Campaign Outsider

Even by the subterranean standards at Fox News, Chris Wallace’s interview of Sarah Palin yesterday was a flat-out embarrassment.

Not only did Wallace allow Palin to Katrina Barack Obama over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, she also tarred him for being in the pocket of BP and other oil companies. From foxnews.com:

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Palin suggested that the White House is too cozy with the oil industry because of contributions to candidate Obama during the 2008 presidential race.

“I don’t know why the question isn’t asked by the mainstream media and by others if there’s any connection with the contributions made to President Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration,” Palin, a Fox News Channel contributor, said on “Fox News Sunday.” 

“If there’s any connection there to President Obama taking so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there, and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing here in the Gulf of Mexico — now, if this was President Bush or if this were a Republican in office who hadn’t received as much support even as President Obama has from B.P. and other oil companies, you know the mainstream media would be all over his case,” she said.

Interestingly, the Los Angeles Times reports these figures:

The oil and gas industry donated $2.4 million to Palin’s running mate, Republican John McCain, in the 2008 election cycle, and nearly $900,000 to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ opensecrets.org website.

Beyond that, here’s a fun fact to know and tell from Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times today: “oil and gas companies, always Republican-leaning, have gone all out [this year], bestowing 76 percent of their largess on the G.O.P.”

If anyone’s in the pocket of the oil industry, it sure looks like the Republicans.

But maybe not Palin herself?

As part of Campaign Outsider’s Fair & Balanced Outreach Initiative®, here’s a minority report from Michael Roston  at True/Slant. 

As Alaska’s occasional governor, Palin actually took a rather populist position on how oil companies should be dealt with.

I blogged about this back in March of 2009 when Portfolio fronted Palin on the cover of its soon-to-be-out-of-business magazine. Portfolio’s story sought to identify failings in Palin’s energy policy – that she had failed to make a big natural gas pipeline deal happen because she had taken a hostile position against the major fossil fuel corporations that wanted to invest in the project.

But what the story actually revealed was not that Palin had failed in her energy policy. Rather, it showed that she had refused to let her state’s energy policy be set on terms that were most favorable to those large companies – like the very ones she accuses Obama of receiving too much money from today.

So while people on the left will see Palin knocking Obama and asking “What about ‘drill baby drill’?” what they’re missing is that Palin was always a believer in Alaska’s system of petro-socialism, and does not in any way believe that the oil companies should get a pass.

Hey – I report, you decide.