The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

As Mauer recounts: “She and her husband began following the money, from halfway house contracts that [Bill] Weimar held with the state Corrections Department to political contributions by [Bill] Allen, whose company, Veco, would have built the prison.”

Weimar and Allen, of course, eventually pleaded guilty to corruption, once a small federal probe into the private prison issue turned into a large federal probe into corruption surrounding oil tax legislation. That investigation, as everyone knows, eventually snared a handful of powerful Alaskans, ranging from Vic Kohring to Ted Stevens.

In the process, it changed the face of Alaska politics.

Without the corruption probe, Democrats might not have won enough seats to wield any power in the legislature, leading to one-party rule. Without the probe, Sarah Palin might not have found a strong enough anti-corruption backlash into which she could successfully tap during her Republican primary challenge to Frank Murkowski three years ago. Without the probe Ted Stevens might still be stalking the halls of the Senate in his Hulk tie, and national Democrats, without a filibuster-proof majority in the upper house, might be talking about something less controversial than the nation’s broken health care system.

Without Dee Hubbard, there might not have been a corruption probe.

Okay, maybe that last one is a stretch. Something as big as the corruption investigation we’ve seen here in the last several years is generally too large to rest on the shoulders of just one individual. And if Hubbard hadn’t pursued her curiosity and sense of civic outrage, somebody else—eventually, inevitably—would have.

But as Senator Mark Begich told Mauer, Hubbard wasn’t the type to wait for somebody else: “When she thought something was unjust, she was not going to sit around and wait for someone to do something—she felt she was the someone.”

This is an old story in politics. A woman I once interviewed for a political profile got started because she was upset by a poorly planned development in her neighborhood. She didn’t stop the development, but she didn’t stop being involved either. Fast-forward a few decades and the same woman was about to take the reins of one of the most powerful committees in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But with Hubbard this story comes with a twist. She may’ve followed her civic instincts, but she didn’t follow them into a public office, or even into the limelight. She was content to work hard in the public’s interest, but to stay out of the public’s eye. Contrast that kind of humility with the brazen self-promotion of some who filed fistfuls of ethics complaints against then-Governor Sarah Palin, then rushed to congratulate themselves for having done so on blogs and in other sympathetic outlets.

Such pervasive selflessness—giving one’s time and effort for the greater good while spurning all compensation, whether in the form of pay or notoriety, except the satisfaction of knowing you did the right thing—seems valuable and rare.

Maybe it’s just me, but this seems like a season of uncommon ambition in Alaska, especially when it comes to politics.

Perhaps that’s because of the power vacuum created by the power structures the federal corruption investigation dismantled. Perhaps it’s that we’ve become accustomed to the national media spotlight that’s been trained on Alaska in the past 12 months, following Sarah Palin’s rise and fall from political prominence. Perhaps it’s always there bubbling under the surface, emerging when conditions are right.

There’s nothing wrong with ambition, of course, and many of our most ambitious would-be leaders have impressive resumes and thoughtful policies. We’ll be spending a lot of time soon covering a gubernatorial race and a race for the state’s lone seat in the House of Representatives. And that’s as it should be.

But this is a good moment to take a break from that, to honor Hubbard—and those like her who discharge their civic duties beyond glow of the spotlights cast on the public stage.

Hubbard died on Saturday of kidney and liver failure at the age of 62.

She’ll probably go down as little more than a proverbial footnote in Alaska history. But the events she helped set in motion—that cataclysmic shift in who holds power in Alaska and how—and their aftermath, will likely prove to be a central part of this young state’s history for decades to come.

Let’s hope that the next Dee Hubbard is already out there, anonymously tracking the footprints left by those in power.
http://www.anchoragepress.com/articles/2009/09/02/news/doc4a9effdbb708d338753963.txt