How Sarah Palin Mastered Politics

(2 of 3)

It wasn't a well-connected or privileged family, but Chuck's position as a teacher meant that all of Wasilla knew him. By the time she finished high school, Palin had made a name for herself as a standout girl — a star basketball player and an avid hunter who won the local beauty pageant and placed second statewide. Her marriage to high school sweetheart Todd Palin upped the family's Alaska quotient: he was part Yupik native and all man. He would go on to become a commercial fisherman and part-time oilman and win the nearly 2,000-mile (3,170 km) Iron Dog snowmobile race four times.

Related

Photos

The Fashion Looks of Sarah Palin

Specials

Top 10 Shameless Sarah Palin Spoofs

Photos

Bristol and Levi: So Many Memories

Stories

• Are Evangelicals Really Sold on Palin?

She moved far away to attend college — at the University of Hawaii in Hilo — but she did so with a tight nucleus of three friends from high school, according to Kaylene Johnson, author of Sarah, a biography of Palin published earlier this year. The group quickly transferred to Hawaii Pacific University, but that didn't work out either; they missed the winters, Johnson says. Palin moved with one of the girls to North Idaho College in Coeur D'Alene in 1983. When Palin did finally strike out on her own, it was to transfer to the University of Idaho at Moscow — where her brother was enrolled. (See the top 10 unfortunate political one-liners.)

She graduated in 1987 with a degree in journalism and a minor in political science. She returned home to the valley and concentrated on commercial fishing and starting a family. On the side, she slowly eased into local politics, from PTA activism to a Wasilla citizens' group to a seat on the city council. Her family never got in the way, says Hansen. "She had her kids before she got in politics," she says. "She always had a lot of support from friends, from family." In Palin's convention speech, she described herself as "just your average hockey mom who signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my kids' public education better. When I ran for city council, I didn't need focus groups and voter profiles because I knew those voters and knew their families too." And they knew her.

The Making of a Pol
In her first big race, for mayor of Wasilla, Palin was a polarizing figure who introduced issues like abortion and gun control into a mayoral race that had traditionally been contested like a friendly intramural contest. John Stein, the mayor at the time, had helped Palin get into politics a few years earlier. He had no idea that he was about to become the first casualty of her ambitions. He doesn't begrudge her running against him — he had been in office for nine years — but he says she changed the stakes when she sought outside endorsements and injected hot-button politics into a small-town race. "It was always a nonpartisan job," he says. "But with her, the state GOP came in and started affecting the race."

Palin often describes that 1996 race as having been a fight against the old boys' club. Stein's memory is different. "It got to the extent that — I don't remember who it was now — but some national antiabortion outfit sent little pink cards to voters in Wasilla endorsing her," he says. Chas St. George, a Palin friend who worked on Stein's campaign, says he has no reason to dispute Stein's recollection of events but doesn't remember Palin's conduct as beyond the pale. "Our tax coffers were starting to grow," he says. "John was for expanding services, and Sarah wasn't. That's what the race was about."

One thing all sides agree on is that the valley was in flux. The old libertarian pioneer ethos was giving way to a rising Christian conservatism. By shrewdly invoking issues that mattered to the ascendant majority, she won the mayor's race. While she may have been a new face, says Victoria Naegele, who edited the local Frontiersman newspaper then, Palin also knew how to get the party establishment on her side. "The state party gave her the mechanism to get into that office," says Naegele. "As soon as she was confident enough to brush them off, she did. But she wasn't an outsider to start with. She very much had to kowtow to them."

Being mayor was, in the beginning, as contentious as campaigning for the job. Palin ended up dismissing almost all the city department heads who had been loyal to Stein, including a few who had been instrumental in getting her into politics to begin with. Irl Stambaugh, the police chief, filed a lawsuit for wrongful termination, alleging that Palin fired him in part at the behest of the National Rifle Association because he had opposed a concealed-gun law that the NRA supported. He lost the suit. The animosity spawned some talk of a recall attempt, but eventually Palin's opponents in the city council opted for a more conciliatory route.

Palin saw a larger future and presided over Wasilla's rapid expansion. Churches proliferated as well. "We like to call this the Bible Belt of Alaska," says Cheryl Metiva, executive director of the local chamber of commerce. Stein says that as mayor, Palin was as much about promoting conservative values as about promoting growth. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Emmons, couldn't be reached for comment. St. George, however, points out that Palin couldn't have seen everything through a religious lens; like all smart pols, she knows how to appeal to a broad constituency. She did, after all, resist calls to restrict operating hours for the bars in town.

See pictures of Republican memorabilia.

See pictures of 60 years of election night drama.