Payback in Alaska

POLITICAL FORECASTERS LOOKING for cutting-edge national trends shouldn’t read too much into Alaska Gov. Frank H. Murkowski’s decisive defeat in that state’s Republican primary last week. The message voters delivered was as timeless as it was bipartisan. He made them mad, so they dumped him.

Murkowski had easily won reelection three times to the U.S. Senate. But once he left that job for the governorship, he angered constituents by naming his daughter to fill out his unexpired fourth Senate term. Politics is increasingly treated as a family business nationwide, but this was an especially outrageous dynastic power grab. Alaskans didn’t hold that decision against the younger Murkowski, electing her to a full term in 2004. But that same year, they did register their objections with her father, mandating by initiative that future vacated seats be filled by special election, not gubernatorial appointment.

Nepotism was not the only manifestation of Murkowski’s imperial manner. The $2.7 million he spent on an executive jet (while cutting benefits to seniors) managed to offend even the residents of a state with more pilots per capita than any other. And although most Alaskans pine for a natural gas pipeline to replace dwindling oil-field revenues, they weren’t happy with the deal Murkowski offered oil companies to build the thing, or the secrecy under which he conducted the negotiations.

For his arrogance, Murkowski got fewer votes than either of his two Republican challengers, both of whom had been on the short list to fill the Senate seat that went to his daughter. (Their campaigns featured dueling dog-musher endorsements, but that’s another story.)

If only it were a national trend for politicians to get so deserving a comeuppance.

Then again, if only it were an Alaskan trend to reject arrogance in Washington as well as at home. Murkowski’s reelection to the Senate was all but guaranteed as long as he and the rest of the state’s long-serving congressional delegation delivered more pork per capita than any other state, including boondoggles such as Sen. Ted Stevens’ recent multimillion-dollar “bridge to nowhere.”

Murkowski was the same person in Alaska that he’d been in Washington; he was just using state money to buy the pork. By electing him governor in the first place, Alaskans got their comeuppance too.