Palin's Home Town Expresses Surprise, Shock at Selection
Some Locals Critical of Governor's Ability

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 31, 2008

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.

"I would've thought that McCain would go for someone more experienced, someone who had been in and out of the country. It was a shock," said Lewis, 52, raising his voice to be heard over the chain saw carving a likeness of a grizzly bear out of block of wood at the Alaska State Fair in nearby Palmer.

Sawdust drifting into his salt-and-pepper beard, Lewis added: "She seems like she cares about the common-law man. I feel like she cares about me."

A few stalls away, past the I Did A Putt miniature golf course, Korey Cronquist paused from polishing a jet black Ski-Doo snowmobile. Through his company's Wasilla dealership, and moving in the racing circles with Todd, he has spent a fair amount of time with the Palins.

"I know her character, and I know she has integrity," Cronquist, 38, said of the governor. "She's driven, motivated. She's a strong person. And because of all that, I knew she wasn't going to stop with our little town."

Palin's primary residence remains in Wasilla. When the legislature is in session, she decamps to the governor's mansion in Juneau. The rest of the time, she commutes to an office in Anchorage decorated by a grizzly bear skin and a enormous king crab, often stopping along the way at the Mocha Moose to order a skinny white caffe latte.

As mayor from 1996 to 2002, Palin encouraged development in Wasilla -- where a new Target and other big-box retailers line the highway -- by slashing property taxes, residents say. Then she pushed for a sales tax, arguing it was the fairest way to raise revenue in a town that has about 7,000 residents but that serves a valley population 10 times as large.

"If you went to city council meetings -- and I went to a lot of them -- she didn't make a quick decision," said Bruce Nicholson, who owns a local concrete grinding and polishing businesses. "She took it under advisement. She thought things out."

But Palin also showed nerve, he said. Her resolve in standing up to oil companies in the legislature, which voted to increase taxes on the firms, was presaged by her effort to build a trail between Wasilla's lakes.

"Rather than bending to the old folks -- the people who were the status quo, the people who'd made decisions for years -- she did what was in the best interests of the people," he said. "She's not part of a political machine."

That reputation for independence has defined Palin in Alaska far more than her stance on socially conservative issues that made her selection so popular with the national GOP base. In Alaska, an abortion-opposing, pro-gun politician is, in many ways, simply a politician, and it is unusual to find a resident who is against drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

But in a political establishment badly tainted by oil money, Palin stood out vividly.

In high school, "she was just a person you admire," said Susan DeCamp, 41, who was a freshman when Palin (then Sarah Heath) was a senior in Wasilla, where her father taught science. But when she made the move to state politics, it was as a member of the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. On the way to forcing out a fellow member who was chairman of the state Republican Party, because of a conflict of interest, she resigned herself after 11 months on the job, leaving a salary exceeding $100,000 in the name of integrity.

Palin's decision served her well when the federal investigation of Alaska politics burst into public view in 2006, just as she was running for governor. The candidate cruised into office by dovetailing demands for open government with professions of love for Alaska. She began her term with public approval ratings in the 90s.

Less than two years later, Palin can boast several victories in the legislature, including a bill to create a pipeline that would ship Alaska's currently untapped natural gas to the Lower 48 states. But she has also caught her first whiff of scandal. Lawmakers appointed a special prosecutor to investigate whether Palin or her staff improperly pushed to have fired a state trooper who went through an ugly divorce from Palin's sister.

"This is a new arena she's got invited into," said Ralph Moore, 57, a Wasilla laborer. "It'll be interesting to see how much she learns between now and then, how much they teach her.

"They say she's a quick study, because no one thought she was ready to be governor."