Levi Johnston had this to say about Sarah Palin’s resignation:
“She had talked about how nice it would be to take some of this money people had been offering us and you know just run with it, say ‘forget everything else,'” he said.
Needless to say, this has sparked a war with Palin. Palin’s spokesperson issued the following:
“It is interesting to learn Levi is working on a piece of fiction while honing his acting skills,”
Generally the approach on claims that could be considered false is to respond with something like “we’re not going to dignify that claim with a response”, but Palin couldn’t do that. Instead they decided to start another war with the father of their grandchild. Very interesting.
But now let’s look at Palin’s stated reason for resigning – the legal fees associated with ethics complaints against her. That excuse has been pretty much debunked by most, and the evidence to support the claims that these fees were so high seems to be crumbling even more:
The administrative director in the governor’s office, Linda Perez, conceded that some costs were counted twice and said “the total cost is overstated by $26,849.” She said she missed that the Department of Law’s updated numbers included costs that were already counted.
“It was my error . . . mea culpa,” said Perez, who has worked for governors of both parties since the 1980s.
Perez said she’s going to ask the Department of Law about some other puzzling parts of the spreadsheet, including a line item that says 0.3 attorney hours added up to $10,063 in costs.
That would add up to an attorney billing of over $30,000 an hour, and Perez said the flat billing rate the state uses for its attorneys is $121.98 an hour. Perez said she would check and see what costs beyond the staff time went into that calculation of over $10,000 in costs.
(emphasis added)
If Palin is sticking with the legal fees as a reason for resigning, then isn’t it ironic that she is resigning based upon a clerical error? There’s even an interesting irony with this revelation. As executive of her state, don’t you think Sarah Palin would have said “wow these numbers seem high. Maybe we should take a look at them again”, instead of using them as an excuse to resign. How can that be considered fiscally responisible?
But if we take these two stories and put them together, we start seeing something that might make sense out of this whole soap opera style episode in American politics. Perhaps Palin and Johnston are both right. The Palins probably did talk about the money she was missing out on by not taking all these deals. Who in their right mind wouldn’t talk about something like that? And thenn Palin sees some highly inflated numbers that indicate the charges of ethics against her is costing the state all this money. Instead of questioning those numbers, which it turns out are wrong, she takes that as the excuse to resign.
Of every reason I have heard for her resignation so far, this one makes the most sense. She had motive, the money she was missing out on, and she had reason in these numbers. But that still leaves the unanswered question of why Palin saw these numbers and didn’t immediately question them. That’s a problem that can go right to the heart of her ability to lead, and something that should be brought up when/if she has any future runs for office.