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Sarah Palin: gun-toting beauty queen aiming to be the vice-president
August 30, 2008

Tim Reid in Dayton

She hunts, fishes, and eats moose burgers. She is such a keen runner that she named the first of her five children Track. She is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association and was runner-up in the Miss Alaska beauty contest in 1984.

In short, this self-styled “average hockey mom” is the kind of all-American girl to gladden the heart of the Republican Party — and yesterday Sarah Palin delighted it even more by virtually wiping out coverage of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver on Thursday night.

Mrs Palin may have been Alaska’s Governor for a mere two years, but she is wildly popular, with an approval rating of 80 per cent. She ran in her gubernatorial campaign as a cleangovernment reformer and scourge of wasteful spending, a message that resonated strongly in a state beset by political corruption.

But for all her strengths, both parties know that her nomination is a risk for John McCain. Only two years ago she was the Mayor of the Alaskan town of Wasilla, where the biggest worry is whether there will be enough snow for the annual dog-mushing race. Before her two terms as a councillor in the same town she was a sports reporter for a television station in Anchorage.

Since she took office in 2006 as Alaska’s youngest governor, and the first woman to hold the post, she has delivered on many of her campaign promises. She took a pay cut, dispensed with the gubernatorial jet, and killed the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” project that had become a nationwide symbol of the wasteful spending that Mr McCain has made a cornerstone of his campaign. “As Governor I’ve stood up to politics as usual,” Mrs Palin said. “I’ve stopped wasteful spending, cut taxes, and put the people first.”

A fiscal and social conservative, she is also strongly “pro-life” and belongs to Feminists for Life. She opposes gay marriage, although she says she has gay friends. She has also admitted in the past that she smoked marijuana when it was legal in Alaska — but did not like it. Born in Idaho, Mrs Palin has lived in Alaska since she was three months old.

She once worked as a commercial fisherman with her husband, Todd, her high-school sweetheart and a native Yupik. It was their 20th wedding anniversary yesterday. Her husband works for BP, is a champion snowmobiler — a passion she shares — who has won the 2,000-mile “Iron Dog” race four times.

They have three daughters, Bristol, 17, Willow, 13, and Piper, 7. In April she gave birth to another son, Trig, after refusing to let the results of prenatal testing that showed he had Down’s syndrome affect her decision to have the baby. He was asleep on the shoulder of one of her daughters during her speech.

At the rally in Ohio last night Mrs Palin was given a raucous reception during a poised and forceful speech in which she displayed clear signs of grit, a muscular, family-oriented conservatism, while also reaching out to the disaffected supporters of Hillary Clinton.

“I would be honoured to serve next to the next president of the United States,” she declared, with four of her five children behind her. “I know it will demand the best that I have to give, and I promise nothing less.”

Her son Track will be deployed with the US Army to Iraq on September 11, she added. “As a mother of one of those troops, John McCain is the kind of man I want as our commander-in-chief.”

Her description of herself as an “average hockey mom” was a clear bid for America’s swing-vote suburban mothers and disaffected Hillary Clinton Democrats. In her speech she heaped praise on Geraldine Ferraro — the only other woman to be named on a major presidential ticket, in 1984 — and Mrs Clinton, and got her biggest cheers when she said: “We can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all!”

Thrilled as they were, Republicans knew straight away that her choice was highly risky. With Mr McCain turning 72 yesterday, and having suffered two bouts of skin cancer, Mr Obama’s campaign wasted no time in raising the question of his age and Mrs Palin’s lack of experience.

“Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency,” Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman, said. And, in her one vice-presidential debate, she will face the seasoned foreign policy veteran Joe Biden.

Mr Burton also criticised Mrs Palin for her support of oil drilling in the Alaskan wilderness and her anti-abortion stance, referring to the 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in the United States.

“Governor Palin shares John McCain’s commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush’s failed economic policies. That’s not the change we need, it’s just more of the same,” he said.

Mrs Palin’s lack of experience undercuts Republican charges that Mr Obama is not ready to be commander-in-chief. Mr McCain said in April that he was determined to avoid choosing someone like Dan Quayle, the little-known Indiana senator whom George Bush Sr put on his ticket in 1988. The choice proved embarrassing. Mr Quayle “had not been briefed and prepared for some of the questions”, Mr McCain said.

Pat Buchanan, a conservative who twice sought the Republican nomination in the 1990s, said: “This is the biggest political gamble I have ever seen. She is enormously exciting but if, God forbid, something happens, can she be president?”

Mrs Palin was closely vetted by the McCain team because of an ongoing ethics investigation by the Alaskan legislature over claims that she used her executive position to try to get her sister’s former husband, Mike Wooten, an Alaskan state trooper, dismissed from the police force after their divorce. In 2006 Mr Wooton was briefly suspended from his job for threatening to kill Mrs Palin’s father, and for shooting his 11-year-old stepson with a Taser gun.

Another potential problem was that she was endorsed in a 2006 television advert by Ted Stevens, the Republican Alaskan senator recently indicted on corruption charges.

Mr McCain passed over several men for his choice, including Mitt Romney, his former presidential rival, and Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota Governor. He had been keen for months to pick a woman, and declared yesterday: “She’s got the grit, integrity, good sense and fierce devotion to the common good that is exactly what we need in Washington today.

“She’s exactly who I need, she’s exactly who this country needs.”

Cont'd next post

From beauty pageant to governor’s mansion

— Sarah Palin is 44

— At high school she acquired the nickname “Sarah Barracuda” for her fierce competitiveness as the star of the basketball team

— She won the local Miss Wasilla beauty contest, in which she was named “Miss Congeniality”, and was a runner-up in the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant

— She has worked in a commercial fishing business with her husband, Todd, and as a television sports presenter

— He is of Inuit heritage through his grandmother and is a four-times champion of the 2,000-mile “Iron Dog” snowmobile race

— Her children are named Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig

— The eldest is going to serve in Iraq next month and the youngest, who has Down’s syndrome, was born this April

— At 32, she was elected mayor of Wasilla, population 9,000

— She has a reputation for cracking down on government waste

— She was championed as a heroine for resigning as head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in 2004, after highlighting ethical violations by another commisioner

— She was sworn in as Alaska’s first female and youngest ever Governor in December 2006, despite missing so many campaign appearances that she was tagged “No Show Sarah” by her opponents

Sarah Palin: gun-toting beauty queen aiming to be the vice-president (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article4636745.ece)
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Sarah Palin sounds like a fierce advocate of the hard-working, taxpaying people of America. Demo-cats will attempt to dismiss her, but it may backfire. Demo-cats talk the talk, but at least she walks it.

From what I've read so far in these two threads she sounds refreshing to me.  But this politcal season has more twists and turns than a switchback mountain road!   ;D