Baked.(The Talk of the Town)(Sarah Palin and Ted Stevens)

Last Tuesday morning--a week before Election Day--John McCain called on Senator Ted Stevens, of Alaska, the longest-serving Republican in Congress, to step down. The day before, a jury in Washington, D.C., had found Stevens guilty on seven counts of lying on his financial-disclosure forms in order to conceal gifts that he had received from oil-industry executives: a sled dog, a gas barbecue grill, an electronic massage chair, the addition of a new story to his house--in all, more than a quarter million dollars' worth of booty. Stevens, who is eighty-four, was seeking a seventh term in the Senate, and now, after a five-week trial that had kept him in Washington throughout the campaign season, he was a convicted felon. For McCain, who had never much liked him, denouncing and renouncing Stevens was an obvious political move.

But McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, was more circumspect. She greeted Stevens's conviction with a statement in which she proclaimed herself a fighter against corruption but avoided taking a stand on the case. She said only, "I'm confident Senator Stevens will do what is right for the people of Alaska." Pressed to clarify what that right thing would be, Palin eventually took a line more consistent with McCain's, saying, "The time has come for him to step aside." But she was careful not to hurry him out the door. "Even if elected on Tuesday," she went on, "Senator Stevens should step aside to allow a special election to give Alaskans a real choice of who will serve them in Congress."

In late summer, when Stevens was facing trial, and Palin had not yet been tapped by McCain, there was speculation in Alaska that she might maneuver to replace Stevens on the senatorial ballot. Now, in the last week of the campaign, with a Barack Obama victory looking increasingly likely, Alaskan politicos parsed her second statement on Stevens. "If she returns to Alaska, Palin could pursue appointing herself," Tony Hopfinger, an editor of the blog AlaskaDispatch, wrote. "Another scenario would be Palin filling Stevens' post with a Republican seat-warmer, then running for senator in the special election." Dermot Cole, a columnist for the pro-Stevens Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, said, "I think that was a carefully planned statement, and it differed from ...