Carpetbagging

If you were to take off from the remote grass airstrip that legislator Lloyd Moore built in 1964 for his Stinson 108, there wouldn’t be a lot to see, at least not immediately.

Mainly large stretches of boreal forest, dissected by chaotic rivers and broken here or there by logging operations, and dotted occasionally by a hunting camp. Eventually, though you’d come to the paper mill where Moore spent a long stretch of his life turning spruce into pulp for paper.

Further on still, a keen eye might notice tailings from old mining operations, half-overgrown, but still leaching telltale metallic traces.

If it was winter, you’d catch glimpses of a comprehensive snowmachine trail system. Except that here they call them snowmobiles. Because “here” in this case is the northwest corner of the Adirondacks, and the heart of New York’s 23rd congressional district.

Except for maybe some patches of rural Maine, you won’t find country more like Alaska anywhere in the East Coast. Head east a bit and you’ll find some of the biggest mountains in the East (not very big, granted, but with alpine tundra anyone who’s hiked Flat Top would recognize). Head west, and you’d soon come to some of the East’s most abundant salmon streams. East Coast rarities such as moose and ruffed grouse are common here. People are a little less so. The federal Essential Air Service subsidizes the rare flights into the hubs in this area. A few people here even run dogs.

The landscape isn’t the only thing that’s reminiscent of Alaska. People like Moore could’ve been lifted straight from the Last Frontier too. Moore was a lifelong Republican county legislator with a cantankerous disposition in the mold of Ted Stevens or Don Young. Like those two, Moore was unabashedly pro-development, pro-logging, and pro-mining—even though large chunks of the land had been protected from development directly through the state constitution for half a century.

Moore was constantly locking horns with environmental groups that he felt were unfairly limiting the use of public lands for the people living in the remote communities nearest them. He worked to keep timberlands in private hands, and fought to keep snowmachining corridors open through designated wilderness areas. I launched my career in journalism in these small towns, covering many of these issues that Moore cared so deeply about.

I keep thinking of Mr. Moore, who passed away last summer at 81, as I’ve followed the story that’s unfolded in the special election in his congressional district. In case you haven’t followed it, here’s the abridged version.

After President Barack Obama appointed John McHugh, a moderate Republican congressman from the North Country to the post of Army Secretary, the Republican chairs of the counties in New York’s 23rd district got together and looked for a candidate for a special election to be held to fill the seat. They tapped Dede Scozzafava, a Republican state assemblywoman with deep ties to the district. Scozzafava seemed to be a good fit—a moderate Republican in a district that was moderately Republican (NY23 sent Rs to Washington since the 19th century, but it also swung for Obama a year ago). Then came Doug Hoffman, an ideologue from outside the district, propelled by money from teabaggers and political opportunists—including our own former governor, Sarah Palin—who wanted to score points against the president and needed a federal race to do it in. Hoffman reneged on a promise not to run, and soon had national figures like Palin raising money for him or traipsing the North Country, telling residents there that the election was about the future of the nation, not their “parochial” local issues.

I wonder what Lloyd Moore would’ve made of all this. He was, as far as I can recall, a more conservative Republican than Scozzafava. On the other hand, like Stevens and Young, he was more of a pragmatist than an ideologue.

But more than that, I can’t help thinking that Moore would’ve resented the outside intrusion like hell. This was a man who, after all, couldn’t be bothered with talk of states’ rights because he was too busy arguing passionately on behalf of towns’ rights. His political foes were as likely to include politicians from the metropolises of Ogdensburg and Massena as they were Albany.

So I wonder what he would’ve thought of when the district was beset by carpetbaggers from Texas, or a carpetbagger from Alaska. I imagine he would’ve felt something like the Bartlett Democrats might if Eliot Spitzer suddenly showed up at a rally on the park strip ranting about how Hollis French, not Ethan Berkowitz is the real Democrat in the race for governor, and anyway, the election is too important to be left up to Alaskans.

Palin seems to be slowly shedding her Alaska image, as she cautiously remakes herself for the national stage, and maybe we should just let her quietly do so. But it wasn’t too long ago that she was using our state as window-dressing for her national aspirations. Good small town people, like the folks back home in Alaska, her message went, are at the heart of America. We should be paying attention to their concerns.

But either that only applies to the people of Wasilla, not the small town folk from Gouverneur, or movement conservatives like Palin decided that self-determination is a value that’s expendable when the opportunity to score political points presents itself. Neither of those sounds very Alaskan to me; this is a state, after all, where we have some of the loosest gun laws and some of the loosest pot laws. A state where we’re generally pretty tolerant of our neighbors, and expect to be tolerated in return.

In either case, the voters of the 23rd rejected it. Rather than go along with a candidate pushed by outsiders, they elected a Democrat.

I’ll let other pundits decide how big a blow this is—or isn’t—to Palin and her national aspirations, to the teabag wing of the Republican Party. I’m still just reeling from the shock of having exported our very own carpetbagger.

krestia.degeorge@anchoragepress.com