Largely without notice during the banking dust up, the trial of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens is gearing up in Washington. Jury selection is beginning this week.
Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) — U.S. Senator Ted Stevens’s bid for a seventh term may be decided by 12 people he has never met in a courthouse thousands of miles away from his home state of Alaska.
Jury selection in the Stevens trial gets under way tomorrow in Washington after the prospective jurors complete questionnaires. The trial could last a month or more, concluding just days before U.S. election on Nov. 4.
The longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history, Stevens was indicted in July for failing to report gifts from an Alaska oil-services company. He demanded speedy justice in an effort to clear his name.
Less shocking than the trial itself are the poll numbers reported in the article. In the midst of the Alaska Pork King’s (shown above posing with the 49th state’s Pork Queen) trial, he has not only managed to secure his party’s nomination for Senate yet again, but has erased a previous 13% deficit and has drawn even in the polls with Democratic challenger, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich. In yet another demonstration of how all politics is local (or at least State level), we find political actors retaining their popularity at home even as they are branded as scoundrels in the national press. (Think “Dollar” Bill Jefferson from the left side of the aisle for a comparison, though recent polls indicate that his own constituents may be tiring of him.)
Should this jury return a guilty verdict in late October, will that be enough to turn Alaskan voters off from one of the hungriest gobblers at the Federal Feed Bag, or will they send him back to extend his record as the longest-serving GOP Senator? Yet another question is whether or not this will have any fallout for the presidential race. Sarah Palin’s ties to Stevens’ pork parade run right up until Feb. of this year, when she submitted a 70 page request to Stevens’ office for hundreds of millions in earmarks. Palin faces her own investigation, with results scheduled to come out prior to Election Day, so the two actions will doubtless garner a lot of attention just as voters prepare to go to the polls.