Sarah Palin: Quick Facts to Educate the Uneducated or Misinformed

Sarah Palin was a sitting governor, and at that time, before the Obama campaign and their allies in the press spent months relentlessly smearing her good name, she had the highest approval ratings of any governor in the country [http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/851orcjq.asp]

She was also responsible for getting the largest energy project in North American history underway after several decades of interminable delays in Alaska [http://www.newsweek.com/2008/09/19/palin-s-pipeline-to-nowhere.html].

She was a courageous corruption-busting whistleblower who turned in the leader of her own party in Alaska for his corrupt practices [http://www.adn.com/2007/07/10/150137/palin-signs-ethics-reforms.html].

She was a fiscal conservative who made the largest veto cuts in Alaska history [http://www.alaskajournal.com/stories/070807/hom_20070708005.shtml], reined in the reckless waste, cut her own expenses, sold the governor’s private jet [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/04/sarah-palin/no-bidders-on-ebay-sold-it-offline/], let the personal chef go [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin#cite_note-alaskajournal1-105], and put away billions of dollars in savings for Alaska for a rainy day [http://web.archive.org/web/20080527181734/http://www.adn.com/legislature/story/415749.html].

She was a tough CEO who went toe to toe with the Big Oil companies and fought to get the best deal for Alaskans, the resource owners she represented [http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/sarah_palin_and_big_oil.html]. And she did all of this as a woman from a modest background who was entirely self-made – without the benefit of a rich or influential father or husband. 

There are a few things that people like to bring up about Sarah and one of the most common is in regards to her stepping down as Governor. But to me, her stepping down as Governor was the noblest, selfless act I've seen in a state official. Below is an excerpt from her book “Going Rogue” explaining how her administration was paralyzed once she came back from the 2008 campaign.

"My administration was hit with hundreds of demands for all communications: months' worth of e-mails between me, Todd, and my staff, and every other combination of e-mail addresses you can imagine. Only the opposition really comprehends the work involved with FOIA requests--from the retrieval of all correspondence and e-mails, to copying them for lawyers and staff to review in order to remove confidential or privileged information, to assembling and packing them, and on and on. Just ONE of these requests for a certain batch of e-mails generated 24,000 individual sheets of paper. So instead of doing out jobs, my staff, including my attorneys, spend thousands of hours and wasted more that $2 million of public monies to sort through it all one sheet at a time... Combined with the FOIAs, the sheer volume of paperwork and legally required responses brought the business of governing the state of Alaska to a grinding halt. Eventually, it overwhelmed us--and was obviously meant to."

-Going Rouge: An American Life, By: Sarah Palin