Word: alaskan
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...Outsider Palin's breakneck trajectory from rising star to former officeholder - with more twists sure to come - has everything to do with her Alaskan context. As the writer John McPhee once observed, "Alaska is a foreign country," a statement legally false but true in terms of culture and attitude and location. Recall how the story begins. It is June 2007, and a ship docks at the remote port of Juneau, a place tightly bound between sea and mountains. Down the gangplank walks a pair of pundits - Barnes and editor William Kristol - bound for lunch with an unknown first-year governor...
...Born to Run Her departure was a distillate of all things Palin. It packed the same gob-smacking wallop as her arrival on the GOP ticket. Sunlit against an Alaskan waterfront, it was as telegenic as her boffo acceptance speech. Rambling along in Palinesque fashion, she didn't quite tell us where she's headed, but she left no doubt that she remains in a hurry to get there...
...tough could she really be, having learned about politics in a state with almost as many square miles as people? Alaskan feuds are straightforward and personal, against a backdrop of "live and let live." Washington combat has an impersonal cruelty to it, reflected in a maxim of the strategist Lee Atwater: "Never kick a man when he's up." As Barnes and Kristol began feeding Palin's name into the swirl of Washington gossip known as the Great Mentioner, they might have overestimated how ready she was for battle in the big time...
...campaign ended but not the barrage. Since the election in November, Palin has been hit with at least 10 ethics complaints for such alleged offenses as allowing her picture to be used to promote Alaskan fisheries and wearing a logo on her snowmobile gear. One complaint was filed under a pseudonym borrowed from a British soap opera. Most were quickly dismissed. And yet, Palin says, she arrived at the conclusion that there would always be more and that the complaints would consume her remaining time as governor...
...weekend as a symbol, she says, of her new and exhilarating freedom. She's headed to a bookstore, a television set, a convention hall near you, armed with an anti-résumé. Cut loose from her obligations to her huge and awesome homeland, her message remains quintessentially Alaskan. Where she comes from - the last American frontier - the past is irrelevant, the rules are suspended, and limitations are for losers...