“He said that he’s trying to restore the credibility or the trust in the board. I don’t think this is how you do it, because it makes it look like now he’s going to put in everybody of his liking, which is not how you restore trust. So, yeah, I don’t like that,” Murkowski told the Times about Kennedy.
To be fair, her choice of words also points to one of the best things about Murkowski—she tries to be the voice of calm in the storm. She mentions in the interview how when she returned to the Senate after beating Joe Miller in 2010 with a write-in campaign, there was a “newfound unleashed Lisa.”
I believe that only in the sense that the Republican attacks on her character that year awakened her to the idea that some friends aren’t worth keeping.
The Times interview is part of the publicity campaign for her new memoir, written with Charles Wohlforth, “Far From Home.” It’s a sign of her character that she has Wohlforth’s name on the cover, her ghost writer. A lot of people in her position would claim that they did the whole thing themselves.
She needed a ghost writer because Murkowski chooses words the way some people choose wedding rings. Plus, every page would otherwise include the words concern, concerning and very concerned.
While her support for tax cuts for billionaires strikes me as unconscionable, I respect her because she approaches her job with discipline, empathy and courage, even when her approach leads her to staking out a dumb political position.
I wrote some harsh things about her early in the history of this blog because of her muted response to Donald Trump’s excesses. In time, however, she made the difficult choice to act according to her conscience.
She has distinguished herself by standing up to the most serious threat to the future of our nation. And for that she has been disowned by the right-wing zealots who control the Alaska Republican Party.
In an extended rant about Murkowski during an Anchorage campaign appearance in 2022, Trump said, “And that piece of (mouthing a word he wouldn’t say out loud) voted to impeach me.”
The country would be much better off if the Senate majority included more senators like Murkowski who could muster the courage to think and speak for themselves.
With the possible exception of Sen. Susan Collins, the rest of the Republican senators, including Sen. Dan. Sullivan, have proven themselves to be Trump lackeys.
I think the opening paragraph by Garcia-Navarro comes as close to accurately capturing Murkowski as anything that has been written about her since she took the measure of Trump.
“In many ways, Senator Lisa Murkowski is the last of a dying breed of politician,” Garcia-Navarro writes. “She eschews bombast, preferring to speak softly and with deliberation. In our hyperpartisan times, she is a proud Republican but has sided with Democrats on several crucial votes, notably to save the Affordable Care Act in 2017 and, more recently, to oppose the confirmation of Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense. She acknowledges she has never voted for President Trump but has also worked with him to expand oil and gas drilling in her native Alaska. In the closely divided Senate, she is courted by both sides of the aisle, which has made her powerful and also an object of hope and suspicion.”
This may also be the first time that her name has ever appeared so close to the word “bombast.”
Murkowski is the opposite of Trump, who speaks without thinking. Murkowski thinks and sometimes speaks.
When her father appointed her to the Senate more than 22 years ago, she faced an enormous challenge in overcoming the handicap that she had inherited the job.
I was not the only one who thought she could not last, but she proved all of us skeptics wrong. She established herself as a statewide leader and a hard worker who could deal with people who had conflicting points of view. Only Sen. Ted Stevens has been a more influential Alaska senator.
One thing I’ll never forget is that after Stevens was convicted in the Veco corruption case in 2008—one week before the election—it was Lisa Murkowski who traveled with him on a campaign trip, providing him emotional support at a time when Stevens looked and sounded like a broken man.
It wasn’t about politics. It was personal. Stevens was her friend and she wasn’t going to abandon him.
What she told Garcia-Navarro about her sadness over what we have lost in national politics rings true.
“Maybe it’s because I’ve been here in Washington for over two decades now. And I’ve been through multiple presidents, some I really liked and some that I didn’t really like that much. There were policy things that we would disagree on or we would really celebrate, but with a few failures, character, the integrity of the individual was not something that we would call into question. There was a time when we just had higher expectations of integrity and tolerance and manners. I don’t know. I try not to sound like everybody’s mom, but it bothers me.”
Asked if she thinks Trump is following the authoritarian playbook, Murkowski paused for a long moment, the reporter said. She is not the kind of person who pauses for effect, Bill Clinton style, but one who pauses because she takes time to weigh her words.
“I don’t know how I want to respond to that, because I’ve said in my book that I didn’t think that Donald Trump was able to divine the direction that he did in his first administration. Now having had the benefit of four years to be thinking about what he wanted to do, how he wanted to do it, working with those who wanted to see that done, do I think that this is more clearly planned and orchestrated? Absolutely.”
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
