The Sarah Show

The campaign's crowds, once elderly and male, now surge with moms toting children. Grandmothers tell of getting goose bumps when she speaks. A young girl holds up a sign that reads SARAH PALIN UR MY ROLE MODEL. At rally after rally, John McCain must wait to go onstage, while she is still being mobbed at the rope line. In Lee's Summit, Mo., when he attacks Barack Obama as being "wrong for America," the crowd ignores him and chants her name instead. The line to enter a Lancaster, Pa., event winds half a mile through a parking lot, where thousands wait as long as 90 minutes to get a glimpse of her. After driving almost an hour to attend her first political rally ever, Suzanne Cook of Coatesville, Pa., offers an explanation: "The fact that she's a woman."

Sarah Palin has done for the gop what 10 male candidates, nearly two years and $300 million had failed to accomplish: she has boosted excitement, crowds and campaign coffers virtually overnight. She has lifted McCain in the polls, has put Obama into confusion and is living out a Cinderella story unlike any other in recent political history, though the ending is still a slipper of uncertainty. Even Palin seems astonished by it all. Gazing out at thousands from a platform in Sterling Heights, Mich., she shakes her head, dumbfounded for a moment as the crowd chants her name. Her mouth forms a word, mumbled silently to herself: "Wow," she says.

The Palin effect is already measurable. Since McCain tapped her in the days before the St. Paul, Minn., convention, national polls show that McCain has drawn even with Obama in most head-to-head surveys and pulled ahead in several. At the same time, white women have swung away from Obama by as much as 20 points. For months, McCain badly trailed in this group--a warning sign, since George W. Bush won among white women in 2004. But a new CNN/TIME/Opinion Research poll reveals McCain has opened up double-digit leads among this group in the swing states of Virginia, Missouri and Michigan. Charollet Schworer, a retired third-grade teacher from Kentucky who voted twice for Bill Clinton, traveled to Lebanon, Ohio, in a Windbreaker patterned with the American flag. "I sat there, tears rolling down my face, watching my TV," she says of Palin's speech at the Republican Convention. "I felt energized, truly energized for the first time."

While Obama's campaign seemed bewitched and bewildered about how to cope with Palin's appeal and McCain's resurgence, Republicans barely had time to gloat. Volunteers at gop offices have increased fivefold in several swing states. In the first 12 hours after Palin was selected, $4.4 million in donations poured in, contributing to a $10 million infusion over a holiday weekend that ended with Hurricane Gustav. "We had to bring in a few new servers," says a McCain adviser. (Palin's been good for the Democrats, too: the Obama campaign claimed $10 million in donations within 24 hours after her speech at the convention.)

Palin still has plenty of questions to answer, and while she has basked in mostly adoring reviews from the conservative base, she is also struggling to deflect the scrutiny of her record in office. Though it insists she is up to the job of Vice President, the campaign denied all news interview requests for nearly two weeks after she joined the ticket. She regards reporters warily and from a distance, except for a brief meet and greet on her campaign plane that was strictly off the record. Onstage, she tells the same teleprompter jokes every day, and her husband Todd laughs at them as if he had never heard them before. Beforehand and afterward, Palin lunges into the crowds, shaking hands in her 3-in. heels. "I'm excited, but I'd like to see her interviewed first," says Republican Kim Ahaus, a middle-aged woman from Lebanon, Ohio, who has not yet been sold on the fairy tale.

The McCain operation, which knows a thing or two about biography, is betting for now that the details of her views matter less than the grit of her story. Whatever its relevance to working in the White House, there is an undeniable power in the tale of a woman who knows how to carve up a moose and can give a speech while leaking amniotic fluid, just hours before giving birth to a fifth child. Still, her first week on the stump clarified some things: She never banned library books, though she raised the possibility in a conversation with a librarian. She never joined a political party that openly discussed Alaska's secession from the U.S., though she did address its members. On the other hand, the government plane she says she "put on eBay" was never actually sold there. She once supported the prizewinning piece of pork known as the "bridge to nowhere" that she claims to have opposed. And though it was legal under Alaskan law, some found it unseemly that she claimed thousands of dollars in per diem expenses as governor while living at home.

The McCain campaign, meanwhile, has been doing its best to create storms elsewhere, with a series of harshly negative and factually challenged ads, one accusing Obama of making a sexist slight, another accusing him of wanting to give sex education to kindergartners. Though the new attacks are misleading, they have allowed Palin to continue to play booster on McCain's rocket. McCain aides abandoned their plans to send her out on the trail by herself and have instead installed her as his more popular warm-up act. McCain himself certainly seems revitalized, following Palin at each stop with a fiery stump speech filled with barbs aimed at Obama, though cable news networks sometimes cut to commercials after Palin is finished. On the bus, away from reporters, the tone is friendly, informal and light--McCain quizzing Todd and Sarah about caribou and snowmobile racing while Brett Favre debuts with the Jets on the television. McCain is having fun, says traveling aide Steve Duprey: "Riding on the bus with her is like riding on the bus with the press a year ago."

Despite their camaraderie, they will soon be forced apart. After filling the hall in Lancaster, McCain went outside, climbed onto a platform and addressed the hundreds of supporters who never made it inside. "I'm grateful that you are here," he said into a microphone. "I'm not going to let you down." But as he stepped down to work the rope line, the chants--"Sa-rah! Sa-rah! Sa-rah!"--had already started up again, even though she was nowhere in sight.

Travels with Sarah To see photos of the GOP Veep nominee on the campaign trail, go to time.com/sarah