McCain’s Mrs. Right

After a fitful career as a sportscaster (she imagined ESPN, but didn't want to leave Alaska), she was elected mayor of Wasilla, where her basketball-champion-beauty-pageant glow lived on, at the age of 32. "It was a sleepy town, run by good old boys. I ran as the anti-incumbent," she recalled to NEWSWEEK. Her daughter Piper was born while she was mayor. "She was born on Monday, and I went back to work on Tuesday," she said. It didn't take her long to run for lieutenant governor (she ran a respectable second in 2002) and garner a good job from the then Gov. Frank Murkowski, who made her head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

It was in this job that Palin had her true political awakening. She says she was shocked by the corruption she saw. She left after less than a year, but not before she had blown the whistle on another commissioner, Randy Ruedrich, for doing party business on state time. Ruedrich, who also happened to be the Republican state chairman, agreed to pay a $12,000 fine for breaking state ethics laws (he's still in the job). She and others then lodged an ethics complaint against state Attorney General Gregg Ranks, who had been an adviser to Murkowski. Murkowski reprimanded Ranks, and Ranks resigned. Then she turned on Murkowski, who was running for re-election as governor, and beat him by almost 2-1 in 2006. To be sure, she was not always able to juggle family and political obligations successfully along the way. She missed so many scheduled campaign events in the governor's race that reporters began calling her "No Show Sarah." (Palin said during her run that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in schools. She was baptized in an Assembly of God church, a Pentecostal denomination that believes God created the world at every step. Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for the McCain-Palin campaign, said Palin attends different churches and does not consider herself Pentecostal.)

"Being a mom of four [now five] is an unorthodox training ground, but a great training ground," Palin told NEWSWEEK in 2007. "You have to be judge and jury in conflicts. You have to figure out a budget and how to prioritize. To be a mom you have to have more time management than any other CEO." Palin stays up late packing lunches; she gets up every day at 4:30 a.m. "Todd jokes I can sleep when I die," she says. She seems to enjoy that role of strung-out supermom, sustained by wisecracking ("What's the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom?" she asks. " It's lipstick").

By 2007 Palin was a hero to many in the state, the scourge of the Republican establishment. "Political analysts in Alaska refer to the 'body count' of Palin's rivals," wrote Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard, the conservative magazine that identified Palin as "the GOP's newest star." A pollster, Dave Dittman, told Barnes, "The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah." The FBI was doing its part at the same time, investigating ties between the oil companies and various lawmakers who were allegedly bribed to cut taxes for the oil companies. So far, three state legislators have gone to jail, and earlier this year the Feds indicted Sen. Ted Stevens. "Uncle Ted," the great Republican patriarch, had been bringing home the bacon for years to Alaska as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. (Stevens has pleaded not guilty to charges that he failed to report $250,000 in home renovations and gifts from an oil-services company.) Though Palin speaks respectfully of Senator Stevens, she has gone to war on pork-barrel projects, vetoing about 15 percent of the state's capital budget set aside for the pet projects of legislators. Her attack on pork helped endear her to McCain, who has been the leading foe of "earmarking" in the federal budget. Both McCain and Palin were vocal critics of the Bridge to Nowhere (she expressed initial support), a $223 million project in a remote Alaskan community, sponsored by Stevens and Congressman Don Young.

Palin says she is embarrassed by Alaska's national reputation as a corrupt backwater. She believes that the only way Alaska can get off the federal teat and break the domination of the big oil companies is for the state to take control of its vast natural resources, most of which are now controlled by the federal government or leased to Big Oil. She is all for drilling for oil and gas, but she wants more competition from smaller companies. Her critics have lately taken to comparing her to Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan strongman known for seizing oil companies.

She likes to get her way. "I got that Miss Congeniality out of my system back then," she told NEWSWEEK of her beauty pageant days. Inevitably, she has made some enemies. She is currently under investigation by the state legislature in a tawdry little scandal involving alleged domestic abuse. Palin's younger sister, Molly, had been married to a state trooper named Mike Wooten. In 2005, Palin charged that Wooten had mistreated her sister and her family, including using a Taser stun gun on his 10-year-old stepson, according to state documents reported in The Wall Street Journal. Palin told state investigators that she overheard Trooper Wooten threatening her sister, "I'm gonna f–––ing shoot your dad. He's gonna get a lead bullet." An internal police investigation found that Wooten had used the stun gun on the boy (at the boy's request, according to Wooten) but threw out other charges. Wooten was suspended for five days—but not fired.

In mid-July of this year, Palin fired the Alaska Department of Public Safety commissioner, Walt Monegan. Questioned by reporters, Monegan claimed that he had been fired because he had withstood pressure from Palin and her husband to fire Trooper Wooten. "Outrageous," said Palin. But on Aug. 13, a tape recording emerged showing that a top aide to Palin, Frank Bailey, had invoked the governor's name in talking to a state police lieutenant about Monegan's failure to fire Wooten. "Todd and Sarah are scratching their heads, 'Why on earth hasn't this, why is this guy [Monegan] still representing the department? She [Palin] doesn't know why there is absolutely no action for a year on this issue." The state legislature launched an investigation into Palin for abusing the power of her office. "This is a serious investigation," says Beth Kerttula, the Alaska House Democratic leader. "It's not a witch hunt."