From Saturday's Globe and Mail
August 29, 2008 at 11:30 PM EDT
Denver — She is a former beauty queen with a tough-as-nails reputation on government ethics and a track record of standing up to her own party. She is an evangelical Christian and a National Rifle Association member, and returned to her job as Governor of Alaska just days after giving birth to her fifth child. Her elder son will deploy to Iraq next month; her younger was born in April with Down syndrome.
And yesterday, 44-year-old Sarah Palin, an avid hunter with a taste for moose burgers, became the Republican Party's vice-presidential nominee.
“Sarah Palin for her entire political career has been underestimated,” said Paulette Simpson of the Alaska Federation of Republican Women. “She's tough, she's tenacious. I believe that she does have what it takes to get out there.”
If the presidential campaign is a competition of compelling storylines, Ms. Palin's tale can go head-to-head with them all.
Her story holds its own against that of John McCain, a Vietnam prisoner of war; Barack Obama, the biracial son of a single mother; and Joe Biden, a politician who commuted to Washington for decades so he could raise his three children after his wife and a daughter died in an automobile accident.
Because Ms. Palin is only the second female vice-presidential candidate in U.S. history, her nomination is compelling in its own right, and voters are likely to be drawn to her biography and the character it suggests.
She was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, on Feb. 11, 1964, and her parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, moved to Alaska to teach when she was just a baby. Mr. Heath was a science teacher and athletic coach, and would wake his daughter before dawn to go moose hunting.
He said yesterday that he was speechless when he heard about the announcement. The couple had got the call from Ms. Palin's husband, Todd, as they were driving to a remote camp in Alaska to hunt caribou. “I'd rather go moose hunting than be involved with politics,” Mr. Heath said.
In her youth, Ms. Palin played basketball, earning the nickname Barracuda for her aggressive style of play, and friends say that nickname still fits.
“The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah,” pollster Dave Dittman, who worked for her gubernatorial campaign, told the conservative Weekly Standard magazine in 2007.
In 1984, she was the runner-up in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant, having won a local qualifier in which she had played the flute and earned the title of Miss Congeniality.
“I remember asking Sarah why she would enter a beauty pageant when that seemed so prissy to the rest of us,” said her brother, Chuck Heath Jr. “She told me matter-of-factly, ‘It's going to help pay my way through college.'”
Her reputation as a beauty still stands. Bumper stickers and blogs have referred to Alaska and Ms. Palin as “Coldest state, hottest governor.”
But the self-proclaimed “hockey mom” had some youthful indiscretions. She has said she smoked marijuana but didn't enjoy it and doesn't smoke now. “I can't claim a Bill Clinton and say that I never inhaled,” she told the Anchorage Daily News in 2006. At the time, marijuana was legal under Alaska's liberal drug laws.
At the University of Idaho, she studied journalism and politics. She worked briefly as a TV sports reporter after moving home to Wasilla, an Anchorage suburb. (She has also been a commercial fisherwoman.) In her high-school yearbook, she stated her professional ambition not as attaining the country's highest political office, but sitting in a broadcast booth with legendary sports journalist Howard Cosell and broadcasting basketball games starring her boyfriend, Todd Palin.
In 1988, she and Mr. Palin eloped, not wanting their parents to have to pay for a wedding. According to a 2006 profile in the Anchorage Daily News, discovering that they needed witnesses for the ceremony, the pair recruited two senior citizens from a home across the street from the county courthouse.
Mr. Palin, a Yupik Inuit, is a blue-collar North Slope oil worker who competes in the Iron Dog, a 3,200-kilometre annual snowmobile race between Wasilla, Nome and Fairbanks. Ms. Palin refers to him as the “first dude.”
“Obviously, we Alaskans, we identified with her,” said Martin Buser, a four-time winner of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. “We see a person with an incredible amount of integrity that happens to like to hunt and fish and subscribe to all the things that make Alaskans tick.”
Typically seen walking the Capitol halls of Juneau in black or red power suits while reading text messages on BlackBerry screens in each hand, Ms. Palin made a recent appearance in fashion magazine Vogue.
“At first they had me in a bunch of furs,” she said of the photo shoot. “Yeah, I have furs on my wall, but I don't wear furs. I had to show them my bunny boots and my North Face clothing.”
Raised in a Protestant family and fiercely anti-abortion, Ms. Palin and her husband have five children: girls Bristol, 17, Willow, 14, and Piper, 7; and boys Track, 19, and Trig, 4 months. The baby was born April 28 after genetic screening showed that he has Down syndrome, a diagnosis that Ms. Palin has acknowledged saddened her at first.
“When we first heard, it was kind of confusing. It was very, very challenging,” she said after his birth. “[But now], it just feels like he fits perfectly. He is supposed to be here with us.”
News of her pregnancy was kept quiet at first while Ms. Palin went about her work as governor, and her water broke while she was attending an energy conference in Texas. She reportedly delivered a 30-minute speech before flying home, where she delivered the baby boy the next morning.
While raising her family, Ms. Palin was hard at work improving her profile.
In 1992 she was elected mayor of Wasilla at age 32, and served two terms before running for lieutenant-governor.
She lost that election, but was appointed in 2003 as ethics commissioner for the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission.
It was in this role that she got her reputation as a tough critic of her own party. She exposed ethical violations by the state's Republican Party Chairman, Randy Ruedrich, an AOGCC commissioner.
In 2005, she co-filed an ethics complaint against Attorney-General Gregg Renkes, whom she found had a financial interest in a company involved in a trade deal that he was helping to craft.
Both men resigned, but Ms. Palin, too, left her post, citing a “lack of ethics” within the state's Republican leadership.
She ran for governor in 2006 on a pledge to bring principles to the party, and became the first woman and the youngest person to hold the state's highest office. To get there, she defeated two former governors in the primary and general elections, including the former Republican senator who had appointed her AOGCC ethics commissioner during his gubernatorial term.
Alaskan Carrie Hollier, a 27-year-old supporter of Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama, said she would feel some wistfulness about not voting for a governor she admires.
“It definitely makes it difficult, because you can't help but love Sarah Palin. She never comes across as full-on Republican.”
Ivan Moore, an Anchorage-based pollster and political consultant who usually works for Democrats, said: “She has an extraordinary talent when it comes to communicating personally with people. It's as simple as that. That obviously propelled her into the governor's mansion in Alaska.”
As governor, Ms. Palin killed a project dubbed the “bridge to nowhere,” which had become a symbol of wasteful spending, and took on the oil industry, leading to a tax increase for oil companies.
Her reputation as an ethics reformer is now in question, however, while she faces an investigation for allegedly trying to arrange the firing of a state trooper involved in a contentious divorce and child-custody battle with her sister.
Ms. Palin opposes same-sex marriage, but complied with an Alaska Supreme Court order to implement same-sex benefits, which the previous administration had refused to do.
In September, her son Track is scheduled to deploy to Iraq, having enlisted in the military on Sept. 11, 2007. Her running mate John McCain's son Jimmy has already served time in the war zone, and Democratic Party vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden's son Beau is expected to deploy in October.
August 29, 2008 at 11:30 PM EDT
Denver — She is a former beauty queen with a tough-as-nails reputation on government ethics and a track record of standing up to her own party. She is an evangelical Christian and a National Rifle Association member, and returned to her job as Governor of Alaska just days after giving birth to her fifth child. Her elder son will deploy to Iraq next month; her younger was born in April with Down syndrome.
And yesterday, 44-year-old Sarah Palin, an avid hunter with a taste for moose burgers, became the Republican Party's vice-presidential nominee.
“Sarah Palin for her entire political career has been underestimated,” said Paulette Simpson of the Alaska Federation of Republican Women. “She's tough, she's tenacious. I believe that she does have what it takes to get out there.”
If the presidential campaign is a competition of compelling storylines, Ms. Palin's tale can go head-to-head with them all.
Her story holds its own against that of John McCain, a Vietnam prisoner of war; Barack Obama, the biracial son of a single mother; and Joe Biden, a politician who commuted to Washington for decades so he could raise his three children after his wife and a daughter died in an automobile accident.
Because Ms. Palin is only the second female vice-presidential candidate in U.S. history, her nomination is compelling in its own right, and voters are likely to be drawn to her biography and the character it suggests.
She was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, on Feb. 11, 1964, and her parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, moved to Alaska to teach when she was just a baby. Mr. Heath was a science teacher and athletic coach, and would wake his daughter before dawn to go moose hunting.
He said yesterday that he was speechless when he heard about the announcement. The couple had got the call from Ms. Palin's husband, Todd, as they were driving to a remote camp in Alaska to hunt caribou. “I'd rather go moose hunting than be involved with politics,” Mr. Heath said.
In her youth, Ms. Palin played basketball, earning the nickname Barracuda for her aggressive style of play, and friends say that nickname still fits.
“The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah,” pollster Dave Dittman, who worked for her gubernatorial campaign, told the conservative Weekly Standard magazine in 2007.
In 1984, she was the runner-up in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant, having won a local qualifier in which she had played the flute and earned the title of Miss Congeniality.
“I remember asking Sarah why she would enter a beauty pageant when that seemed so prissy to the rest of us,” said her brother, Chuck Heath Jr. “She told me matter-of-factly, ‘It's going to help pay my way through college.'”
Her reputation as a beauty still stands. Bumper stickers and blogs have referred to Alaska and Ms. Palin as “Coldest state, hottest governor.”
But the self-proclaimed “hockey mom” had some youthful indiscretions. She has said she smoked marijuana but didn't enjoy it and doesn't smoke now. “I can't claim a Bill Clinton and say that I never inhaled,” she told the Anchorage Daily News in 2006. At the time, marijuana was legal under Alaska's liberal drug laws.
At the University of Idaho, she studied journalism and politics. She worked briefly as a TV sports reporter after moving home to Wasilla, an Anchorage suburb. (She has also been a commercial fisherwoman.) In her high-school yearbook, she stated her professional ambition not as attaining the country's highest political office, but sitting in a broadcast booth with legendary sports journalist Howard Cosell and broadcasting basketball games starring her boyfriend, Todd Palin.
In 1988, she and Mr. Palin eloped, not wanting their parents to have to pay for a wedding. According to a 2006 profile in the Anchorage Daily News, discovering that they needed witnesses for the ceremony, the pair recruited two senior citizens from a home across the street from the county courthouse.
Mr. Palin, a Yupik Inuit, is a blue-collar North Slope oil worker who competes in the Iron Dog, a 3,200-kilometre annual snowmobile race between Wasilla, Nome and Fairbanks. Ms. Palin refers to him as the “first dude.”
“Obviously, we Alaskans, we identified with her,” said Martin Buser, a four-time winner of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. “We see a person with an incredible amount of integrity that happens to like to hunt and fish and subscribe to all the things that make Alaskans tick.”
Typically seen walking the Capitol halls of Juneau in black or red power suits while reading text messages on BlackBerry screens in each hand, Ms. Palin made a recent appearance in fashion magazine Vogue.
“At first they had me in a bunch of furs,” she said of the photo shoot. “Yeah, I have furs on my wall, but I don't wear furs. I had to show them my bunny boots and my North Face clothing.”
Raised in a Protestant family and fiercely anti-abortion, Ms. Palin and her husband have five children: girls Bristol, 17, Willow, 14, and Piper, 7; and boys Track, 19, and Trig, 4 months. The baby was born April 28 after genetic screening showed that he has Down syndrome, a diagnosis that Ms. Palin has acknowledged saddened her at first.
“When we first heard, it was kind of confusing. It was very, very challenging,” she said after his birth. “[But now], it just feels like he fits perfectly. He is supposed to be here with us.”
News of her pregnancy was kept quiet at first while Ms. Palin went about her work as governor, and her water broke while she was attending an energy conference in Texas. She reportedly delivered a 30-minute speech before flying home, where she delivered the baby boy the next morning.
While raising her family, Ms. Palin was hard at work improving her profile.
In 1992 she was elected mayor of Wasilla at age 32, and served two terms before running for lieutenant-governor.
She lost that election, but was appointed in 2003 as ethics commissioner for the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission.
It was in this role that she got her reputation as a tough critic of her own party. She exposed ethical violations by the state's Republican Party Chairman, Randy Ruedrich, an AOGCC commissioner.
In 2005, she co-filed an ethics complaint against Attorney-General Gregg Renkes, whom she found had a financial interest in a company involved in a trade deal that he was helping to craft.
Both men resigned, but Ms. Palin, too, left her post, citing a “lack of ethics” within the state's Republican leadership.
She ran for governor in 2006 on a pledge to bring principles to the party, and became the first woman and the youngest person to hold the state's highest office. To get there, she defeated two former governors in the primary and general elections, including the former Republican senator who had appointed her AOGCC ethics commissioner during his gubernatorial term.
Alaskan Carrie Hollier, a 27-year-old supporter of Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama, said she would feel some wistfulness about not voting for a governor she admires.
“It definitely makes it difficult, because you can't help but love Sarah Palin. She never comes across as full-on Republican.”
Ivan Moore, an Anchorage-based pollster and political consultant who usually works for Democrats, said: “She has an extraordinary talent when it comes to communicating personally with people. It's as simple as that. That obviously propelled her into the governor's mansion in Alaska.”
As governor, Ms. Palin killed a project dubbed the “bridge to nowhere,” which had become a symbol of wasteful spending, and took on the oil industry, leading to a tax increase for oil companies.
Her reputation as an ethics reformer is now in question, however, while she faces an investigation for allegedly trying to arrange the firing of a state trooper involved in a contentious divorce and child-custody battle with her sister.
Ms. Palin opposes same-sex marriage, but complied with an Alaska Supreme Court order to implement same-sex benefits, which the previous administration had refused to do.
In September, her son Track is scheduled to deploy to Iraq, having enlisted in the military on Sept. 11, 2007. Her running mate John McCain's son Jimmy has already served time in the war zone, and Democratic Party vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden's son Beau is expected to deploy in October.
