Where the Bars Are Open Till 5 A.M.

At the Republican Convention, Sarah Palin talked about her hometown as if it were a place painted by Norman Rockwell. She spoke about the factory workers and the farmers. She quoted the mid-20th-century columnist Westbrook Pegler: "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity." She talked about conservative values and fiscal discipline. "I grew up with those people," she said. So you might imagine that Wasilla, Alaska, is a tight-knit community with a general store, cozy cabins and a quaint bar where everyone knows your name, all centered around a town square with a steepled church and a frozen pond.

But barely anything like that exists in Wasilla. You certainly can have a great time swigging beer in two bars that are allowed to stay open until 5 a.m. It was Mayor Palin who rejected attempts to make them close earlier. (If Palin had completely had her way, in fact, you could have sidled up to the bar with a gun.) At the Mug-Shot Saloon, you can memorize the expletives on the collection of bumper stickers next to the well of bottles. But once you leave, you might want to watch your back: in a state that is consistently in the top 10 of the nation's most violent per capita, Wasilla has among the highest per capita violent- and property-crime rates in Alaska.

For all that, Wasilla is not a bad place. Families go to church services on Sundays; they gather for picnics, barbecues and town meetings; parents root for their kids at ballgames. It's just not the gauzy, idyllic place of long-neglected "values" that Palin evokes. Rather, it's an unexceptional, gritty town, bisected by a four-lane highway. Along the road, used-car lots sit next to car-repair shops next to fast-food joints next to pawn shops.

Wasilla began as a way station for miners in 1917, a place with one store, a road and proximity to gold mines and the railroad. After the gold was gone, most of the residents cleared out. It began to repopulate after the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay—and the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, as well as a highway through town. It was incorporated in 1973. "It's a very confusing place," concedes Wasilla city planner Jim Holycross, who moved here from Oregon two years ago. Holycross had worked as a planner in different parts of Oregon, but he believes Wasilla presents a particular challenge. "There's no center here," he says, standing in his office in city hall. "There's no sense of identity. There's nothing to ground the town. In fact, when I first came here, I got lost looking for the town until I realized I was in the town."

Alaska doesn't generally attract people with plans, and moving to Wasilla as a planner, you might say, was brave. In the mid-1980s, a bureaucrat working for the Greater Matanuska-Susitna Borough wanted to tweak a comprehensive plan to, in part, set some more rules about what could and couldn't be built where. He was fired for his efforts, and his effigy was burned in the parking lot of the borough offices.

Palin likes to invoke the lovely lines of Pegler, a political columnist who built his reputation on investigating people in power. But in quoting his paean to small-town values, Palin leaves out that Pegler was an anti-Semite who, according to his 1969 obituary in The New York Times, wrote that he regretted that a bullet aimed at Franklin Roosevelt "hit the wrong man." There are other inconvenient facts: Palin's nostalgia for small farms and factories can't be tied to Wasilla. Until recently, the only thing that resembled a factory in the area was a cooperative called Mat-Maid dairy. After 40 years of churning milk, cream and yogurt, the place was shuttered in 2007—by Governor Palin's handpicked board in charge of running the dairy. It's now a self-storage unit. There's still a little vegetable and hay farming done in Wasilla, but much of the agricultural land has given way to strip malls, subdivisions and gravel pits.

Palin knows this is the heart of her town. In 1999, when Wal-Mart was the place to shop in Wasilla, a couple who worked there decided to get married in the aisles of the store. Shoppers convened, and tour-bus passengers stopped and gawked. Palin, who was then mayor of the 5,000 or so residents of the town, officiated. Later, she told a reporter that she had to hold back tears. "It was so sweet," she said. "It was so Wasilla."

That kind of Everywoman attitude made Palin popular here. In 1996 she beat incumbent Mayor John Stein, with 651 votes to his 440. Stein challenged her three years later, and she clobbered him, 826 to 292. Wasilla was enjoying an economic boom in those years, and residents had no reason to change course. Even Colleen Cottle, who consistently voted against Mayor Palin as a member of the city council, says she was an effective mayor. "She got things done," says Cottle.