Matthew Scully honed his writing skills at ASU before writing speeches for Sarah Palin. (Courtesy MATTHEWSCULLY.COM)

The speechwriter for vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin found his moral center in Arizona, but did he lose it on the campaign trail?

Matthew Scully is a pensive, 49-year-old Christian vegetarian who is Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s speechwriter. He is an animal rights activist and hunting foe who now labors to get a moose-eating huntress elected as vice president of the United States of America.

Scully’s considerable writing skills were honed in Tempe in the mid 1980s, when he attended Arizona State University and joined a small group of conservative students who took over the student newspaper.

The controversial commandeering of the State Press coincided with Ronald Reagan’s courtship of evangelicals, the formation of the Christian Right and a well-organized effort by conservative leaders to recruit young college Republicans to dominate student media.

“They were kind of like Fox News ahead of their time,” recalls Mary Lou Fulton, vice-president for audience development for the Bakersfield Californian. As a young ASU journalism student, Fulton wrote for the Scully-era State Press for one semester. She and a few other students subsequently launched a “fair-minded” alternative campus newspaper that ultimately failed because of low advertising revenues. 

Most of the young neo-con State Press columnists, like Jay Heiler and Len Munsil, were average writers who penned conservative talking points, graduated and became successful activists and politicos.

But Matthew Scully was different from his peers. Scully was in his mid-twenties when he wrote for the State Press, but his columns were scholarly, moralistic and elitist. You get the feeling, after reading his columns on microfilm, that the kid lived a monkish existence, sequestering himself in his bedroom on weekends to read The Confessions of St. Augustine.