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Sarah Palin

Also known as: Sarah Louise Heath, Sarah Heath Palin

Birth: February 11, 1964 in Sandpoint, Idaho, United States
Nationality: American
Occupation: governor
Source: Newsmakers, Issue 1. Gale, 2009.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

2006, 42-year-old Sarah Palin became the first female governor of Alaska and the youngest person ever elected to lead the state. Palin bested opponents with far more political experience, but her victory at the polls was viewed as a sign of deep voter dissatisfaction with Alaska's longtime power elite in the wake of an embarrassing ethics scandal. The Anchorage-area "hockey mom" had long challenged an entrenched political establishment, dating back to her first win at the polls in the early 1990s. "I recognized that if we had the same good old boys serving, nothing would change," she explained to Vogue's Rebecca Johnson about what drew her to politics back then. "We needed some new blood. I also recognized that you had to be the top dog to make those changes."

Palin was born in 1964 in Idaho as the third of four children in a competitive, sports-mad family. A few months later, her parents moved to the town of Skagway, on Alaska's Panhandle, when her father took a teaching job there. Later they relocated to the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, a collection of suburbs surrounding Anchorage known by locals as Mat-Su Valley or simply "the Valley." Like many Alaska teens, Palin grew up to become an avid sport fisher and hunter.

Palin spent her formative years in the town of Wasilla, where her father, Chuck, served as a science teacher and cross-country coach at Wasilla High School. She proved to be an exceptional athlete, and was the point guard and co-captain of the Wasilla Warriors women's basketball team that won the 1982 state championship title. Her teen years also included a stint as Miss Wasilla 1984 after entering the pageant to win college scholarship money. Though she did not win the Miss Alaska crown, she did walk away with the Miss Congeniality title.

The scholarship funds helped finance Palin's journalism studies at the University of Idaho, and she earned her degree in 1987. A year later, she eloped with her high-school boyfriend, Todd Palin, and soon began a family. Her husband is part Alaska Native, and as such had inherited a valuable commercial fishing license passed down from his Yupik grandparents. During the summers, Palin, her husband, and their growing brood decamped to a site on the Nushagak River in Bristol Bay to collect the annual sockeye run. Todd Palin was also an oil-field worker on Alaska's North Slope, and prior to entering politics Palin worked as a sportscaster on Anchorage television stations and for the local utility company.

Palin first ran for a seat on the Wasilla city council in 1992 on a pro-business, anti-sales tax ticket, and won. The next few years saw immense growth in Wasilla and throughout the rest of the Valley, and the area's political allegiances shifted accordingly from Democratic to Republican. In 1996, Palin was elected mayor of Wasilla, beating out several more experienced candidates for the full-time job leading the city of 6,000. Her first term was marked by some hard feelings and even a brief recall movement that failed to gather steam after she fired the police chief, who had been a supporter of the previous mayor. In an interview with Anchorage Daily News writer Tom Kizzia, she conceded there were some difficulties during that transition phase. "It was rough with a staff who didn't want to be there working with a new boss," she said. "I learned you've got to be very discerning early on and decide if you can win them over or not. If you can't, you replace them early on."

Palin entered the Republican primary for lieutenant governor in 2002 but lost to Loren Leman, the first person of Alaska Native ancestry to be elected to statewide office. The winner of the gubernatorial contest was Republican Frank Murkowski, a former U.S. senator, who then appointed Palin to serve on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. The Commission serves as the regulatory body for the state's immense oil and natural-gas fields, and the only other member was another new appointee, Randy Ruedrich, who was also chair of Alaska's Republican Party. Early on, Palin was troubled by the ties that Ruedrich maintained with executives of the oil and gas companies that the Commission was charged with regulating; she also raised questions about Ruedrich conducting Republican Party business during work hours.

Palin alerted Murkowski of possible ethics violations and filed a complaint with the state attorney general's office. She took her concerns to the press after becoming convinced that neither Murkowski's office nor the attorney general were interested in fully pursuing the matter, and the resulting coverage incited a firestorm of controversy and a more formal investigation. In the end, Ruedrich resigned, pled guilty, and was fined $12,000, and the state attorney general also resigned. By this time Palin had stepped down from her seat on the Commission after less than a year on the job. "A good friend told me that in politics either you eat well or you sleep well," Kizzia quoted her as saying. "I wasn't sleeping well."

In speaking out against Ruedrich's misdeeds, Palin had made some powerful enemies among the state's longtime Republican elite, and her political career was considered to be all but over. The corruption charges she voiced were not new, however, and the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into payoffs made to legislators serving in the state house by lobbyists for the oil and commercial fishing industries. The probe and subsequent indictments would end the careers of several prominent figures in Alaska politics, among them Murkowski and the senior member of Alaska's Republicans, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, who had led the push toward statehood back in the late 1950s. Among those charged were Stevens' son Ben, president of Alaska's Senate, and Murkowski's chief of staff; several more lawmakers were indicted on charges of accepting bribes in exchange for their vote not to increase Alaska's tax on oil profits.

Palin announced her run for Alaska governor in 2006 in the midst of this federal probe. Few gave her a legitimate chance of winning, but as the investigation widened, she beat Murkowski in the Republican primary; days later, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided the offices of several lawmakers, Ted Stevens among them--a dramatic setback for Alaska's Republican leadership. Palin's main opponent in the gubernatorial race was Democrat Tony Knowles, a former Alaska governor who had already served two consecutive terms, but she beat him by a margin of 17,000 votes.

Palin was inaugurated as Alaska's first female governor and its youngest, too, in early December of 2006. During her first year in office, she followed through on a campaign promise to revive a controversial natural gas pipeline scheme. Her predecessor, Murkowski, had invited the three major oil companies--Exxon, BP, and ConocoPhillips--to build it, but because they also owned the natural-gas reserves, the state legislature feared that it would prove another conflict of interest. While the state is rich in oil, particularly on the valuable North Slope, fears of declining reserves made Alaskans nervous about the state's economic future, which is heavily dependent on revenues from corporate oil taxes. The proposed pipeline would tap the rich natural gas reserves underneath the North Slope for sale to energy companies that supply the American Midwest. In March of 2007, Palin introduced the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (AGIA), which invited proposals from several different companies under stricter guidelines that had been hammered out by lawmakers, and it was approved by the legislature almost unanimously. Transcanada Corporation won the job, which would cost an estimated $26 billion and run a pipeline from the North Slope to Calgary, Alberta, that would be fully operational by 2018.

Palin also fulfilled a pledge to reduce waste and spending in Juneau, the state capital. She sold Murkowski's much-derided private jet on eBay and cancelled Ted Stevens' famous "Bridge to Nowhere" project, which allocated $330 million in federal funds to connect an island airport to the town of Ketchikan on the Alaska Panhandle. Public-opinion polls give her consistently high marks, with 90 percent or more in approval ratings.

Palin's second year in office was marked by the birth of her fifth child, a son named Trig who was born with Down Syndrome. Her oldest son, Track, was by then serving in the U.S. Army, which made his mother one of a rare number of elected officials with sons or daughters on active military duty. He completed infantry training at Fort Benning, Georgia, in January of 2008 and was likely to see combat duty in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Palin has voiced support for the Bush Administration's proposal to open up a long-protected federal area, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to developers, but it was Track's decision to enlist "that made it personal for me," she told Johnson in Vogue. "This kid is doing everything he can to protect the safety of the United States. Are we? Are we producing a domestic, secure form of energy instead of relying on foreign sources? We need to be doing more."

Palin and her husband also have three daughters: Bristol, Willow, and Piper. The first was named after Bristol Bay, where the family still operates their commercial fishing site every summer. They live near Lake Lucille in Wasilla, and Palin still hunts and fishes in her spare time; asked her favorite dish, she is apt to reply moose stew or moose burgers. She is a lifelong member of the National Rifle Association and also belongs to the pro-life group Feminists for Life. A conservative on wildlife and conservation issues, in 2008 she penned an editorial piece for the New York Times in which she argued against a proposal to add the polar bear to the list of endangered species, which would have given it added protections under the federal Endangered Species Act. Environmental activists warn that greenhouse gases have caused polar ice to melt at a troublesome new pace, which has imperiled the bears. Palin pointed out that Alaska's 5,000 polar bears already benefit from careful monitoring and protection efforts. "Polar bears are magnificent animals, not cartoon characters," she wrote. "They are worthy of our utmost efforts to protect them and their arctic habitat. But adding polar bears to the nation's list of endangered species, as some are now proposing, should not be part of those efforts."

In the summer of 2008, as the presidential election campaigns of both Democratic and Republican parties intensified, Palin's name was sometimes mentioned as a possible running mate for Arizona Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee. A journalist with the Seattle Times, Erika Bolstad, noted the "undeniable national buzz surrounding [Palin], seen by many Republicans both within Alaska and outside the state as a fresh, new face to represent the party's future." She was even the subject of a Web site launched by a Colorado college student, "Draft Sarah Palin for Vice President." To the surprise of many, on August 29, 2008, McCain announced that Palin would be his running mate in the upcoming presidential election.

Media coverage of Palin rarely fails to note that she was once a beauty pageant contestant, and usually includes some mention that her fans have dubbed her America's most attractive governor. "I wish they'd stick with the issues instead of discussing my black go-go boots," she joked with Johnson, the Vogue writer. "A reporter once asked me about it during the campaign, and I assured him I was trying to be as frumpy as I could by wearing my hair on top of my head and these schoolmarm glasses, but he said, 'No, that's not what I mean.' I guess I was naive, but when I hear people talk about it I just want to escort them back to the Neanderthal cave while we get down to business."

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Born Sarah Louise Heath, February 11, 1964, in Sandpoint, ID; daughter of Chuck (a teacher and coach) and Sally (a school secretary) Heath; married Todd Palin (an oil production operator), 1988; children: Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, Trig. Education: University of Idaho, B.S., 1987. Addresses: Home--Wasilla, AK. Office--Alaska State Capitol Bldg. Third Fl., P.O. Box 110001, Juneau, AK 99811-0001.

CAREER

Sportscaster, KTUU-TV (Anchorage, AK), c. 1988; sports reporter, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman (AK), c. 1988; worked for a utility company, c. 1988; elected to the Wasilla (AK) city council, 1992; elected mayor of Wasilla, 1996; elected governor of Alaska, 2006; named vice-presidential running mate by Senator John McCain, 2008.
Member: Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, chair, 2003-04.

SOURCE CITATION

"Sarah Palin." Newsmakers, Issue 1. Gale, 2009.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2009.
http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC

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