Jonah Goldberg

SKAGWAY, Alaska - What's the matter with Alaska?

That's the question John McCain should be asking.

Next week marks the 102nd anniversary of newspaperman William Allen White's famous editorial "What's the Matter with Kansas," in which he flayed Kansans for their populist foolishness. Tongue firmly in cheek, he editorialized, "Whoop it up for the ragged trousers; put the lazy, greasy fizzle who can't pay his debts on the altar, and bow down and worship him. Let the state ideal be high. What we need is not the respect of our fellow men, but the chance to get something for nothing."

The spirit of something for nothing suffuses the 49th state. The U.S. government bought it for next to nothing - a mere two cents an acre. And ever since the territory became a state, Alaska's politicians have been trying to up the price through the back door.

Ted Stevens, the recently indicted senior senator from the Last Frontier, has been shipping anything not nailed down in Washington back home for years. Citizens Against Government Waste calculates that between 1995 and 2008, Stevens alone brought home some $3.4 billion in pork barrel projects.

Stevens has a worthwhile protégé in Don Young, famed champion of the Bridge to Nowhere. Talk to Alaskans and they'll explain that the difference between Ted Stevens and Don Young is that Young is a dimwitted, corrupt, belligerent, bullying, vindictive taxpayer goody-grabber; Stevens isn't dimwitted.

For the record, I have been to Alaska more than a half-dozen times in the last decade (currently I'm on Hillsdale College's Alaska Cruise), including to the northern coast, where I donated several quarts of my blood to the mosquito population while writing about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. My wife, a onetime staffer to former Alaska senator and governor Frank Murkowski, is from Fairbanks, and we visit her family pretty regularly.

One of the most striking things about Alaska is its cognitive dissonance. On one hand, Alaskans are understandably proud of their rugged individualism. But, politically speaking, their proud libertarianism is as authentic as a Bavarian beer hall at Florida's Epcot Center.

Alaskans say the pork pipeline is necessary because this wild state is wildly underdeveloped. Alaska desperately needs to catch up with states where paved roads are taken for granted. And so they're grateful to Stevens, who kept the state afloat with earmarks and kept military bases here.

Jonah Goldberg
