Now that I’m reasonably certain that Mitt Romney will prevail on
November 6, I thought I’d make a suggestion for a cabinet post:
Sarah Palin for Secretary of the Interior. Despite her
controversial media-magnet political baggage, she should at least
be on Romney’s short list thanks to her familiarity with the
workings of the public lands agencies.
Most of the half billion acres of federal land (the National
Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and other agencies under
the purview of the Department of the Interior; the United States
Forest Service governed by the Department of Agriculture) in the
United States is located in the American West. Depending on the
party controlling the Oval Office, the job of Interior Secretary
many times goes to a Western pol, many times a governor or
ex-governor. Wally Hickel, Bruce Babbitt, and Dirk Kempthorne are
good examples. Some such as Gale Norton and James Watt gathered
their expertise in think tanks and legal foundations concerned with
public lands policies. Ken Salazar (him of the smart bolo tie), the
current Interior Secretary, is an ex-U.S. Senator from Colorado.
The successful nominee to the post should have a thorough knowledge
of the multiple functions of the public domain, roughly a quarter
of the land area of the United States.
While governor of Alaska from 2006 to 2009 Sarah Palin reacted
to federal policy on 222 million acres of public land (60% of the
land area) in her state used for everything from timber sales and
oil and gas leases, to hunting and fishing and other recreational
activities. She supported the first steps to build the Alaska gas
pipeline, a project of TransCanada and Exxon-Mobil designed to
deliver natural gas to the Lower Forty Eight, and still in early
development stages. To be sure, her attempt to raise taxes on
energy companies doing business in Alaska was a bad idea. Taxes on
energy production are already responsible for 90% of annual state
revenue. Palin can take partial credit for Alaska’s current $12
billion dollars budget surplus, not bad for a state twice the size
of Texas with a population of 723,000. Her policy of pursuing
multiple-use (public land utilized in both extractive and
recreational ways to maximize local economic benefits) was — as
every Western governor knows — a constant battle to assist the
creation of jobs, and to help keep her Alaskan constituents
prosperous in the face of bureaucratic dictates from Washington
driven by green legislation and the unending litigation of
environmentalists.
Palin also has a personal connection with the public lands; in
fact, risking shrieking green lefty hysteria, I’ll call her a
conservationist. She grew up in Alaska and, with her husband Todd,
has enjoyed hunting and fishing, and just plain “getting out
there.” The Hook and Bullet demographic is usually denigrated as
troglodytic by Gaia-type greens, yet hunting and fishing
organizations work hard for habitat preservation. Being lampooned
as “Caribou Barbie” by the likes of Maureen Dowd looks good on
Palin’s résumé given that the New York Times columnist
herself might not know the difference between a caribou and a
moose. Dowd probably thinks the mission of federal Bureau of
Reclamation is the regulation of cosmetic surgery.
Indeed, Palin as a lightning rod for loony green left savagery
should be a plus from Romney’s point of view. Her notorious line,
“Drill, baby drill,” is a good fit for a Romney energy policy that
includes the promotion of such projects as the Keystone XL
pipeline, a decision which President Obama ceremoniously punted
into his second term (assuming we are so blessed) as a bouquet to
his environmental left constituency. Shelving Keystone XL coupled
with failing to develop at least a portion of an estimated 85
billion barrels of oil on America’s Continental Shelf at a time
when Americans are paying almost four dollars for a gallon of gas
is a good indication of the president’s disregard for consumers in
order to satisfy a radical portion of his Democratic base more
supportive of Solyndra-type boondoggles then a working energy
policy.
Sarah Palin has never been shy about criticizing President
Obama’s national energy policy or lack thereof. Her Facebook page
states that “President Obama doesn’t have an energy plan. He has an
energy speech that he continues to give regardless of the facts or
his obvious failures.” High gas prices are “one of his campaign
promises.” The Keystone pipeline: “If we’re worried about
instability in the Middle East, it makes no sense to shun safe and
reliable oil from Canada.”
Secretary Salazar continues to stonewall energy leases on Bureau
of Land Management (BLM) tracts in the West, and others along the
coastal continental shelf. Upon his appointment one of his first
acts was to kill 77 leases in Utah previously approved by the Bush
Administration. Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming by themselves have
roughly 1.8 trillion barrels of “recoverable” oil shale (the U.S.
Geological Survey estimates a total of 3 to 6 trillion barrels for
that region) that currently sits in bureaucratic limbo. Salazar
implemented Obama’s six month moratorium of Gulf of Mexico
development following the British Petroleum (BP) “Deepwater
Horizon” spill in 2010, and development in that sphere proceeds at
a snail’s pace. Salazar maintains a no-drill policy in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). And this past May, new Interior
Department regulations governing seismic hydraulic fracturing, or
“fracking,” now add another layer of bureaucracy to that
controversial natural gas extraction technique.
Thanks to the Bakken Formation in the western part of the state,
North Dakota has America’s lowest unemployment rate (2.9% — June,
2012), its energy boom giving North Dakotans the sort of economic
prosperity other Americans can only barely remember. I would think
that both Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin are popular public figures in
the Peace Garden State.
