'Palin administration is shrouded in loyalty and secrecy'

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WASILLA, Alaska: Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of Alaska's Division of Agriculture, Palin appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as one of her qualifications for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Havemeister was one of at least five high school classmates Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding what they had made in the private sector.

When Palin had to cut the 2007 Alaska state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.

Last May, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor's career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to find an assistant to the governor on the line. "You should be ashamed!" Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. "Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now." . . .

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Palin appointed Bitney, her former junior high school bandmate, as her legislative director and tapped another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the office of economic development for $82,908 per year. Previously he established an Alaska franchise area for Mailboxes Etc., a company that provides retail postal and business services.

When the state creamery board recommended closing a state-owned dairy that had served a handful of farms in the Matanuska Valley, Palin quickly responded to local farmers' protests to "Save the Cows" by ousting the board members and installing her real estate agent, Kristan Cole, as chairman. . . .

The administration's e-mail correspondence reveals a siegelike atmosphere. Top aides keep score, demean enemies and gloat over successes. Even some who helped engineer her rise have felt her wrath.

Dan Fagan, a prominent conservative radio host and longtime friend of Palin, urged his listeners to vote for her in 2006. But when he took her to task for raising taxes on oil companies, he said, he found himself branded a "hater."

It is part of a pattern, Fagan said, in which the governor characterizes critics as "bad people who are anti-Alaska." Since then he has been inundated with critical calls. . . .