Sarah Palin Leads By Example
by
The Savant
09/14/2008, 7:56 PM #
And you know, as mayor and as governor, I tried to lead by example. So as mayor, I took a voluntary pay cut which didn't impress my husband at all.-- Sarah Palin, speaking to a crowd in Fairfax, VA on Sept. 10
The mayor [of Wasilla] oversees a police department created three years before Palin took office; the public works department; the parks and recreation department; a planning office; a library; and a small history museum. Council meetings are in the low-ceilinged basement of the town hall, a former school, and often the only residents who show up to testify are two gadflies. When Palin was mayor, the population was just 5,500. Palin limited her duties further by hiring a deputy administrator to handle much of the town's day-to-day management. -- “As Mayor of Wasilla, Palin Cut Own Duties, Left Trail of Bad Blood,” Washington Post, Sept. 14
According to news reports, the deputy administrator’s salary was $50,000. Palin’s was $68,000; whether this was before or, instead, after she cut her own salary, I don’t know. Palin fired the deputy administrator shortly before her final mayoral term expired, and her immediate successor, who is still mayor, never filled the deputy administrator position.
In other words, Palin wanted to work part-time, so she arranged to have the city pay someone $50,000 to perform much of her work. In exchange, she agreed to a reduction—undoubtedly of far less than $50,000, in her own salary. And now she is telling the public that she cut her own salary in order to lead by example.
Presumably she also was leading by example when she arranged to have her tiny town pay a net total of (almost certainly) more than $100,000 annually between 1996 and 2002 to obtain the same work that until then had, and since then has, cost that town tens of thousands of dollars less than that per year.
Also presumably, she plans to lead by example as vice president. She will ask Congress to reduce her salary but provide money in the budget for a deputy vice president who will travel to state funerals and the like while she advises President McCain on how to win the land war against Russia.
