She has been known, at times, as “Sarah Barracuda”. It began with her ferocity on the high school basketball court.
As co-captain her senior year, Sarah Palin was a point guard who made the final free throw that won the Wasilla Warriors their first state championship.
A decade later, the nickname resurfaced when she was a 28-year-old political novice on the Wasilla City Council.
She turned on a veteran council member who had coaxed her to run for office, blocking a bill that would have steered business to his garbage-hauling firm.
The moniker was revived once again in 2003, when Alaska’s governor, whom she would later unseat, appointed her to a state oil-and-gas commission.
As a brand-new member, she challenged the ethics of the panel’s leader, the chairman of state’s Republican Party, forcing him ultimately to resign.
Since long before she became Alaska’s youngest — and first female — governor 20 months ago, Sarah Louise Heath Palin has been making her mark as an unlikely upstart.
Last Friday, she did it again, accepting Senator John McCain’s surprise offer to be his running mate.
Palin, a 44-year-old mother of five who hunts caribou and was once a beauty queen, rose to the statehouse by challenging the corruption that has become endemic in Alaska, even if it meant taking on the Republican establishment there, including the former governor and the state’s congressional delegation.
Although her resume does not fit the mold of most vice-presidential nominees, her acts of dissidence appear to have endeared her to McCain, who regards himself as an independent-minded Republican.
Her evangelical Christian faith — she believes in creationism and is adamantly opposed to abortion — may help him court sceptical social conservatives.
Her swift ascent is regarded by some in Alaska as a case of fortunate timing, for someone who possesses the right outsider’s tactics at the right political moment.
Others cite driving ambition and instinctive opportunism — a willingness to turn on political patrons to get ahead.
One of her central gubernatorial campaign pledges — to clean up the state’s government — has been called into question by critics because of an investigation into whether the state public safety commissioner was fired because he refused requests to dismiss a state trooper who had been married to her younger sister.
Born in Idaho, Palin became an Alaskan as an infant when her parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, settled in Wasilla, about 45 miles north of Anchorage.
Palin’s official biography describes it as a place with a “reputation for junky yards and cranky land-owners who didn’t mind using the serious end of a shotgun to run off trespassers.”
The third of four children, Palin was shaped by her father’s love of sports and her mother’s Christian faith.
Palin entered the Miss Wasilla beauty pageant and won, playing the flute for her talent. She went on to compete for Miss Alaska and was a runner-up.
She began to date Todd Palin, a part Yup’ik Eskimo who grew up in the bush of a native Alaskan village, when he transferred to Wasilla’s high school to play basketball.
She went off to college, studying first in Hawaii before transferring to the University of Idaho, where she majored in journalism with a minor in political science.
Not long after she returned to Wasilla, she and Todd Palin eloped at the local courthouse, recruiting two strangers from the senior citizen housing across the street to serve as witnesses.
Palin worked as a television sportscaster and weather reporter and was 28 when she set her sights on the Wasilla City Council.
A social conservative in tune with the town, Palin easily won a seat. Along the way, she made an enemy of her political patron.
She then ousted the three-term incumbent Republican mayor, winning by 211 votes, according to her biography.
“She’s conservative in ideology, but she’s very practical,” said lobbyist Paul Fuhs, who battled Palin over the gas line and eventually reached a compromise. “What you see is what you get. She’s very upfront.”
