Palin's Home Town Expresses Surprise, Shock at Selection

Some Locals Critical of Governor's Ability

WASILLA, Alaska, Aug. 30 -- Sarah Palin grew up, played basketball, wore a tiara and first stood for office in this town that is really an incorporated cluster of strip malls and lumber yards, 45 miles up the broad valley leading north from Anchorage. The newest and least-known figure in national politics has been known all along in Wasilla, where the governor lives with her husband and five children on Lake Lucille.

And yet, Sen. John McCain's announcement that Palin was his choice for vice president astonished Wasilla as nowhere else.

"It's kind of a shock. I think she's in a little over her head," Eric Thaler, 34, said over breakfast at the Mat-Su Family Restaurant. "But I think, of anybody, she's the kind of person who can rise to an occasion."

"She handles things with such grace," said his wife, Kelly Thaler, whose father employed the future governor 25 years ago to do office work for his land surveying business. "She handles tough questions well. It's hard to get elected -- to be a woman and get elected -- in Alaska.

"It's big, but it's small. Everybody knows everybody."

Palin's selection confounded an Alaska political establishment already shaken to its foundations by the indictment of its senior senator, and by the continuing suspense over whether its sole congressman survived a primary five days ago that will be decided by absentee ballots not yet counted.

There was snide criticism from the Republican establishment that Palin fought in her underdog gubernatorial campaign in 2006, after six years as Wasilla's mayor.

"She's not prepared to be governor; how can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" said state Senate President Lyda Green, a Wasilla Republican who told the Anchorage Daily News that she at first thought news of Palin's selection was a joke.

The criticism was no less sharp from the minority Democrats whom Palin worked beside to push through legislation, including a $1,200 check to every Alaskan to cover higher fuel costs.

"I think John McCain won the state of Alaska but lost the nation," said state Sen. Hollis French, an Anchorage Democrat. "I think her inexperience is going to cause many, many voters to think twice before voting for him."

Yet in the wide, green valley called the Mat-Su, where farmers make the most of the Last Frontier's brief growing season on the deltas formed by a web of rivers running into Cook Inlet, reaction to Palin's abrupt ascent appeared to depend on how well the person claimed to know her.

Louis Lewis made the governor's acquaintance only at Wasilla parties that brought together competitive snow machiners. Palin's husband, Todd, and his partner are three-time winners of the Iron Dog snowmobile marathon, which runs on the Iditarod dogsled course. Racers who endure the course qualify as local celebrities in their own right.