Throughout, her pursuits appeared to be typically Alaskan: She spent a summer working at the Alyeska Seafoods processing plant in Dutch Harbor, America's largest seafood port.
"She used to work for me," said Frank Kelty, who at the time was the plant manager. "She took butchered crab portions and arranged them in a basket for cooking."
She enjoyed hunting, she told Vogue, and felt no qualms about shooting caribou.
"That caribou has had a good life. It's been free out there on the tundra, not caged up on a farm with no place to go," she said.
While her husband fished and worked in the oil fields, she moved quickly from the PTA to the Wasilla City Council, in 1992. Four years later, she bumped off a three-term incumbent to become mayor of the town, near Anchorage.
During her tenure, the flashes of the future governor arose: not terribly communicative, running a little roughshod.
"Some of the things I'm doing, it's obvious I'm not running for Miss Congeniality," she said, citing a title she had won in the Miss Alaska contest. "I'm running the city."
It was not until her term-limited departure from that job that she burnished her reformist credentials, much cited by the McCain campaign Friday.
After being appointed to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, she filed an ethics complaint against a fellow panelist, who happened to be the state Republican Party chairman. That presaged her 2006 gubernatorial race, when she defeated Republican incumbent Frank Murkowski and another candidate in the primary, and former Democratic governor Tony Knowles in November.
As governor, she has struck populist positions. She laid off the chef in the governor's mansion -- no need for that, she said -- and often drives herself around town.
"She's got perfect political pitch," said Jake Metcalf, former chairman of the state Democratic Party. "She's just been able to get in with issues and get press on it, and she knows sort of what the public wants to hear and has been able to place her positions around those sort of issues that are important to people here, the values that are important to people here.
"I don't think you can underestimate her as a politician," he said.
Two years after taking office, Palin remains enormously popular, in large part because many of the state's other politicians have been embroiled in ethics scandals.
