Go Here to read this excellent overview of Palins Executive achievements.
This comprehensive blog post is really a must read for all those who would like to understand Palins Leadership style.

This was my favorite part of the report:
Putting Her Own Stamp On State Government
As Fred Barnes noted last year:

Political analysts in Alaska refer to the “body count” of Palin’s rivals. “The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah,” says pollster Dave Dittman, who worked for her gubernatorial campaign. It includes Ruedrich, Renkes, Murkowski, gubernatorial contenders John Binkley and Andrew Halcro, the three big oil companies in Alaska, and a section of the Daily News called “Voice of the Times,” which was highly critical of Palin and is now defunct.

Palin sent the message from the very beginning who was in charge:

Days after she was sworn in as governor, Sarah Palin began to clean house at the department of natural resources, firing and demoting several top officials and eventually appointing a new director at the agency that oversees the energy companies that provide the state with 85% of its revenue.

The shake-up was an early sign that this newly elected Republican governor was not like any of her predecessors — she was determined not to cave in to the energy industry, the state’s lifeblood.

More examples? Her firing of an aide who had a messy affair and covered it up; her sacking of the entire state Creamery Board in a dispute over $600,000 in state funding.
Palin’s been unafraid to make waves, removing people who stood in the way of her policies and working to change the ethical climate.
One of Palin’s major priorities in her 2006 campaign was ethics reform, and in July 2007 she signed a new ethics bill that took a number of steps forward in requiring disclosures and limiting sources of compensation for public officials. The new law had bipartisan support behind the new Governor’s leadership, including a State Senator who is now a prominent Obama supporter:

State Sen. Hollis French, D-Anchorage, said the law closes several loopholes and includes a ban on outside compensation for official acts. It also bans legislators from accepting campaign contributions as bribes.

“It’s my further hope that by signing this bill we will close a shameful chapter in Alaska’s history,” French said during the signing of the bill at the Alaska Public Offices Commission in Anchorage.

Now, the ethics reform bill, under the circumstances, is more an example of bipartisan leadership than of courage or independence, as it did not exactly incite a groundswell of opposition, and some people even wanted it to go further. But Palin has also shown her willingness to put pressure on, or cut ties entirely with, powerful people in her own party as she seeks to remake the Alaska GOP into a cleaner organization.
For example, Palin has injected herself into the state’s Congressional races. She cut ads for her Lieutenant Governor, Sean Parnell, in his primary challenge to Don Young, a race that was so close it took weeks to resolve it despite Young’s status as a hugely entrenched incumbent. As Matt Moon explains, Palin’s backing was one of the reasons why Parnell entered the race with a huge advantage, and his loss was largely the result of being out-campaigned by Young, which doesn’t change the fact that Palin made a significant effort to throw her personal prestige behind removing one of the icons of corruption in her own state party. We’ll get in Part II to how this stacks up to Obama, but of course the short answer is that he never tried anything remotely comparable.
Palin’s often been cold-blooded about cutting off former friends and allies who had ethical troubles, as even a hostile Salon profile notes:

Alaska state Rep. Victor Kohring, another key Palin supporter during her political rise in Mat-Su Valley, found this out after he became a victim of the FBI’s oil corruption sting operation. Kohring, who used to accompany Palin on her campaign jaunts, angrily points out that he was abandoned by his fellow Christian conservative before he even went to trial. The former Alaska legislator, who now resides in the Taft minimum security prison outside Bakersfield, Calif., communicated his views of Palin through his friend, Fred James. Kohring, said James, feels “betrayed” by Palin.

I’ve discussed above some of her specific breaks with Ted Stevens; for another example, in 2007 she again demanded the resignation of his son Ben from his role as Alaska’s representative on the Republican National Committee. Granted, despite their many battles, Palin hasn’t entirely cut ties with Stevens, who after all remains the state’s senior senator:

Palin, an anti-corruption crusader in Alaska, had called on Stevens to be open about the issues behind the investigation. But she also held a joint news conference with him in July, before he was indicted, to make clear she had not abandoned him politically.

Stevens had been helpful to Palin during her run for governor, swooping in with a last moment endorsement. And the two filmed a campaign commercial together to highlight Stevens’s endorsement of Palin during the 2006 race.

At last check, Palin was pointedly declining to either support or oppose Stevens or Don Young in the general election: “Ted Stevens trial started a couple days ago. We’ll see where that goes.” Not precisely a hard line, but after Palin’s multiple feuds with Stevens and her backing of the primary challenge against Young, she’s already gone about as far as you can expect any Governor to go to make clear to the voting public her disapproval of the methods of the leaders of her own party’s Congressional delegation in her own state.
All of these moves, of course, have made her enemies. This post is long enough already without delving into the whole Tasergate/Troopergate investigation, but to focus on the relevant point for these purposes, the investigation was touched off when Palin sacked Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan, who broke openly with Palin over her efforts to cut his agency’s budget:
* 12/9/07: Monegan holds a press conference with Hollis French to push his own budget plan.
* 1/29/08: Palin’s staffers have to rework their procedures to keep Monegan from bypassing normal channels for budget requests.
* February 2008: Monegan publicly releases a letter he wrote to Palin supporting a project she vetoed.
* June 26, 2008: Monegan bypassed the governor’s office entirely and contacted Alaska’s Congressional delegation to gain funding for a project.
This is all of a piece with Palin’s willingness to butt heads to get control of the budget, to the advantage of the taxpayer. Hollis French, the Democratic State Senator and prominent Obama supporter, is effectively controlling the investigation, which was designed to release its report five days before the election and which would be essentially guaranteed to do zero political damage to Palin if it was released at any other time (you can tell this by comparing how much time Palin’s critics spend discussing the investigation’s procedures as opposed to its underlying facts). Anyone remotely familiar with the history of political reform can tell you that this sort of vendetta is exactly the risk you run when you try to bring about genuine change in the public sector, and why so many politicians shy away from necessary confrontations that create enemies of people like Monegan. The investigation is just another badge of Palin’s fearlessness.
As we look back over the last four years in national politics, this much is certain: we needed more people like Sarah Palin in Washington.
Amen brother! Sarah Palin is just the style of politician we need in Washington.
Go Sarah Go!
Jenny Hatch