Center Stage

But McCain didn't want the safe choice. A top adviser would later recall that telling McCain that Pawlenty was "safe" was "like guaranteeing" that McCain would not pick him. Prodded by Schmidt and Rick Davis, McCain began asking about Palin, a first-term governor who had shaken up the Alaska political establishment by taking on her own party elders, who was fearless and defiant, who was … a little bit like McCain. He had called her that Sunday morning while she was attending the Alaska State Fair. It was a quick phone call, only about five minutes, and Palin had trouble hearing McCain over the noisy crowd. But McCain was intrigued. He told Salter and Schmidt to fly her down to Arizona and take a close look.

Schmidt and Salter met with her as soon as she arrived in Flagstaff on Wednesday. The three talked late into the night. Schmidt and Salter probed and pressed and looked for gaps between her views and McCain's. Palin shrugged off substantive differences. "What's the big darn deal?" she asked, smiling and, in her frontier-girl way, half defying, half flirting with her interrogators. With her flat accent and folksy charm, Palin was refreshingly down to earth, thought Salter. Salter had been wary; he had favored Pawlenty, who exuded a warm Midwestern solidity. Schmidt was pro-Palin from the beginning. He saw her potential as a conservative populist, the kind of throw-'em-red-meat, bash-the-elites politician who thrilled the Republican base that Karl Rove had so carefully nurtured through the Bush years. By picking Palin, Schmidt argued, McCain could snatch the "change" mantle away from Obama. Not for the first time, Salter came around to Schmidt's way of thinking. In the home of one of Cindy McCain's business associates, the two men tried to impress on Palin just how grueling the coming months could be. She did not seem intimidated—in the least. She was up front about her family, telling the McCain aides that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter Bristol was pregnant.

Palin stayed in Flagstaff on Wednesday night. Early on Thursday morning, Schmidt and Salter drove her to the cabin in Sedona, where she met for about an hour with McCain and chatted briefly with Cindy. Afterward, McCain and his wife took a walk along a creek running through the property. McCain consulted one last time with Schmidt and Salter. Palin would be a brave pick and she was a straight shooter, the two advisers counseled McCain. But she had no foreign-policy experience and was brand new to the national stage. McCain did not take long to decide. By 11 on that Thursday morning, he had asked Palin to join his ticket. Palin did not hesitate an instant to say yes.

The campaign was obsessively secretive about the choice. Charlie Black, one of McCain's senior advisers who was involved in the early discussions about Palin, was not told until very late Thursday night. Speechwriter Matt Scully and senior communications aide Nicolle Wallace were instructed to fly to Cincinnati and were given the name of a small, nondescript hotel. When they arrived they found Salter sitting on the curb, smoking, while Schmidt stared at his BlackBerry. The two men escorted them upstairs, saying virtually nothing. As they got out of the elevator Scully began to wonder, who the heck is behind the door? Colin Powell? Schmidt opened the door to the suite and said, "Meet our vice presidential candidate." It took Scully a few seconds to register who she was. Wallace, still a little dopey from painkillers from a root-canal operation, had no idea.

The Palin pick had the feel of a guerrilla raid, a covert operation. Salter, Schmidt and Governor Palin had checked in to the hotel under false names, pretending they were in town for a family reunion. The pirate ship was back! Muzzled and ordered to behave like a regular politician (run negative ads, avoid reporters, just read from the damn teleprompter), McCain had rebelled in his way by picking a fellow subversive—a sassy, shoot-from-the-hip, self-styled hockey mom who had shown those Big Oil boys a thing or two up in Alaska. It was romantic but also a bit impulsive. McCain's vetting operation had relied heavily on Internet searches for background checks. Davis had kept his eye on Palin for months, but it does not appear that the campaign did extensive interviewing and digging in Alaska. Some of McCain's aides were a little nervous about the Hail Mary quality of McCain's choice. As the GOP candidate introduced his running mate to the world on the morning of Friday, Aug. 29, from Wright State University's Nutter Center in Dayton, Ohio, one of his aides, watching from backstage, muttered, "We just threw long."

Other campaign advisers were gleeful as the pundits scrambled to make sense of it all. Some reporters did not even know how to pronounce Palin's name. But on Saturday night, a couple of reporters began asking questions about Bristol. Some had caught a glimpse of her, and explained to a campaign aide that she looked, well, pregnant. The aide denied any knowledge, but Schmidt tapped one of McCain's friends, Steve Duprey, to go have an awkward conversation with Palin. Told of the reporters' nosing around, she looked out the window briefly and replied, "We have a strong family. We've been dealing with this already. We're gonna tell Bristol. We'll be fine. Let's move on. What else do you have?"

Palin remained phlegmatic the next day when the left-wing blogs began speculating that 5-month-old Trig was actually Bristol's child and that Palin was covering for her daughter. When an aide told Palin that he had started receiving calls from "respectable news organizations" demanding physiological proof that Trig was actually Palin's son, she quipped, "What, do I have to show them my stretch marks?"

At the convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys'-club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Schmidt and Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. "I'll be just a minute," she said. Salter tried to strike up a conversation. He knew that Todd was half native Alaskan and a championship snow-machine racer.

"So what's the difference between a snowmobile and a snow machine, anyway?" Salter asked. "They're the same thing," Todd replied. "Right, so why not call it a snowmobile?" Salter joshed. "Because it's a snow machine," came the reply.

Later, Schmidt and Salter went outside so that Salter could have a cigarette. "So how about the Eskimo? Is he on the level?" Schmidt asked. Salter just shrugged and took another drag.

McCain loved the whole Palin family. They seemed to offer some relief, if not a touch of anarchy, to the Straight Talk Express, which had become a bit joyless. Piper, the governor's 7-year-old, thought nothing of crawling across Joe Lieberman's lap to get to her mother. Lindsey Graham mischievously enjoyed getting the child hopped up on Mountain Dew, a beverage to which he was mildly addicted. McCain relished talking to his running mate about guns and hunting in the wild. Duprey made up a T shirt that read OUR CANDIDATE FOR VP CAN HUNT, SHOOT, DRESS, COOK HER DINNER. JOE BIDEN ORDERS TAKE-OUT. Palin put on the shirt and gave him a hug. "I love this shirt," she said.

The morning after his own acceptance speech, McCain was more revved up than his aides had seen him in weeks. McCain had worked hard on the speech. After wrangling with Salter, he had agreed to talk about his POW experience. Salter had privately worried that McCain might choke up, but McCain just said to Salter, "Sit where I can see you, OK?" The speech ended with a dramatic kick, as McCain implored the crowd, "Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight!" Salter leaped up in the front row, clapping and furiously gesturing for McCain to "surf the wave" of crowd response.

McCain had been too wound up to get to sleep, calling Graham at 1 a.m. ("What'd ya think, boy?" "Home run.") He was still soaring eight hours later. In Cedarburg, Wis., he gestured toward Palin and exclaimed to the crowd, "Isn't this the most marvelous running mate in the history of this nation?" McCain's crowds were usually dwarfed by his rival's rallies. But with Palin by his side, the crowds suddenly swelled to Obama-size numbers—5,000, 10,000, 15,000 people. It didn't bother McCain that the people were there to see Palin.