'Work Harder, Prove Yourself'

NEWSWEEK: Sarah Palin, you are a Republican and a conservative one at that. It's unlikely that you and Hillary would agree on too many issues. But, yet, as a woman, chief executive—someone who's been through the grinder—when you look at the coverage and you listen to the conversations, what do you see?
Sarah Palin: Fair or unfair—and I do think that it's a more concentrated criticism that Hillary gets on so many fronts; I think that's unfortunate. But fair or unfair, I think she does herself a disservice to even mention it, really. You have to plow through that and know what you're getting into. I say this with all due respect to Hillary Clinton and to her experience and to her passion for changing the status quo. But when I hear a statement like that coming from a women candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism or a sharper microscope put on her, I think, man, that doesn't do us any good. Women in politics, women in general wanting to progress this country, I don't think it bodes well for her, a statement like that. Because, again, fair or not fair it is there. I think it's reality and it's a given, people just accept that she's going to be under a sharper microscope. So be it. Work harder, prove to yourself to an even greater degree that you're capable, that you're going to be the best candidate. That's what she wants us to believe at this point. So it bothers me a little bit to hear her bring that attention to herself on that level.

Did you ever feel: Hey, I'm getting a question, I'm getting an attitude or something that I don't think my male counterpart would have?
For gender being an issue in my race for governor. You know I grew up with Title IX, and sports were so big, and in my upbringing very instrumental in shaping my character and a need to compete and really to win. So because of a very athletic background and growing up in a family, a busy large family, where gender never was really an issue there. My dad expected us to be back there chopping wood and snowmachining with the rest of them, hunting and fishing and doing all those things that are quite Alaskan. So gender not being so much an issue, you know what more of an issue was? I had served two terms as a mayor and manager of a city before being elected governor and was on a city council before that. It was more of sort of an age-discrimination thing at the time but looking back now, I'm like, "Dang, I was young! What was I thinking?" I was in my 20s, you know, and had babies at the time. That was more of an issue than gender. And that is a little bit still in play today. The other issue is a challenge I think, that someone tried to make for me—again not so much gender-oriented perhaps—but, would I be able to do the job with having kids? I've got a bunch of kids and how would that balance be. And my answer would always be … that I'm going to do the job just as well as any male governor who had kids, you know, I think we can handle this.

Did voters ask you that when you were out campaigning for your first job?
Amazingly, some Neanderthals did.

You have a wonderful Alaska life story. Your husband works on the North Slope. Your dad, whom I met, teaches high school and keeps a pile of skulls of some sort, antlers. I give away my urban background, but lots of dead things piled up. And you snowmobile and you hunt and you're a member of the NRA, you were a champion athlete, and yet the little life detail that seems to sneak into so many stories about you is that you were also a beauty-pageant winner.
Yeah, and I got that title Miss Congeniality out of my system back then, because I'm not running for that anymore. But you know, speaking of sports, growing up. Graduating high school in 1982 there weren't a whole lot of high-school athletes, females going on to college to play sports yet. That's what I was looking for, a scholarship in athletics. I didn't get one, the next best thing would be the Miss America scholarship pageant where at least you had to show that you had a talent. I played the flute and was really into music so, you know I won a couple of titles there, and it paid tuition through four, five years of college. So, that was OK, it wasn't really my thing, I was never really comfortable with it, but it paid for some college, though.

But it's something we fixate on. Do you find the attention paid to that detail of your life excessive?
That's ironic you would even mention that. This morning the local TV station here, KTLA, was going to introduce me as former beauty-pageant queen. And I said, "Could you not say that?" Say commercial fisherman or anything like that, anything but the beauty-queen thing, because it was a little tiny local pageant. I was proud to get up there and play the flute, do a good interview, that was the thing. So, yeah, as recent as this morning, I asked that that not be the highlight.

But I left out that you and your husband run a commercial fishing operation in Alaska in the summer.
But that is funny that the media does kind of fixate on, is it more intriguing and more, I think, revealing of who a person is? Say in my case, she's an outdoorswoman and a commercial fisherman or, you know, way back 100 years ago she was in a beauty pageant? You know, what is more, I guess, attractive to the media [about] that person, what is it that the media fixates on?