Alaska’s happy warrior

Then, just as it seems Sullivan is about to reach the anti-Obama crescendo so many Republicans have adopted in this election cycle, he does the unthinkable: He says that Alaska is “turning a corner” and moving in the right direction.

He talks about Ketchikan, at the southernmost tip of Alaska, where “jobs are cranking.” Nikiski, on the Kenai Peninsula, is “booming!”

“Things are happening,” Sullivan said Wednesday to a room of seniors at the Chester Park Cooperative in Anchorage.

“Imagine the opportunity we would have in Alaska and the country if we had a federal government that was actually a partner in opportunity, a partner in progress, a partner in prosperity, not an obstacle,” Sullivan continued. “I think the sky would be the limit.”

Sullivan is one of a growing number of Republican candidates who are no longer taking a fire-and-brimstone tack on the campaign trail, but instead embracing a sunnier, more uplifting approach to politicking.

Perhaps the best example of the trend this year is Rep. Cory Gardner, the Colorado Republican challenging Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, whom columnist George Will described recently as a “human sunbeam.”

Sullivan is not as energetically cheery as Gardner, nor does he label himself a new kind of Republican, as Gardner does. Sullivan’s is an endearingly dopey demeanor, marked always by a relaxed smile. And in Alaska, a deeply independent state where voters put less of a premium on political parties, Sullivan’s toned-down partisan message is a given.

A former Alaska attorney general and Department of Natural Resources commissioner, Sullivan is waging his first campaign ever in a must-win state for Republicans during one of the most important election cycles for the GOP.

And he looks to be in a strong position. Every public poll since August has shown Sullivan leading Begich, although polling in Alaska is notoriously volatile since many Alaskans are difficult to reach in the state’s far-flung rural areas or aren’t interested in taking calls from pollsters. In 2010, all but one public poll going into Election Day showed Republican Joe Miller beating Lisa Murkowski, who ran a write-in campaign. Murkowski won by 4 points.

Democrats and Begich think they have identified a chink in Sullivan’s armor with questions over the length of his residency in Alaska.

Sullivan left Alaska in 2002 for a White House fellowship before he was called to serve overseas with the Marines. He planned to return to Alaska afterward, but received a call from the State Department asking him to sign on as an assistant secretary to Condoleezza Rice. Sullivan took the job.

Sullivan continued to vote absentee in Alaska while he lived in an idyllic corner-lot Craftsman home in Bethesda, Md. He received a tax credit for naming the property as his primary residence — which Democrats cited as proof that Sullivan has not been forthcoming about his length of residence in Alaska.

“With Alaskans it’s not a big issue,” Sullivan said during an interview Wednesday with the Washington Examiner. “With my opponent it’s been a big issue. … The number of times I get asked about it from voters is negligible.”

Just a few hours later, during a Rotary Club meeting in Anchorage where Sullivan spoke, an Alaska voter, Al Bramstedt, asked Sullivan about it, referencing a Democratic ad that accused Sullivan of lying about his residency.

“So, what about that?” Bramstedt posed.

“Well, look, I didn’t lie,” Sullivan said. At first, Sullivan explained, he and his family had rented a home, but his wife faced “very serious health issues” after mold was discovered in the house. They moved out and opted to buy the home in Bethesda.

“The first time we heard about this tax thing was in one of the Begich attack ads,” Sullivan said. He afterward called his accountant to ask about the tax credit. “It was an automatic tax you got for living in Montgomery County, Maryland. You didn’t apply for anything. Automatic.”

But Begich has continued to poke Sullivan on the issue, implicitly touting Begich’s own native-son status.

“The issue on residency is not about how long you’ve been here,” Begich told the Examiner. Instead, he said, “It’s a trust issue, it’s a character issue.”

In the official election pamphlet distributed by the state of Alaska, Begich pointed out, Sullivan lists his residency as 17 years, but then names only 10 years he has physically lived in Alaska.

“[Alaskans] will tell you exactly what year they came here and what circumstances brought them here,” Begich said. “That is a badge that every Alaskan wears, unless you were born here.”

Sullivan was not born in Alaska but in Ohio, where his family owns the multibillion-dollar company RPM International, a paint and sealant manufacturer started by Sullivan’s grandfather and grown by Sullivan’s father. His immediate family is politically diverse: One of Sullivan’s five siblings, Kathleen, is a longtime anti-nuclear activist.

According to one of Sullivan’s first cousins, Tom Kelly, a Cleveland radio host and a Democrat, Sullivan was not particularly interested in politics growing up, and he was not overtly Republican.

“If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know,” Kelly said. “Dan’s not a rigid Republican. He can work with anybody.”

Sullivan said he was not interested in staying in Ohio to work for the family business, which one of his brothers now helms.

“I’m someone who’s kind of been a guy who’s believed in blazing his own trail,” Sullivan said. “And that’s what I’ve done.”

Instead, Sullivan enrolled in Harvard University as an undergraduate, with the intention of completing pre-med coursework and later attending medical school. When Sullivan encountered a “killer” organic chemistry class during his sophomore year, however, he changed course.

After he graduated from Harvard, Sullivan studied law at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where one of his best friends was Mike McFadden, the Republican Senate candidate in Minnesota challenging Sen. Al Franken.

In Washington, Sullivan first met Julie Fate, now Julie Fate Sullivan, who was at the time an aide to then-Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska.

Julie hails from an Alaskan family of the highest pedigree, with roots in the state stretching back generations. Her mother, Mary Jane Fate, an Athabaskan native, served as the first chairwoman of the Alaska Federation of Natives. Her father, Hugh Fate, was a state representative.

As Sullivan has faced attacks over his residency and his Alaskan roots, his wife and her family have been invaluable legitimizing forces. On the campaign trail, the couple often appear as one unit, and they often talk about the campaign in the first-person plural.

At Pioneer Home, a senior living facility in Anchorage, on Wednesday, they retold a favorite story of Sullivan’s first exposure to Alaska with Julie’s family at a traditional fish camp on the Yukon River.

“I think my dad, the first thing he did was hand Dan a shovel,” Julie said. “Put him to work digging our outhouse.”

Kelly, Sullivan’s cousin, said Sullivan considered himself an Alaskan from the moment he met Julie.

“I wanted to follow her wherever she wanted to go,” Sullivan said. “She said, ‘Let’s go back to Alaska,’ and I said, ‘Roger that.’ ”

The couple married in Fairbanks 20 years ago. In 1997, when Sullivan finished his active duty in the Marines at Camp Pendleton in California, they drove up the West Coast and returned to Alaska for good.

Democrats hoping to hit Sullivan on his length of residency might have been unnerved watching the Republican primary earlier this year, when Mead Treadwell also attempted that line of attack.

“I’ve got a jar of mayonnaise in my refrigerator that’s been there longer than Dan Sullivan’s been in Alaska,” Treadwell said at the time. The line was buzzy but the attack didn’t stick and Treadwell lost.

“[Sullivan] is a very disciplined, smart candidate, and that’s been his whole campaign,” said Rick Gorka, who advised Treadwell’s campaign in the primary. “He hasn’t made a mistake, hasn’t had the big gaffe, just quietly built the team and volunteers and network and used his family ties in Alaska to get the job done.”

One Alaska Democratic strategist compared Sullivan to Tom Cotton, the Republican candidate for Senate in Arkansas, a military veteran who is also viewed as squeaky clean.

“If you ordered a candidate in a box,” the operative said, “that’s Dan Sullivan.”

But if the polls depict Sullivan as a political powerhouse, slayer of Democratic incumbents, on the campaign trail he can look like a neophyte, unpolished and rough around the edges, learning the ropes as he goes.

Like a candidate for an average-size congressional district, Sullivan carries around a notebook to each of his events.

“I take a lot of notes,” Sullivan told the group of seniors at Pioneer Home, holding up his black notebook for effect.

He still speaks like a Midwesterner: “Holy cow,” he says regularly on the campaign trail, along with the occasional “for goodness sakes.” He earnestly describes himself as an optimist. And he wears combat boots under his khakis, which he shows off to each new crowd of voters to tout his military service.

These stylistic quirks bely Sullivan’s deep political ties and know-how. His family remains close to that of the late Sen. Stevens, at whose funeral Sullivan was a pallbearer. Rice, his former boss at the State Department, endorsed Sullivan in a television ad.

And Sullivan has not stepped gingerly over some political third rails, as many first-time candidates might.

“You’re either a lion, a lamb, or a mule,” said Rob Engstrom, national political director for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has endorsed Sullivan. “There are some people, lambs, that are afraid. Mules just kind of follow. It’s the lions who will actually be prepared to lead on something. Dan falls into the lion category.”

Sullivan has been vocal, for example, about his view that Social Security, the classic political third rail, is in need of reform for future generations.

“I was even told by my team: ‘Hey, don’t talk about this,’ ” Sullivan said. His advisers warned him that Democrats would use his remarks in attack ads. “And guess what? That’s exactly what happened.”

And Sullivan, although supportive of Republicans on most issues, has criticized Republicans and Democrats alike for the country’s $18 trillion deficit.

“To me, that is a bipartisan failure,” Sullivan said.

But that swashbuckling, throw-caution-to-the-wind attitude does not extend to all campaign issues. In an interview with the Examiner, Sullivan stopped short of taking positions on a handful of the most controversial issues in the Alaska Senate race, including whether he would support the controversial Pebble Mine project in Bristol Bay, the site of a major salmon fishery.

The Environmental Protection Agency attempted to restrict mining in the bay before a project has been proposed, which Sullivan says is an unacceptable overreach by the federal government.

“What I’ve said is, we should never trade one resource for another. We have a tremendous resource in Bristol Bay, which is our salmon fishery,” Sullivan said. “And part of the process is to make sure that’s protected. If [the mine] ever did go through permitting, they’d have a very high hurdle to meet. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be allowed to try and make the case.”

Nor would Sullivan, a veteran himself, take a stance on whether reporting and prosecution of sexual assaults in the U.S. military should be separated from the chain of command, as some members of Congress have proposed. Notably, one Republican Senate candidate, Joni Ernst in Iowa, has supported such a change.

“I’d want to hear directly from the military officials who say no, they don’t want it outside the chain of command, and the others who say that would be helpful, and the pros and cons of it,” Sullivan said.

Discussions of policy in Alaska are rarely intuitive from a partisan perspective, because Alaska is anything but normal when viewed in a national scope. Even as Alaskans demand extreme independence from the federal government on regulatory issues, the state is heavily dependent on the federal government for money and jobs.

Sullivan has embraced that uniquely Alaskan paradox, as has Begich.

“I’m a less government, more freedom candidate,” Sullivan told the crowd at the Rotary meeting. “But I do believe there are important areas where the government should be taking care of our most vulnerable in society.”

Sullivan invoked as example his tenure as attorney general, during which he singled out addressing sexual assault and domestic violence, at epidemic levels in Alaska, as his priority.

Begich has pointed to that initiative as a promise unkept by Sullivan, a charge Sullivan has vigorously disputed.

Meanwhile, Sullivan has pointed to a promise made by Begich as a candidate in 2008, that he would work to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling — a plan opposed by environmentalists and many Democrats.

During his time Sen. Stevens had the same goal, and even with a much more amenable Congress and president was unsuccessful at opening the area to oil exploration. That Begich had less time, and a divided Congress, doesn’t matter to Sullivan, however.

“He made a promise,” Sullivan said. “But we’ve gone nowhere on ANWR, as a matter of fact we’ve gone backwards on ANWR.”

With Sullivan as the state’s Department of Natural Resources commissioner, Alaska sued the U.S. Department of the Interior to approve a plan for exploration in the refuge. That case has not yet been decided, and the state asked last month for a summary judgment.

It’s not clear how much more than that Sullivan could accomplish on the issue at the federal level. Were Sullivan to win, and were Republicans to control both the House and Senate, President Obama would likely still oppose drilling in the refuge. It’s not clear what would change, if anything, or how.

But Sullivan is ever an optimist.

“With a Republican-controlled Senate, I think we have a much better chance of getting it done than we do if Harry Reid is Senate majority leader. There’s no chance,” Sullivan said. “Would Obama veto something like that? Who knows? He can’t veto everything.”