I’ll be the first to admit I’m a worrier. Mostly I worry about things that are out of my control, like clear-air turbulence and elevator malfunctions. And lately, I’ve been worried about the impact Sarah Palin’s notoriety (or popularity, or infamy, depending on who you ask) has had on Alaska politics.

When Palin returned from the campaign trail last fall, an entire neighborhood of the internet had already grown up around her. As of July, Team Sarah, a social networking site for Palin supporters, had more than 70,000 members. The blog Conservatives4Palin racked up over a million hits in its first six months. Locally, liberal bloggers have attracted hundreds of thousands of readers from all over the world, given interviews to national media, and been profiled in a book about new media’s impact on elections. An Anchorage blog, The Mudflats, received a 2008 Blogger’s Choice Award for Best Political Blog.

Former Anchorage Daily News editorial page editor Michael Carey looks at the Palin-related storm raging on the Internet and sees a lot of people focused on personality.

“I think it comes off as kind of a big muddle,” Carey says. “It’s affinity politics. ‘I’m like you. You represent me. We’re on the same team. You share my values. You represent my values.’”

Undeniably, he said, of late it’s been all about Palin.

“So much of what we have now in Alaska politics is the response to Palin,” Carey says. “'I either like her or I don’t like her. I want her to become president. I just want her to leave me alone. I’m sick of watching her on television'—those kinds of things.”

Pro- and anti-Palin bloggers frequently engage the kind of online battles you wouldn’t notice unless you spend a lot of time in the world of Palin-centric social media. The internet’s Palin frenzy has spilled over into real life on more than one occasion, however, when bloggers on both sides have mobilized their readers to take action on Palin-related issues. Progressive blogs congratulated one another on defeating Palin’s nomination of Wayne Anthony Ross for Attorney General, and conservative blogs kept a running tally of each new ethics complaint dismissal. Legislators—particularly Hollis French, Les Gara, Mike Hawker, Jay Ramras, and Mike Doogan—started to grow accustomed to having their names batted around online and watching their email inboxes swell when they failed to adequately support or thwart Palin.

It was the Ross incident that first got me worried about whether all this online Palin-watching was actually turning out to be bad for Alaska. I’d be lying if I said I wanted Ross to be Attorney General. On the other hand, I wasn’t so sure I wanted people who didn’t live in Alaska to be contacting my legislators and telling them how to vote—on any issue. But Carey says he’s not convinced Outside Palin-watchers have actually done much to influence the way laws are made in Alaska.

“I don’t see it,” he says. “Legislators have told me they get a lot of email; some of it’s from people who don’t live here.” There’s a lot of Palin-related noise right now, he says, but it hasn’t had a substantive impact on what the legislature does.

“Palin is a celebrity,” Carey says. “That is the single most important thing. People don’t discuss her policies. She’s the It Girl in this context.”

Carey left me feeling a little better, but I still wasn’t convinced. I wanted to hear from a legislator that they hadn’t felt pressured by Palin’s supporters or critics during the 2009 session. Unfortunately, I had a hard time tracking one down. Doogan and Ramras didn’t reply to my request for an interview, and Hawker declined, albeit very politely.

“I have something of a conflict of interest with my legislative advocacy for the best interests of Alaska being under constant assault by Palin’s national organization and its contractors,” he wrote in an email.

So one night in July, I walked across the alley to visit my neighbor. It was dipnetting season, and I found Representative Les Gara standing at a picnic table in his front yard with a fillet knife in his hand and a cooler full of salmon at his feet.

“You know, in politics, you like to demonize people, and there’s an easy way to demonize bloggers; you know, they take one side, they don’t show the other, blah blah blah,” Gara said, cutting into a salmon. “But in the end, really, a lot of these bloggers are just people who give a damn about their community.”

The problem, Gara continued, is not with people who care; it’s with people who refuse to budge from their own ideologies.

“With some of those folks—on both sides—everything’s black and white,” he said. “If you don’t agree with them, you’re either disingenuous or stupid, but you can’t possibly be somebody who just has an independent, honest difference of opinion with them.”

During the last legislative session, Palin’s every move was tracked by the blogosphere—and blog readers weren’t shy about unloading on legislators when it seemed like a good way to promote their views. Gara said he and other legislators saw a spike in email, both from constituents and from non-residents who have started following Alaska politics through blogs.

“Those are interesting because when you respond to people, people are amazed that you respond… it’s very disarming,” said Gara, who makes an effort to reply to emails personally. “And then they’ll almost always say, ‘I didn’t think of that.’”

Gara offered up an example: Earlier in the summer, he received a flood of emails from Palin supporters who were angry about a photo posted by Anchorage resident Linda Kellen Biegel on her blog, Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis. The photo, taken at the Republican National Convention, showed Palin holding her infant son Trig. In the version Biegel posted, Trig’s face had been replaced with the distorted face of local conservative radio personality Eddie Burke. The image provoked outrage among Palin fans and prompted a public statement from Palin representative Meghan Stapleton, who called the Photoshop job a “malicious desecration” of the original. Stapleton’s statement referred to Biegel as the “official Democrat party blogger for Alaska,” a handle that was echoed by pro-Palin blogs nationwide. (Biegel’s website was awarded the Alaska state blog credential for the 2008 Democratic National Convention, but has no official affiliation with the Alaska Democratic Party.)

Gara said he wasn’t aware of the controversy until messages started popping up in his inbox.

“I got a bunch of emails, from non-Alaskans, mostly, saying, ‘how dare the Democrats go after Sarah Palin by making fun of Trig,’” Gara said. “And I’d write and say, you know, I’ve never seen the photo. Linda Kellen Biegel seems like a nice woman, but I can’t tell her what to do. That would be wrong. And I don’t know what her politics are—I assume she’s a Democrat, but she has no official position with the party. There’s nothing she can be sanctioned for. So why are you writing me about it? Do you really want me to go after a citizen for not agreeing with me? And people would write back and go, ‘Oh. The blog said that she had been hired by you guys.’ And then almost all of them would say, ‘I’m sorry.’”

And that’s how it tends to go, Gara said: People get bad information, and unless it’s corrected, they don’t know it’s bad information.

“I guess that’s the problem,” he said. “One of the unintended side effects of blogs is they attract people who are rabid about their politics sometimes. Sometimes they provide those people with misinformation, get those people angrier, but in the end, you find out they’re just people, because they write you, you write back, and they’re like, ‘never mind.’”

Gara said he sometimes finds it more difficult to find common ground with blog readers who share his political views.

“You can never be radical enough for some of the folks on your own side,” he said. “There were a bunch of people who wanted me to impeach Sarah Palin, and I’d write back and say, ‘you know, I don’t really believe in impeachment except for serious crimes, and you know, the way you react to politicians you disagree with is you work on a campaign for somebody who’s better. Put your energy into that. Impeachment’s going to get you her lieutenant governor as your governor, and it’s wrong.’ You can’t have a society where opponents of a governor or president always impeach the one that they don’t like. At some point, a vote should count for something.”

With Palin in the governor’s office, Gara said, legislators found themselves criticized by Palin supporters and detractors alike.

“There is this very sick thing with Sarah Palin’s popularity that unfortunately became part and parcel of her governorship: You had to agree with her a hundred percent of the time or disagree with her a hundred percent of the time, or the blog commenters would go after you in a very personal, nasty way,” he said. “There was no room in their minds for you ever to take an anti-Sarah position on one hand or a position where you’re not anti-Sarah on the other hand. There’s no middle ground.”

On paper, Rebecca Mansour and I don’t have much in common. Most notably, she is the editor of Conservatives4Palin.com, while I recently wrote a blog post in which I compared Palin’s resignation to my quitting the Wendler cross-country running team after two days. On the other hand, we’re both writers, and according to her Blogger profile, she shares my love of folk music and the books of Lloyd Alexander. So when I finally got her on the phone, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Conservatives4Palin hasn’t held back from criticizing Alaska bloggers. Mansour and her team have repeatedly taken Alaska bloggers to task for what they’ve perceived as unfair coverage of the Palin family.

“I think Phil (Munger, of Progressive Alaska) went below the belt when he started to post stuff about Sarah Palin flying home to have her baby,” Mansour said. “That’s nobody’s business but hers.” She also took issue with Kellen Biegel’s use of the doctored photo of Palin with Trig.

“Don’t mess with a photo of her kid,” Mansour said. “That’s creepy.”

Interestingly enough, the blog most Palin supporters love to hate is one for which Mansour doesn’t have much criticism.

“Mudflats tends not to go below the belt,” Mansour said. “She’ll snark about Palin, but she doesn’t go personal. I don’t like what she’s written, I think she’s totally wrong, but she usually tends to stay away from anything personal. There’s a line we have to watch and call each other out on.”

Mansour will be the first to admit that her own readers aren’t always so civil.

“It’s open commenting,” she said. “We don’t have control over the comments, really.”

There are two sure ways to get banned from Conservatives4Palin, though: Suggest that Trig Palin isn’t really Sarah Palin’s son, or question Obama’s citizenship.

“I don’t know how many times I have to tell these morons that he was born here,” Mansour said. “He is an American citizen. Are these people friggin’ stupid?”

Mansour said she and her team make a good-faith effort to keep comments in check as much as possible.

“I skim through the comments,” she said. “We go through and we delete anybody commenting about appearances of Celtic Diva, get rid of that.” She’ll also delete comments that refer to the Mudflats blogger, “AK Muckraker,” by her real name, Jeanne Devon, which became public earlier this year when Doogan published it in his constituent newsletter.

“I like her as a person,” she said. “If I were to go through her comments, I’m sure I would find some nasty crap. But I know she wouldn’t support that.”

One issue that is very personal to Mansour is race. Mansour and Conservatives4Palin contributor Daniel Terrapin are both Lebanese, as is outspoken Palin critic Andree McLeod.

“We feel it is our duty to protect the governor just to make up for our Phoenician friend,” Mansour joked. But when she saw a comment on another pro-Palin site that commented on McLeod’s race, Mansour wasn’t laughing.

“Somebody made a comment comparing Andree McLeod to the Taliban,” Mansour said. “I posted a big thing saying, ‘Lay off. That’s low. That’s below the belt.’”

Sandra Mitchell is a retired dietician, an Oregon resident, a vehement Palin opponent, and a dedicated reader of blogs about Alaska politics. Until recently, she read and frequently commented on Conservatives4Palin. Mitchell said she’s occasionally come across offensive remarks in the comments at Conservatives4Palin, but confirmed Mansour’s assertion that site administrators don’t tolerate racism.

“A couple of times I have detected Muslim bashing and racist comments that I have reported to the moderators,” she said. “They are good about controlling that stuff.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that outside points of view are welcomed.

“On the whole there is no discussion at C4P,” Mitchell said. “When I post a valid point I get slammed as a ‘troll.’ In some cases I’m told to stick to Oregon politics. This is weird because most of the posters there are not Alaskans.”

(Mitchell is right on that point, according to Mansour. “If there were as many people from Alaska as claim to be from Alaska, you guys would be a lot more crowded,” she said.)

While personal attacks and name-calling do go on in the comments (a recent post about the future of Alaska’s liberal blogs, for example, generated a couple of comments about the possibility of “Phyllis” Munger undergoing a sex-change operation and at least one rude remark about Kellen Biegel’s appearance), Conservatives4Palin hardly has a monopoly on that sort of behavior. Alaska’s liberal blog community has freely engaged in playground behavior as well, rechristening Doogan “DooDoo Doogan,” playing on the abbreviation C4P with all manner of urine jokes, and distorting Mansour’s last name in a variety of ways (Mansour’s personal favorite is “ManSewer”). Mansour says she doesn’t take it personally.

My mother told me recently she’d paid a visit to Conservatives4Palin and was appalled by the reactions from other readers when she posted what she thought was a reasonable comment about a factual inaccuracy she’d noticed in an earlier comment. If it were anyone else, I might have taken the account with a grain of salt, but my mother, while opinionated, is polite to a fault. I didn’t doubt she’d posted a perfectly reasonable comment, or that she’d been excoriated for it. I told Mansour about the incident, interested to see how she’d respond. Her immediate reaction? An apology.

“What is sad about that is that I bet if I sat down with your mom and had coffee, we’d have a lot in common,” she said.

Of course, she added, the site isn’t intended to draw Palin detractors; it’s an online community for Palin supporters.

“The blog is called Conservatives4Palin, so our regular commenters (aren’t looking for) persuasion,” she said. “Their level of what they argue about with each other, for example, in the open thread is not ‘Sarah Palin is a moron because of her Katie Couric interview.’ They’re arguing about things like ‘should she run in 2012 or 2016?’”

There’s no question that Alaska blogs have benefited from Palin’s national candidacy in terms of readership and exposure. But now that Palin’s no longer running the state, and with her political future yet to be determined, will non-Alaskans keep up their interest in Alaska politics? And will pro-Palin blogs and networks continue to keep a close eye on the state?

Mansour said it’s hard to tell how significantly Alaska will figure in the Palin discussion moving forward, but added that there’s no divorcing Palin from her past.

“That is who she is. This is what she loves,” Mansour said. “Alaska will always be important. To the extent that it is now? No, I don’t think. Nobody’s going to go and see Sean Parnell’s State of the State, let me put it that way. (But) Alaska will always be central in the sense that when they’re looking for dirt, they’ll go local. When we want to look at her record, we’ll go local.”

While there’s going to be “less heat” on the local political scene, Mansour said, residents may find things a little dull after the fuss dies down.

“I think Alaskans will probably somewhat miss it,” she said. “I think it was kind of fun for a while.” On the other hand, from her perspective, the McCain campaign’s handling of the Troopergate issue during the campaign may have caused irreparable damage to Palin’s image with some Alaskans.

“They were assholes,” she said. “How do you repair all those damages? It’s almost impossible. And then there’s also anger on her part. So there’s legitimate anger on both sides and there’s no way to repair it. I think Alaska will be grateful for that part of it to be gone, and all the drama.”

Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, devoted a chapter of his book Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press to examining ways in which Alaska bloggers contributed to the national perception of Palin immediately after her nomination was announced.

“Palin has been the gift that kept on giving for local liberal bloggers,” Boehlert said. “Now, just as the larger blogosphere adjusts to a media and political landscape without George Bush, who had served for years as a central galvanizing figure, Alaska bloggers will now have to adjust to life beyond Palin.” Some blogs, he added, will probably continue to attract national readership.

“I think Mudflats in particular has a good chance of continuing her readership simply because she’s been able to develop a real community,” Boehlert said. “(It’s) a community that came first for all things Palin but then seemed to stick around simply because they had found a home online.”

One Mudflatter who plans on sticking around is Phoenix, Arizona, resident Sharon Alexander, who didn’t get interested in Palin until after the election. She stumbled onto The Mudflats a few months ago and plans to stay a devoted reader.

“I will continue to follow the blogs as they struggle to bring Alaska back to order and get rid of the nasty taste of Sarah Palin from their lives,” Alexander said. “These are dear friends to me now.”

Back in downtown Anchorage, Gara tossed a salmon carcass into a nearby trash can and wiped his hands.

As a legislator, Gara said, it’s great to see so many people involved in politics. The key is to try to get past the facelessness of the Internet and see one another as people. It’s something he thinks some of his colleagues in the legislature still don’t get.

“You know, step back for a minute,” Gara said. “They’re interested in politics. It’s not their fault they got some misinformation. Their emotions got all wrapped up. And frankly, if you guys took the time to write back to them, you’d find out that most of them are pretty nice people, as much as you want to think they’re not.”

Gara said now that Palin has stepped down, he’d like to see a return to focusing on the issues.

“I hope people sit back and say, ‘you know what, we were too concerned about her personality, and it wasn’t okay to judge an issue by judging whether she was for it or against it,’” he said. “I hope one day it sort of hits people that it’s very unhealthy for voters to be driven by personality rather than the merits.”

My grandparents voted “no” on Alaska statehood in 1958. They’d moved up in 1951, planning to stay a few years, have a few adventures, and make a lot of money. They weren’t that interested in politics, and they liked the way things worked under the territorial government. Later, after Alaska became home, they were glad statehood passed, but at the time they didn’t think it was in their best interest.

As I mulled over the conversations I’d had about the online culture surrounding Palin, I thought a lot about my grandparents. I also thought about the pioneers who fought for statehood and how they might have felt about these Johnny-come-lately types who showed up at the last minute and threatened to derail their plans. I thought about the Alaska Natives who’d been here long before and how they’d felt as they watched first the Russians and then the Americans waltz in and start calling the shots.

Over the years, people have come to Alaska in waves: The first Natives, the Russians, the Americans, the miners and trappers, the military, the Okies and the Texans, and now the Palin watchers. Some of these people, like my grandparents, find a home here, and they stay. Some of them move on to the next gold strike or pipeline or news cycle. A lot of them make mistakes. All of them make an impact.

I’ve decided to stop worrying about Alaska. This place has survived wave after wave of newcomers, and each time it emerges, changed but whole.

Clear air turbulence, though—for that, I’ll need a Xanax.