DOZENS OF reporters trekked to Juneau, Alaska yesterday for the release of 24,000 e-mails sent by Republican politician Sarah Palin as governor between December 2006 and September 2008, after media organisations filed a request for the documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
Juneau can be reached only by aircraft or boat.
Mrs Palin has not declared her candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, but it is a measure of the fascination she exerts on the US body politic that journalists were willing to go to so much effort to obtain her redacted e-mails.
The messages were printed on paper and were not made available digitally. Several media groups began scanning them immediately to put them online.
They filled six boxes weighing 250 lbs and costing $725 (€505) for a set. The state had withheld more than 2,200 pages of material under laws pertaining to public records, privacy, attorney-client privilege and executive privilege.
“The thousands upon thousands of e-mails released today show a very engaged governor Sarah Palin being the CEO of her state,” said a statement by Tim Crawford, the treasurer of SarahPAC, Mrs Palin’s fund-raising organisation. “The e-mails detail a governor hard at work. Everyone should read them.”
Reporters scrambled for the boxes and rolled their “treasure” away on trolleys at 6pm Dublin time yesterday. It was not immediately clear whether they contained anything of interest.
Further details on issues that arose during Mrs Palin’s governorship would be considered “scoops”. Examples include the installation of a $35,000 tanning bed in the governor’s mansion – to ward off depression, Mrs Palin said; the $17,000 in daily expenses she claimed when she spent nights at her family home in Wasilla; “troopergate”, or Mrs Palin and her husband Todd’s alleged involvement in the firing of a state trooper who divorced her sister; and Levi Johnston, the ex-boyfriend of the Palins’ daughter Bristol, and Bristol’s pregnancy.
Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich, another Republican presidential hopeful, swore to fight on yesterday after the mass desertion of his senior campaign staff.
“I’m prepared to go out and to campaign very intensely, but I want a campaign on ideas and on solutions and I want to do it in a way that brings Americans together into a large movement,” Mr Gingrich told ABC News in a televised interview outside his home in McLean, Virginia.
Unconventional methods of campaigning seem to be a fetish with Republican candidates this year. Mr Gingrich blamed the implosion of his campaign on “a fundamental strategic difference between the traditional consulting community and the kind of campaign I want to run”.
Mr Gingrich did not address the transgressions that led to the departure of nearly two dozen aides, including his campaign manager, spokesman and senior strategist, as well as staff in the early voting states of New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina and his home state of Georgia.
The first mistake was his condemnation of Republican representative Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which would have converted Medicare, the public health insurance plan for the elderly, to a voucher system, as “right-wing social engineering”. In Republican parlance, “social engineering” is usually preceded by the word “liberal”.
A second mistake was keeping a $500,000 credit line open at Tiffany Co to satisfy the craving of Mr Gingrich’s third wife, Callista, for diamonds. The purchases were not illegal, but they shocked voters at a time of 9 per cent unemployment and economic crisis.
The mass resignations coincided with Mr and Mrs Gingrich’s return on Thursday from a two-week cruise through the Greek islands while campaign staff had been slaving away. The aides had concluded that the former Speaker of the House lacked the discipline and dedication needed to win the Republican nomination.