I grew up in Alaska and both my parents were passionately involved in Republican Party politics. <\/p>\n
My step-dad, Dick, was elected a member of our town assembly and my mom, Elaine, worked for years as a kind of legislative staffer.<\/p>\n
Through all that time, Sen. Ted Stevens was an institution, a guy who existed beyond politics. He helped make Alaska a state. <\/p>\n
His title was Senator. But in a state with only a half million people, Stevens wielded a kind of power that was more intimate, more personal.<\/p>\n
Everyone had met him. And if he hadn’t helped you directly — with a job, an earmark, a letter of recommendation to a military academy — then you knew someone he had helped.<\/p>\n
When I met Stevens, I was working as a journalist and he had already taken on some of the aura of entitlement and arrogance that seem to have brought him down.<\/p>\n
It’s a failing of many politicians: the sense that the public treasury is your own; and the belief that normal rules of ethics simply don’t apply.<\/p>\n
I actually believe Stevens when he says that he doesn’t feel that he did anything wrong. <\/p>\n
He felt that he could color outside the lines — maintaining a complicated financial relationship with an oil industry company — while maintaining his integrity and his independence.<\/p>\n
He was wrong. There were rules and laws governing his behavior. Not suggestions or guidelines.<\/p>\n
In the end, it’s always startling what men like Stevens are willing to give up in exchange for a pittance. He was convicted for receiving a quarter-million dollars in illegal gifts. <\/p>\n
A historic career that spanned a half-century — his status as a legend in America’s Last Frontier — thrown away for $250,000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I grew up in Alaska and both my parents were passionately involved in Republican Party […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}