Sarah Palin: McCain's Brilliant Choice

John McCain made a bold choice by picking Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to join his ticket for the 2008 presidential campaign and it was a wise one on several fronts. Aside from the obvious benefits Palin brings to the campaign as a D.C. outsider, a bona fide conservative, and strong female voice, she also offers an cultural bent that seems only to grow on the Western front of the United States. In the frontier, Teddy Roosevelt said that America abandoned its cultural vassalage to Europe. Ronald Reagan sparked a revolution in California. And Barry Goldwater gave us western conservatism in 1964.

Roosevelt's badlands are developed now; Goldwater's civil-libertarianism has been mitigated by his successor; and Reagan's legislature has been gerrymandered back to the Democrats. But Alaska remains, as the state motto says, "the last frontier". It is still a place where people go to start new by escaping the rigors and hype (and sometimes the law) of the 'lower 48'. Its people maintain an almost-quixotic appreciation for deeds and accomplishments, rather than dynasties and family names. And Alaskan children are taught to revere not sports stars or pop icons, but men who land planes on glaciers and women who win 1400-mile dog sled races in February.

Sarah Palin personifies that culture. While Hillary Clinton fights to empower women, Palin comes from a place where they took charge on their own. They dug deep while men mined for gold, flew the Southeast archipelago, or like Todd Palin, went to sea in commercial fishing. Often that meant braving sub -zero temperatures, hunting and trapping for their families, and overall less reliance on niceties of urban life. While this rings true in to the history of any frontier state, in Alaska, it still is.

My wife's grandmother spent a winter in a tent in "downtown" Anchorage in the 40's. She dried the clothes by freezing the water out of them. My mother-in-law and the twelve siblings that she raised had a wood stove. They would wipe the soot off their noses in the morning and eat a slice of reindeer before hiking through waistdeep snow on the way to school. That was in the 60's, when Hillary Clinton was applying to Wellesly College. So when Sarah Palin says that she got up to go moose hunting before class, it doesn't seem that exotic. It just sounds about right. Alaskan women have gumption.

But Palin is more than an Alaskan woman. Having no female predecessor, she is the culmination of everything that is great about Alaskan women; she is strong female chief executive who can and did win a fortitude match against the good 'ol boys of the Alaskan GOP. Some say that´s nothing compared to Vladimir Putin, but they don't know Murkowski -or Ted Stevens -or Don Young. If she can break their triumvirate, she can play on an international stage. Stevens has been voted the most powerful man in the Senate several times, he is almost the longest serving member, and he is a one-man economy for the state. Murkowski directed musical offices with impunity until Palin came along. And Don Young has a reputation for coercing other congressmen. If nothing else, juggling their power bases, pulling away their votes, and convincing their donors to rock their own boats took some genuine diplomatic skill and a little bit of head-cracking. By contrast, Obama eased his way into the Senate with no opposition after voting "present" 130 times in the Illinois legislature.

Together, the Palins are even more than that. In an era where over 90% of Downs Syndrome babies are aborted before birth, the Palins debunk the left-wing charge that pro-lifers would not have the courage of their convictions when it came to their own reproductive woes. Some journalists report that Sarah Palin chose to "keep" her child, though I suspect she would explain that she never entertained an option. Sarah Palin has sharp mind, a lot of guts, and a reformer´s attitude. Todd Palin is a union member, a children´s hockey coach, and part Yup´ik native who looks like he could go the distance in a fistfight with a grizzly bear. There's even a chance that he has.

I will enjoy watching Palin punish people for underestimating her. She will be railed for not having enough foreign policy experience. But having observed Palin a little, I suspect she would like nothing more than to stand tall against the new Russian front. Or author a mutually-beneficial deal with Iran. At the very least, she´ll offer more than good rhetoric and a "present" vote.