Palin’s Alaska emails show obsession with her image

June 11, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Photo by: Brian Wallace

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Photo

Reporters load boxes containing thousands of pages of Sarah Palin's emails from her time as Alaska's governor Friday, June 10, 2011 in Juneau, Alaska. The emails released Friday were first requested during the 2008 White House race by citizens and news organizations, including The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Brian Wallace)

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON

Emails released Friday from Sarah Palin’s time as Alaska’s governor show a doubled-fisted Blackberry user fully comfortable with handling nearly every aspect of state government from her private and state email accounts.

But long before she became a national figure, the documents also hint at the obsession Palin had with managing her image — and the frustration the prolific emailer had with the news coverage of her governorship.

She came into office with a January 2007 reminder to her staff that they should feel free to “share your opinions, speak freely to the press, public, legislators, one another, etc.” But that changed as time went on. A little over a year later, she even ghost-wrote a proposed letter to the editor of the Anchorage Daily News — quoting herself — in reply to a complaint that she had failed to appear at the 2008 Miss Alaska pageant.

The emails, released Friday by the state of Alaska, begin when Palin took office in December 2006 and run through the fall of 2008, when she was a candidate for vice president. The state released 24,199 printed pages of emails; many news organizations began scanning in the emails and posting them online Friday afternoon.

About a dozen news organizations, including McClatchy Newspapers’ Anchorage Daily News, requested the emails shortly after Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., picked Palin in 2008 as his vice presidential running mate.

The request for the documents came at a time when Palin wasn’t only an unknown political figure to most Americans, but also when she had experienced little of the vetting most candidates see in what can be a multiyear bid for the White House.

But their release comes at a time when it’s unclear whether Palin intends to jump into the Republican field and run for president. Palin, who hasn’t said what she intends to do, has said she has “fire in the belly” for a presidential bid. She also launched a multistate tour of the East Coast in a campaign-style bus emblazoned with the motto “One Nation.”

For the most part, the emails show a governor deeply engaged in her work as the state’s chief executive, including managing the politics of a Legislature wrangling over a complicated oil-tax proposal she was championing.

Before her first trip to Washington in early 2007 for a meeting of governors, aides suggested Palin meet with Pete Rouse, a Senate aide her advisers described as “chief of staff for a guy named Barack Obama.”

“I’m game to meet him,” Palin replied.