Palin's Family Has Always Held a Place in Her Politics

"That growth happens to parallel Sarah Palin's growth," said Mike Chmielewski, a family friend and city council member in nearby Palmer.

Palin both claimed the area's heritage and rode the change. As mayor, she presided over a city whose coffers swelled with sales tax revenue from the big-box stores lining a highway once known for ramshackle trailers. She named a marketing company "Rouge Cou" -- "Red Neck" in French.

And through her husband, she could lay claim to much of Alaska.

Todd Palin arrived in Wasilla from Dillingham on Bristol Bay in the early 1980s, and cut such a figure at the high school that girls inked T-O-D-D on the back of their fingers, Kaylene Johnson wrote in her admiring biography of the governor. The newcomer chose Sarah Heath, daughter of a popular science teacher, and flirted with her from a two-way radio on the open boat his family used when the salmon ran up Bristol Bay.

Todd Palin claims Yupik Eskimo blood through his grandmother. When he took a job on the North Slope, working Arctic Circle oil pads for British Petroleum, the family's life assumed a rhythm familiar in Alaska: a week or two at home, a week or two on "the Slope."

And when he won the Iron Dog, he basically owned the state. The endurance race involves six days of steering a snowmobile at 80 mph. From its start in Wasilla, the course runs across two mountain ranges to Nome on the Bering Sea, then back down the Yukon River to Fairbanks.

The terrain is so rough that some days drivers pull their hands out of mittens bloody from blistering, and so dangerous that drivers must move in teams. With Scott Davis, who sells concrete block in Soldotna, Palin has won the race four times.

"He's always trying to give someone else credit," Davis said.

It's a useful quality in a political spouse. And long before Todd Palin followed his wife to Juneau, he was a fixture in her career.

Guests summoned to the governor's office often find Todd Palin sitting in on the meeting.

Tom Whitstine, a fellow Wasilla-based oil worker and friend, recalled raising concerns to Todd Palin about legislation that would impact the oil industry.

"I talked to Todd sitting on the couch in his house there on Safari Lake, in April 2007," said Whitstine, who expresses disappointment with Palin's performance. "It's a known fact Todd was right there when those kind of policy decisions were being made."