoculate Obama against some Republican attacks.For example, the McCain ad criticizing Obama’s vote for a sex-education program for kindergartners largely backfired, as McCain’s Des Moines Register interview showed. Most people don’t believe Obama supports such a program — he doesn’t — but they do think McCain is lying about it.There were about 200 references to “false,” “fact,” “fact-check” or “misleading” in the Obama campaign’s press release data, all aimed at McCain’s credibility. That’s a sharp shift from the week in September, when three of the words didn’t break 10 references.  “Fact” was used 77 times, reflecting a positive gloss and few charges of falsehoods.

Yes, press communications are only one part of a campaign’s message. TV ads, direct mail, phone-bank scripts, stump speeches and surrogate events reach more voters than the soundbites pushed on reporters each day. Some messages to the press are reinforced in ads and speeches, like the health-care focus, while others are more like fact-check missives.

A few more caveats on the data: I only counted what the campaign was pushing, not how it played.  In reviewing press emails from the two weeks, I cut items that seemed minor or tangential. In the tabulations, common words, like “say” and “president,” were removed to focus on those politically salient.  I did not include rapid-response documents sent during the vice presidential debate either, because that night was all about Palin for the Obama campaign. The rest of the week was not. Nor did the count include messages from the Democratic National Committee — or any other pro-Obama political groups making news.Finally, not every priority message must be repeated 100 times to sink in, so frequency is admittedly a limited metric.

It can still be illuminating, however, to look over the words a campaign is using in the homestretch. For Obama right now, it’s Taxing Your Health Care, Stupid.

Gov. Sarah Palin (Zuma Press)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – As one of the most successful newcomers in Alaska’s political arena, Gov. Sarah Palin should have known better than to get into an ethics scandal right now.

The mood of the public in Alaska has been changing, gradually, but noticeably in the last few years. Palin was one of the first to catch on to it — and exploit it to win an upset victory in the 2006 governor’s race.

Before then, an Alaska official who pursued a personal vendetta in office probably would not have drawn the ire of the state’s legislature. Voters in the state would have looked the other way too.

But Alaska seems to have gained a new political maturity.

Palin ran for governor on a reform platform that proved widely appealing. She knocked out the state’s sitting governor, Frank Murkowski, in the GOP primary and defeated a well-known former governor, Tony Knowles, in the general election. Knowles campaigned on “experience” — which effectively tied him to the corruption-tainted old guard, though it was the GOP that was embroiled in scandal. That year, voters elected four Democrats to replace Republicans in the state House and Senate.

The politics that Palin pledged to reform was typified by a clique of state lawmakers that embraced the nickname the “Corrupt Bastards Club” because of its cash-for-votes relationship with an oil services firm, Veco Corp. The group had baseball caps made, on Veco’s dime, with their “CBC” insignia embroidered on the back.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The CBCers eventually landed in trouble with the law. The FBI raided 12 legislative offices in 2006, as part of a broad investigation into ties between state and federal lawmakers and Veco Corp., whose former chief executive, Bill Allen, and former vice president, Rick Smith, have pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges.

Since the raids, three state legislators have been convicted of bribery charges in connection with Veco. Allen and Smith are cooperating with prosecutors.

A testament to just how much the legislature has changed came this summer when news broke that Palin may have unethically fired her commissioner of public safety, Walt Monegan, over a long-standing family feud with her ex-brother-in-law.

The legislature acted swiftly. It hired Steve Branchflower, a well-respected former Alaska prosecutor with 28 years experience in the Anchorage district attorney’s office, to handle the investigation. A legislative committee voted unanimously Friday to release his 236-page report on “Troopergate,” as the scandal is known,  to the public.

Alaska, only 50 years old this year, is growing up politically.

TROOPERGATE

Branchflower’s report found that Palin violated a state ethics law by overseeing a coordinated effort to get her ex-brother-in-law, Michael Wooten, fired from his job as a state trooper. Palin ultimately fired Monegan after he wouldn’t oust Wooten, despite being pressured  by the governor’s husband, Todd, as well as multiple state officials, including the state attorney general. Todd Palin also pressured Monegan’s replacement on the same issue.

Branchflower exonerated the governor on her final decision to fire Monegan, though the investigator concluded that Monegan’s refusal to oust Wooten was likely a factor in his removal.

Before Troopergate, it had been more than 20 years since the legislature asserted itself so aggressively in an ethics matter.

“It was just over two years ago that the FBI raided the legislative offices in Anchorage and Juneau,” said state Sen. Hollis French, the Anchorage Democrat who headed the Troopergate investigation. “Since that time, the state’s been very alert to ethical lapses in government.”

The state legislature approved the hiring of Branchflower to investigate the matter in June, three months before Sen. John McCain tapped Palin for the GOP ticket. Branchflower spent much of his career evaluating cases submitted by police and state troopers for prosecution to determine if the D.A.’s office should take them up.

“Steve Branchflower’s report is a model of keen analysis and hard work,” French said. “He’s fair. He analyzed the facts, and I think he came to balanced conclusions.”

Even among lawmakers who have doubts about the report’s findings, none has questioned Branchflower’s integrity.

“The report was probably rushed to get done before the election,” said Rep. Bill Stoltze, who voted to appoint Branchflower and voted Friday to make the report public.

Stoltze said he didn’t like that Branchflower used inference to reach his conclusions, though he did not question its fairness. Stoltze said he wished there had been “more participation” — a reference to Palin’s decision not to testify, after she had first agreed to cooperate.

THE REFORM CANDIDATE

Palin has said the report is a vindication  of her conduct. “I’m very, very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing … any hint of any kind of unethical activity there,” Palin told the Anchorage Daily News in a phone interview from the campaign trail.

One of the report’s findings, however, is that Palin broke the law.

That Alaska governor’s ethics problems certainly don’t square with the reform candidate of 2006.

Palin had a strong sense of the changing attitudes toward corruption in Alaska and tapped those sentiments to move into the governor’s office. “Alaskans deserve transparency and accountability from their leaders,” said Palin on her 2006 campaign website. “It’s a philosophy I will promote as governor.”

About a month before voters went to the polls in 2006, news cameras captured FBI agents carrying boxes of material out of the 12 state lawmakers’ offices — including Senate President Ben Stevens, son of Sen. Ted Stevens. The younger Stevens has not been charged.

Buttressing her reputation as a reformer after the election, Palin stood up to her own state party chairman over accusations of a conflict-of-interest with oil companies. And she filed a bipartisan complaint that led to the resignation of the state’s GOP attorney general.

Things were even starting to change for the federal delegation.

ALASKA’S 50th

Sen. Ted Stevens (WDCpix)

This year, Alaska celebrates its 50th year of statehood, thanks to Sen. Ted Stevens, who helped usher the territory into statehood in 1958. Stevens, the longest-serving GOP senator, has been in the Senate since 1972.

T-shirts are on sale all over Anchorage right now featuring the image of a 1958 newspaper front page with the headline: “We’re In!”

By 2006, Stevens — known here as “the most famous Alaskan” — was starting to take heat nationally for his infamous earmarking. The non-partisan watchdog group Taxpayers for Commonsense estimates that Alaskans see about $4,300 per person in federal dollars return to their state, compared to states with far larger populations like Texas or New York, where residents see about $95 per person.

Stevens, now on trial in federal court in Washington on charges of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from Veco Corp., without disclosing them on Senate ethics forms, is slipping in the polls in his reelection bid. The gifts include the construction of a new first floor in his Girdwood home, furnishings and a state-of-the-art Viking grill.

Stevens is locked in a tight race with Democratic challenger Mark Begich, Anchorage’s mayor. The last poll showed Begich with a four-point edge. In 2002, Stevens won with 78 percent of the vote.

Many long-time Stevens supporters are starting to reconsider whether the state should keep the longtime GOP senator in office. “[Stevens] brought a lot of money to the state,” said Susanne Hutzel, a nurse who lives 20 minutes outside Anchorage. “But, we have to have a balance.”

Still, change doesn’t come all at once. Stevens garners nearly 50 percent of Alaskan voters Alaskans like Claude Morris, a retired oil field project manager and World War II veteran who lives on the same street in Girdwood as Stevens. Morris credits the senator with bringing Alaska into the modern era, not to mention the town of Girdwood, a small ski-resort town about an hour and a half drive south of Anchorage.

“Ted Stevens has got my vote no matter what,” Morris said in a recent conversation in the Double Musky Inn’s bar, Stevens’ favorite hometown restaurant. “For what he has done for Alaska for the last 40-some years.”

The state’s only congressman, Rep. Don Young, a feisty character who has never achieved the same popularity as Stevens, is facing a far tougher electoral battle. He’s down about nine percentage points in the polls.

Young’s popularity has been sliding since last year, when a series of corruption scandals came to light. Young has been accused of taking money from Florida developers in exchange for a $10-million earmark. The Senate has since asked the FBI to look into the earmark, added to a bill after it passed Congress.

News also broke last year that Young is under federal investigation for his connections with Veco. Federal agents are looking into an annual pig-roast fund-raiser held at Veco chief executive Allen’s home. Last year, Young was booed and oinked as he arrived at the event.

“Don’s problem in that race is that in six polls in a row he’s had a negative rating above 50 percent, and he’s got to push that down into the mid-40s, or below, to have a chance,” Anchorage pollster Ivan Moore told Alaska’s NBC affiliate, KTUU, when the last Young poll was released. “You know, you just can’t win when more than half the people don’t like you.”

PALIN’S FUTURE

If Palin returns to Alaska as a state politician, it’s unclear if she will be regarded by voters as another of their pols who doesn’t deserve their trust.

Little is likely to happen before the regular legislative session begins Jan. 20, according to House GOP spokesman Will Vandergriff.  For there to be a special session, a supermajority of lawmakers — 45 members out of 60 — must approve. Palin could also call a special session — though that is considered unlikely.

If the legislature went into special session, Palin could face impeachment.

Sen. Kim Elton (D-Juneau), who served as chairman of the Legislative Council that oversaw the Troopergate investigation, said in an interview with TWI shortly after the report was released Friday that he is not prepared to start considering taking action against Palin. The violation of the state ethics law outlined in Branchflower’s report caries up to a $5,000 civil penalty.

“This is like truth and consequences, Elton said, standing in a hallway of the Anchorage legislative office building where the report was released. “Today, I will say we got the truth. The facts are now public. I’m not prepared to go to consequences.”

Once the legislature is back in session, it will have to decide whether to act on Branchflower’s report.

Does all this signify a turning point for public corruption in Alaska?

“I think we will try to grow up,” said former Anchorage Daily News editorial page editor Michael Carey. “Or we will be caught in the Palin lie machine.”

Though the GOP vice-presidential nominee repeatedly calls herself “working class” and talks about her familiarity with its problems, her policies have been just the opposite.

Laura tracks four major issues where Palin is not exactly a friend of the working man and woman.