Alaska's Troubled Republicans Not Real Conservatives, David Jenkins

Alaska's Troubled Republicans Not Real Conservatives

by David Jenkins, REP Government Affairs Director
published in the Anchorage Daily News, July 25, 2007

We have the Veco indictments, the related FBI corruption investigations into U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens and his son Ben, and the revelation of Rep. Don Young’s Coconut Road earmarks-for-donors program.

All of this comes on the heels of Gov. Murkowski’s failed state “public relations” effort, and the flap over the so-called “Bridges to Nowhere” earmarks.

These Republicans are getting into trouble largely because they are not the conservatives they pretend to be. It is ironic that a state built on a powerful blend of self-reliance and shared responsibility is represented by politicians driven by an entitlement mentality that would make any Boston liberal proud.

While their gluttony at the taxpayer trough has some short-term benefits for Alaskans, it also breeds the kind of cronyism and ethical lapses that are now coming to light. Worse yet, much of those federal dollars are directed to help large, multinational companies and selected individuals get rich off the state’s natural wealth, not to build a diverse and sustainable economy for Alaska’s future.

Across America and worldwide, economies that predominantly rely on natural resource extraction are among the poorest and slowest growing. Most of the wealth goes elsewhere, greed and corruption become a persistent byproduct, and over-dependence on a finite resource inevitably leads to a hard fall.

Just look at West Virginia, where liberal Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd’s penchant for siphoning off federal dollars is legendary. After more than a hundred years of logging and coal production, West Virginia ranks 48th in per capita income. Oil-dependent Louisiana ranks 50th. They have never become much more than resource colonies for the rest of the world.

The affair that Alaska’s elected officials have with the oil industry has not only bred a culture of dependency and corruption that undermines future economic growth. It is also the source of their reluctance to address the serious climate-change threat affecting many Alaskan communities.

Just as Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Alaska’s congressional delegation has been dithering while Alaska melts. Last year, Rep. Young led a successful effort to defeat a resolution that simply acknowledged global warming is real. In arguing that global warming is not a problem, Young claimed that Alaska used to be a tropical paradise and that its oil was formed from dead mastodons and tropical plants.

Even if the congressman’s comical misreading of geology were somehow true, what happened 150 million years ago has no bearing on the causes of climate change today or the impact it will have on the 670,000 people who now inhabit Alaska.

Conservatism, as espoused by conservative icons such as 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke, President Theodore Roosevelt and American political theorist Russell Kirk, places a priority on ethics, personal and fiscal responsibility, prudence and foresight. None of these admirable values seem to be a priority for many of Alaska’s Republican lawmakers.

True conservatism also holds that letting egotism and a focus on short-term gratification govern your actions is immoral. It demands that we conserve and safeguard the world for the benefit of future generations.

While I am sure most of Alaska’s Republican voters share these conservative values, it is becoming clear that many of those they have sent to Juneau and Washington no longer do.