As Dunleavy sows, so shall he reap

Tuckerman Babcock, former chief of staff to Gov. Mike Dunleavy, recently made an extraordinary claim. He said, explaining Rep. Laddie Shaw’s failure to ascend to the Senate, that Senate President Cathy Giessel punished Shaw because she hates the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend.

Usually people reserve hatred for something close to home — their straying ex-husband, their cruel sibling, their arrogant neighbor who sued them over a property line. It is true that Vladimir Lenin hated capitalism. And the co-founder of the John Birch Society, Robert Welch, hated communism. But the dividend is neither an economic system nor a form of government. It is a state program. Is it really worthy of hatred?

I tried to conjure Giessel hating the dividend. How would she express herself?

By foaming at the mouth, tearing her dividend check into tiny pieces, flushing the pieces down the toilet, and screaming “Bye-bye, filthy lucre""

Babcock’s portrait of Giessel (who has advocated for a smaller dividend) as a dividend hater is extreme. But that’s the Dunleavy administration in a single word: extreme.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy was elected promising he was a conservative. He’s a radical, far more radical than those “Leftists” he denounces (and in Alaska, unlike Greenwich Village, there aren’t enough competent Leftists to form a single Marxist cell in an 8-by-12 cabin). Dunleavy’s cuts to the ferry system, the university, the Pioneer Homes and Medicaid are radical. He is also radically making war on the state employees’ union. Whether or not he hates the union, I will leave to the reigning expert on hatred: Tuckerman Babcock.

Gov. Dunleavy knew the changes imposed by he and his team, headed by departed budget director Donna Arduin, would be unpopular with liberals. Babcock himself said so at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship before the Legislature assembled in January. What Babcock didn’t know was Dunleavy’s radicalism would be deeply unpopular — I might say hated, but that’s Babcock’s province — not only with UU do-gooders but also with the GOP establishment, Sen. Giessel providing a sterling example.

About 49,000 voters signed the initial Dunleavy recall petition.

I am going to read Dunleavy’s mind — after all, Babcock read Giessel’s — and stipulate that the governor understands the danger he is in. While he is likely too artistically incurious to listen to departed rocker Jimi Hendrix, the governor would recognize, with a bit of interpretation, what Hendrix sang near the end of “Foxy Lady” is true of the recall: “Here I come, baby, I’m comin’ to getcha.”

Yes, governor, the recall is comin’ to getcha, although many months will pass before anyone knows if you get got.

Gov. Dunleavy enters the recall with a personality flaw that will make defeating a recall difficult, if not impossible, no matter how many millions of dollars his rich friends throw at defending him. He seems incapable of expressing sympathy, empathy, compassion or care for the people affected by his destructive policies. His answer to why the cuts are necessary is always the same: We don’t have the money. This comes across as heartless. And the only thing worse for Dunleavy than a lack of heart would be faking compassion. Nobody would be fooled by a speech at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in which the governor expressed his deep concern for the future of the school, or an appearance in Cordova to voice his affection for the ferry system.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy has sown the wind. Now he is reaping the whirlwind.

Michael Carey is an Anchorage Daily News columnist. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com.

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