What Ayelet Shaked can learn from Sarah Palin

By Seth Lipsky, HAARETZ

It’s hard to imagine that Habayit Hayehudi’s Ayelet Shaked needs my help in running the Justice Ministry, but she could do worse than study one of the women to whom she’s being compared: Sarah Palin.

The Alert Alaskan, as I like to call the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee and former Alaska governor, has long struck me as way more substantive than her detractors give her credit for. The message for Shaked is that Palin’s power has almost nothing to do with gender or glamor. What Palin is about is substance. A few of the key points:

Palin is pro-labor

This is one of my favorite Palin features. Almost the first things U.S. Senator John McCain — and Palin herself — pointed out when Palin first stepped onto the national stage was that she is a union member. Her husband, Todd Palin, is a member of the United Steelworkers Union, and she herself holds a union card. She’s sensitive on the point, too; when I wrote that she held her union card via her husband, she promptly relayed word that on her own account she was as a sister of the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which she joined when she worked for the local phone company.

It seems that Palin can stand apart. There is no other member of the Republican Party who shares Palin’s concern for the collapse of organized labor. She has insisted that the Democrats are hurting labor and that the natural ally of working Americans is the Republican Party. She drove labor leader Richard Trumka fairly to distraction with her call, “Union brothers and sisters, join our commonsense cause.”

Palin gets monetary policy and the crisis over the dollar

She was the first politician in America, in either party, to challenge the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, over the easy money strategy known as quantitative easing. She did that in 2010 when U.S. President Barack Obama was preparing to go to the G-20 Summit in Seoul and Bernanke was preparing a second round of monetary easing.

Things would have been better, I suggested at the time, had America sent Palin to South Korea. Obama certainly got nowhere at the Seoul summit, where he pushed left-wing bromides and fiat money. This was acknowledged even by the liberal press. The New York Times headline on his return from the summit was “Obama’s Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage.” Palin grasped that it was an error for America to pursue growth by devaluing the dollar.

Palin’s own deficit strategy has been the development of domestic energy, of which she was an early champion. Fracking and other new techniques have revolutionized America’s energy outlook and put us on the path of independence from Arab oil. Palin’s savvy on the issue came from being governor of a major oil- and gas-producing state, which also made her a canny custodian of the environment.

Palin fought corruption and the old boy network

She did this from her base at the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which she eventually chaired. She also chaired its ethics commission and challenged a number of figures in Alaska politics and government, forcing resignations over ethics issues, including some within the Republican Party.

It’s not my purpose here to suggest that Israel’s government is corrupt, but a campaign for honest government certainly worked wonders for Palin – and what better office from which to keep an eye on this issue than the Justice Ministry?

Palin supports the settlements

The former Alaska governor is one of the most radically pro-Israel leaders of the GOP. She turns out to be the only Republican figure to argue that “the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon,” as she put it in an interview with Barbara Walters in 2009, “because that population of Israel is, is going to grow.” Palin told Walters that she was anticipating future immigration to Israel, saying, “I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”

Given that Shaked’s Habayit Hayehudi party is seeking to increase construction of settlements in the West Bank, the message here is that Palin and Shaked could be natural friends.

It’s true that Palin quit the governorship shortly after losing her run for vice president. Yet even without an office, she’s had an outsize impact on the national scene.

Palin stuck to her guns on labor, she took a stand such sophisticated of issues as monetary policy, and she made a point of nursing GOP talent, winning friends in nearly the whole field that is now running for the Republican nomination. Ayelet Shaked, take note.

Seth Lipsky, the founding editor of The Forward and a former foreign editor of The Wall Street Journal, is editor of The New York Sun.