Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska
Sarah Louise Heath Palin ( born February 11, 1964) is the governor of the U.S. state of Alaska and the Republican Party's vice-presidential nominee for the United States presidential election of 2008.

Palin was a member of the Wasilla, Alaska city council from 1992 to 1996 and mayor from 1996 to 2002. After an unsuccessful campaign for lieutenant governor of Alaska in 2002, she chaired the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission from 2003 to 2004. She was elected governor of Alaska in November 2006 by defeating the incumbent governor in the Republican primary and a former two-term Democratic governor in the general election. She is the youngest person to have been elected to the position, and is Alaska's first female governor.

On August 29, 2008, Republican presidential candidate John McCain announced that he had chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Palin was formally nominated at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She is the first woman to run on the Republican Party's presidential ticket and the first Alaskan nominee of either major party.

Governor of Alaska

In 2006, running on a clean-government platform, Palin defeated incumbent Governor Frank Murkowski in the Republican gubernatorial primary.Her running mate was State Senator Sean Parnell.

Despite being outspent by her Democratic opponent, she won the gubernatorial election in November, defeating former governor Tony Knowles 48.3% to 40.9%. Palin became Alaska's first female governor and at 42, the youngest governor in Alaskan history. She is the state's first governor to have been born after Alaska achieved U.S. statehood, and the first not to be inaugurated in Juneau; she chose to have the ceremony held in Fairbanks instead. She took office on December 4, 2006 and has been very popular with Alaska voters. Polls taken in 2007 early in her term showed her with a 93% and 89% popularity among all voters, which led some media outlets to call her "the most popular governor in America." A poll taken in late September 2008 after Palin was named to the national Republican ticket shows her popularity in Alaska at 68%.

Palin declared that top priorities of her administration would be resource development, education and workforce development, public health and safety, and transportation and infrastructure development. She had championed ethics reform throughout her election campaign. Her first legislative action after taking office was to push for a bipartisan ethics reform bill. She signed the resulting legislation in July 2007, calling it a "first step" declaring that she remains determined to clean up Alaska politics.

Palin has sometimes broken with the state Republican establishment. For example, she endorsed Sean Parnell's bid to unseat the state's longtime at-large U.S. Representative, Don Young. Palin has publicly challenged Senator Ted Stevens to come clean about the ongoing federal investigation into his financial dealings. Shortly before his July 2008 indictment, she held a joint news conference with Stevens, described by The Washington Post as needed "to make clear she had not abandoned him politically."

Palin promoted oil and natural gas resource development in Alaska, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where such development has been the subject of a national debate.

In 2006, Palin obtained a passport and in 2007 traveled for the first time outside of North America on a trip to Kuwait. There she visited the Khabari Alawazem Crossing at the Kuwait–Iraq border and met with members of the Alaska National Guard at several bases. On her return trip to the U.S., she visited injured soldiers in Germany.

2008 Vice-presidential campaign

On August 29, 2008, in Dayton, Ohio, Republican presidential candidate John McCain announced that he had chosen Palin as his running mate. McCain met Palin in a February National Governors Association, and it is reported that she made a favorable impression on him. He called Palin on August 24 to discuss the possibility of having her join him on the ticket. As of July, Palin was one of those rumored to be under consideration though Palin expressed to an interviewer that she was unfamiliar with the duties of the Vice President and the productivity of the position. On August 27, Palin visited McCain's vacation home near Sedona, Arizona, where she was offered the position of vice-presidential candidate. Palin was the only prospective running mate who had a face-to-face interview with McCain to discuss joining the ticket that week. Nonetheless, Palin's selection was a surprise to many as speculation had centered on other candidates, such as Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, United States Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge.

Palin is the second woman to run on a major U.S. party ticket. The first was Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1984, who ran with former vice-president Walter Mondale. On September 3, 2008, Palin delivered a 40-minute acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that was well-received and watched by more than 40 million viewers.

Since Palin was largely unknown outside of Alaska before her selection by McCain, her personal life, positions, and political record drew intense media attention and scrutiny. Some Republicans felt that Palin was being subjected to unreasonable media coverage, a sentiment Palin noted in her acceptance speech. A poll taken immediately after the Republican convention found that slightly more than half of Americans believed that the media was "trying to hurt" Palin with negative coverage.

During the campaign, controversy erupted over alleged differences between Sarah Palin's positions as a gubernatorial candidate and her position as a vice-presidential candidate. While campaigning for vice-president, Palin touted her stance on "the bridge to nowhere" as an example of her opposition to pork barrel spending.. In her nomination acceptance speech and on the campaign trail, Palin has often said, "I told the Congress 'thanks, but no thanks,' on that Bridge to Nowhere." Although Palin was originally a main proponent of the Gravina Island Bridge, McCain-Palin television advertisements assert that Palin "stopped the Bridge to Nowhere." These statements have been widely questioned or described as misleading or exaggerations[ by many media groups in the U.S. Newsweek remarked, "Now she talks as if she always opposed the funding."

In September 2008, a hacker accessed a Yahoo! email account Palin uses, hoping to "derail her campaign,"[ and precipitating an investigation by the FBI and Secret Service. On October 8, 2008, David Kernell, 20, the son of a Democratic Tennessee state lawmaker, entered a plea of not guilty in federal court in Knoxville, the same day prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging him with intentionally accessing Palin's e-mail account without authorization.

A series of polls suggested that Palin boosted John McCain's campaign and excited the Republican base. The McCain campaign briefly reversed its poll deficit. Palin may have boosted support among white mothers. A WSJ/NBC News poll taken on September 9 indicated that 34% of respondents were more likely to vote for McCain as a result of the Palin pick, while 25% were less likely. McCain chose Palin, in part, due to her potential to rally Christian conservatives behind his campaign.

After announcing Palin as McCain's running mate, McCain's campaign initially restricted press access to Palin, allowing three one-on-one interviews and no press conferences with her. Among the news organizations that criticized the restrictions were Newsweek and Time, but they still put Palin on their covers. Palin's first major interview, with Charles Gibson of ABC News, met with mixed reviews. Her interview five days later with Fox News's Sean Hannity went smoothly, with Hannity focusing on many of the same questions from Gibson's interview. However, Palin's performance in her third interview, with Katie Couric of CBS News, was widely criticized, prompting a decline in her poll numbers, concern among Republicans that she was becoming a political liability, and calls from some conservative commentators for Palin to resign from the Presidential ticket. Other conservatives remain ardent in their support for Palin, accusing the columnists of elitism. Following this interview, some Republicans, including Mitt Romney and William Kristol, questioned the McCain campaign's strategy of sheltering Palin from unscripted encounters with the press.

Palin was reported to have prepared intensively for the October 2 vice-presidential debate with Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Joe Biden at Washington University in St. Louis. Some Republicans suggested that Palin's performance in the interviews would improve public perceptions of her debate performance by lowering expectations. Polling from CNN, Fox and CBS found that while Palin exceeded most voters' expectations, they felt that Biden had won the debate.

Upon returning to the campaign trail after her debate preparation, Palin stepped up her attacks on the Democratic candidate for President, Senator Barack Obama. At a fundraising event, Palin explained her new aggressiveness, saying, "There does come a time when you have to take the gloves off and that time is right now." In a campaign appearance on October 4, Palin accused Obama of regarding America as "so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." The accusation referred to a New York Times article describing Obama's contacts with Bill Ayers, a founder of the 1960s radical group called the Weathermen. The Obama campaign called the allegation a "smear", citing newspaper commentaries critical of Palin's attack.

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