An Apostle of Alaska

John McCain was not her dream pick. Only a year ago, when the Republican primaries were just beginning, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told NEWSWEEK that she wasn't enthusiastic about anyone in the GOP field. McCain was languishing at 7 percent in the polls. Mike Huckabee was reduced to playing his electric bass to get attention. Palin, driving with a NEWSWEEK reporter along the highway from Anchorage to Wasilla, said she could understand why the country was enthralled by the race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. "When you talk about the Republican Party needing appealing candidates, darn right they do!" she said. "The Democrats, whether you like them or not … there is some dynamic there, and it's something that the Republicans I think have lacked for some time."

Palin had a lot on her mind in summer, with the kids out of school and a state to run, and didn't think she'd have time to focus on the race for a while. "I'm not overly excited yet," she said. "I will probably do what every American does and that's really get plugged in, tuned in to what's going on, when the field is set and that means there will be someone who stands out."

When the GOP held its Alaska caucus on Feb. 5, Palin didn't bother to endorse a candidate, despite personal appeals from Huckabee and Mitt Romney, her fellow social conservatives. She had never met or spoken to John McCain. But she indignantly dismissed his opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as the politically correct—yet wrong—position of "Eastern politicians." Palin finally got the chance to meet McCain at a gathering of Republican governors in Washington, D.C., in mid-February. Weeks later, even after the other Republican contenders had dropped out of the race, Palin still had not endorsed McCain. Preparing to go onstage March 3 in Los Angeles, at NEWSWEEK's Women's Leadership Forum, Palin was eager to quiz another governor, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, on her impressions of her state's senior senator. Palin said she still had "a lot of questions" to get answered about her party's presumptive nominee before she could back him.

Palin presumably got any lingering questions answered during her secret meeting with McCain at his Sedona ranch, the day he offered her the job as running mate. And McCain, in turn, got at least some of his questions answered, too. He learned days or weeks earlier that Palin's 17-year old daughter was five months pregnant, and that the governor's husband was arrested when he was 22 for drunken driving.

In the wake of her nomination, so many dirt-diggers were clamoring to get into the city hall of Wasilla, Palin's hometown, that the mayor, Dianne Keller, started a number system for out-of-towners to take turns. She also decreed that long-distance calls would not be returned (understandable, given that reporters from Japan, the BBC and Al-Jazeera were on her doorstep). "We are a small city with a small staff, and our residents and business community expect us to fill their needs as well as the needs of the media," said Keller. The media's need for details about Palin, no matter how small, mirrors a national hunger to know more about the 44-year-old governor who has improbably shaken up an already tumultuous race for the White House. The country was introduced to her and her family over the Labor Day weekend and through the Republican National Convention. Now, however, it's time to take the relationship to the next level, and figure out not only who she is but what she's done and what she believes. Palin's personal story taps one of the great American myths—the hardy woman of the frontier, God-fearing and determined to succeed against the odds. Her story could be a Capra film, or a chick flick. But as with most political biographies (or Hollywood films), the rougher edges have been burnished. To her critics, she's also shallow, opportunistic and even corrupt herself.

Palin is not regarded as an introspective or intellectual type—not the sort who likes to mull the deepest nuances of every issue. In that sense, she's the anti-Obama. While Barack Obama of Hawaii, Indonesia, Hawaii, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Cambridge, Mass., Chicago and now Washington has been on a well-chronicled lifelong search for his identity, Sarah Heath Palin seems just fine being a woman of Wasilla. Alaskans regard themselves as a breed apart—more rugged, self-reliant and free than other Americans. Palin shares that sense of exceptionalism. But the myth is contradicted by some inconvenient facts. Only 1 percent of the state's land is in private hands, and the economy is dependent on oil and other natural resources controlled by the federal government or Big Oil. As a result, nearly 50 years after statehood, Alaska remains deeply dependent on the federal government for support. Social ills are rampant. The state's levels of drug abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence and child abuse are above average or among the highest in the country.

To the extent Palin has a governing philosophy, it was shaped by her political mentor, former governor Wally Hickel. The 89-year-old Hickel is a member of the Alaska Independence Party, which espouses, among other things, greater autonomy or even separation from the United States. (Husband Todd Palin is not a member of the party now, but he was registered as an AIP voter at different periods of his life totaling seven years. Sarah has never been a member but attended a party conference in her hometown of Wasilla.) Hickel advocates an "economy of the commons," which would place the state's vast energy and mineral wealth in the hands of the state government and its citizens. In that vein, Palin this year ordered a one-time $1,200 energy refund distributed to each Alaska resident. (The revenues came from recalculating the tax on oil producers.)

Alaska's young governor is as riven with contradictions and complexities as the state itself. A devoted mother, Palin is now running for national office, exposing her young family to the warping effects of international scrutiny. A reformer, she faces allegations of exerting improper influence in city and state government. A self-styled regular Red State gal, she is relentlessly driven, a politician of epic ambition who is running against a Washington establishment that, if elected, she will inevitably join, and even rule over.

Her sense of personal mission may be rooted in her religious upbringing. She was raised in a tradition that tended to emphasize an intimate connection with God, through the Holy Spirit—a tradition that puts the believer at the center of the spiritual drama, in direct communion with the Lord. Formed in such a milieu, it is not surprising that someone like Palin would have a heightened sense of self, and of the possibilities of self, for she was taught from her earliest days that she could be directly moved by God. Friends say the Ten Commandments imbued her with a strong sense of right and wrong. Even now, when she talks about complex political matters, she sometimes speaks in religious terms. To a church gathering, she described a $30 billion natural-gas pipeline project, backed by state tax money, as "God's will." Similarly, she urged her audience to pray that the war in Iraq was "a task that is from God … That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for—that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."