http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/us...ll&oref=slogin

By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: September 3, 2008

ANCHORAGE — Like so many other distinctions about Alaska — the biggest, wildest, coldest state not even half a century removed from its territorial days — being governor here is just flat different.

“Alaska is its own world,” said Tony Knowles, a Democrat who served as governor from 1994 to 2002.

Sarah Palin’s experience as Alaska’s governor since taking office in late 2006 has been a keystone argument by Republicans that she is fit to serve as vice president. At the convention Wednesday in St. Paul, Ms. Palin and other speakers contended that her time as governor has given her more practical experience than Mr. Obama.

Many Americans in other states, though, might not recognize the job she holds or the unusual challenges she has faced — from managing a $5 billion budget surplus in a time of economic distress elsewhere, to upending an entrenched political establishment within her own party that was literally around for the state’s founding.

That said, by other measures, Alaska is harder to govern than a smaller, more settled realm in the Lower 48. With vast distances, large numbers of indigenous peoples and a narrowly based extraction economy — with a handful of giant multinational oil corporations dominating the game — some economists say a country like Nigeria might be an apter comparison.

“Alaska really is a colonial place,” said Stephen Haycox, a professor of history at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. “One third of the economic base is oil; another third is federal spending. The economy is extremely narrow and highly dependent. It’s not to say that Alaska is a beggar state, but it certainly is true that Alaska is dependent on decisions made outside it, and over which Alaskans don’t have great control.”

First, the State Constitution concentrates power in the governor’s office more thoroughly than in almost any other state — a legacy of the late 1950s, historians say, when statehood and a simultaneous trend all over the country toward elevating executive authority coincided.
Alaskan governors can edit legislation and their vetoes are tougher for lawmakers to overcome. In the numerical scale of power devised by Thad Beyle, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, only Massachusetts’ governor has a mightier tool kit.

Second, inch-deep history has meant that the leading lights of statehood are not mere names in history books but are in many cases still around and even still in power, like Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young, both Republicans with decades under their belts in Washington. That old guard is still revered by some Alaskans, but it is disdained by others who have been on the lookout for fresh Republican faces.

It is in that densely layered Alaskan mix that Ms. Palin rose, governed and must be understood, academics and people in both parties say — not as merely a governor, or a woman, but as an Alaskan.