Columnists
Choice for president between a conservative and a radical
Tuesday, September 9, 2008 10:27 AM EDT
So how does a frontier hockey mom of five rise rapidly from mayor of Wasilla, which in 2000 had a population (5,469) smaller than Dowagiac's, but has perhaps grown now to fourth after Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau?
Sarah Palin, 44, the second female vice presidential candidate in history and the first for the Republican Party, in short order went from beauty pageants to sportscasting to mayor to governing Alaska as an anti-corruption crusader in an oil-rich state.
She won the Wasilla High girls cross country award. Todd took the basketball star to the prom the next year, 1982.
Palin is the third of Chuck and Sally Heath's four children.
Her dad taught and coached track, her mom worked as school secretary.
She started college at, of all places, The University of Hawaii, but by 1983 moved back to attend North Idaho College in Coeur D'Alene. She transferred to the University of Idaho in Moscow, where her brother was enrolled, graduating in 1987 with a journalism degree and a political science minor.
She transitioned into local politics through the PTA to a city council seat.
It's interesting reading how she was a polarizing figure even in her first mayoral race in 1996, injecting such issues as abortion and gun control and seeking outside endorsements for what had previously been a non-partisan job. She shrewdly invoked issues that mattered to the ascendant majority, Christian conservatives.
She reportedly governed as contentiously as she campaigned, dismissing most city department heads who had been loyal to nine-year incumbent John Stein.
Her police chief filed an unsuccessful wrongful termination lawsuit, alleging Palin fired him at the behest of the National Rifle Association because he opposed a concealed gun law the NRA supported.
As mayor, she hired a lobbying firm to attract federal funding to Wasilla.
She was a major fundraiser for indicted Sen. Ted Stevens, supporting the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it.
Palin presided over Wasilla's rapid expansion and a proliferation of churches in a part of Alaska known as its Bible belt.
She looked into banning library books, yet resisted calls to restrict bar operating hours.
Palin won re-election in a landslide and left office in 2002 because of term limits. She ran for lieutenant governor and lost.
Republican Gov. Frank Murkowski assigned her to the state energy commission, from which she resigned to protest GOP corruption in the defining moment of her career.
She seemed to sense instinctively issues such as abortion were fading compared to cronyism and the need to clean up the capital. She continued to play down social issues as governor.
A former journalist now on her press staff, Bill McAllister, coined a word for her uncanny timing: "Sarah-dipity."
She remains under investigation for ousting her state's top cop because he refused to fire Mike Wooten, a state trooper locked in a custody battle with Palin's younger sister.
Her celebrity upstages John McCain, the maverick surrounded by lobbyists at the top of the ticket.
Joe Klein hit the nail on the head in Time magazine when he described the choice Nov. 4 as being between a conservative - Barack Obama - and a radical - McCain.
Obama cautiously selected Catholic Sen. Joe Biden to add foreign policy experience to his ticket. Obama understandably doesn't want to seem angry or threatening given the number of racists still running around America.
McCain had months to select a vice president, but Republican bosses wanted Michigan's Mitt Romney. They vetoed McCain's first two choices, Sen. Joe Lieberman and former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge.
So Mr. "Country First" petulantly decided at the last minute on Palin, whose husband belonged to an "Alaska first" secessionist party.
"Let me offer an advance warning to the old, big-spending, do-nothing, me-first, country-second Washington crowd: Change is coming," McCain, 72, predicted in St. Paul Sept. 3. "We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us."
The video that introduced McCain dwelt heavily on his past as a prisoner of war and his decades in Congress. Wife Cindy called him a "man who's served in Washington without ever becoming a Washington insider."
If Vietnam heroics were all that mattered, John Kerry would have won in 2004.
John Eby is editor of the Dowagiac Daily News. To reach him, send an email to: john.eby@leaderpub.com
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