She's no good ol' boy

The country, most of it anyway, got its first glimpse Friday of Sarah Heath Palin, John McCain's selection as his running mate, and the reaction was nearly universal:

Who?

Palin is breathtakingly unlike any other vice presidential pick in American history -- a gun-toting, mooseburger-eating former Miss Wasilla, an Alaska governor whose parents nearly missed her national unveiling because they were out hunting caribou.

The first woman to grace a Republican ticket stepped onto the stage with McCain in Dayton, Ohio, surrounded by her husband and four of their five children, including a baby born in April. The tableau of everyday mom-ness, however, may have masked the ambition and grit that have marked Palin's meteoric rise in Alaska.

Two years ago, she knocked off the sitting Republican governor in the primary and a former Democratic governor in the general. Her relations with Alaska officialdom have not always been sunny, resuscitating a nickname given when, as a high schooler, she led her basketball team to the state championship: "Sarah Barracuda."

By her own telling, Palin's political rise has been improbable.

Born in Idaho, she moved as a baby to Alaska with her science teacher father and school secretary mother, part-time trappers who seemed to personify the quirky Alaska spirit. (Her father, Chuck, to a Vogue magazine reporter recently angling for an interview: "Come on over, unless you have a problem with small dead animals." The magazine reported that a thousand caribou antlers were piled near the driveway of their home.)

Palin was baptized as a Catholic but later began attending the Wasilla Assembly of God church. At age 12 she, her mother and sisters were re-baptized in nearby Beaver Lake. The former pastor of her new church would give the invocation at her inauguration.

As a child, sports gave a structure to her ambition, she told the Anchorage Daily News shortly before her election as governor.

"I know this sounds hokey, but basketball was a life-changing experience for me," she said. "It's all about setting a goal, about discipline, teamwork and then success."

Palin led her school basketball team to the state championship in 1982 and was a runner-up in the Miss Alaska contest two years later. (She reported with some consternation that the judges were too interested in the contestants' derrieres.) In 1988, she and her high school boyfriend, Todd Palin, eloped and began raising a family.