Word: palin
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...Sarah Palin is that most exotic of American creatures: an Alaska original, raised and ripened in an environment remote, extreme, unfamiliar - and free. A land of self-invention, where no one bats an eye at a mom-deckhand-governor-whatever-comes-next. Ever since John McCain introduced his running mate last year, Palin has been like a modern-day version of the captive specimens hauled back to Europe by explorers of old. Like Squanto in London, she speaks the language - if not always the idiom - of the audiences she fascinates. But she remains, on some level, unknowable...
...This outsider quality is easy to ignore when you see her in full dazzle on a convention stage, but it comes into focus should you find her in her habitat. After announcing plans on July 3 to resign as governor after just 2½ years, Palin retired to her in-laws' place in Dillingham, a tiny fishing village in southwestern Alaska, reachable only by boat or plane. TIME caught up to her there. It was salmon season, and thick fillets, red from the smokehouse, were drying on a line strung from a nearby tree. Husband Todd Palin was chopping wood...
...woman in a blue T-shirt - "Go Slam a Salmon," it reads - about her plans to run for President? And yet this was the place where her answer finally made sense. It included none of the strange ramblings of her televised resignation speech, which managed, in pure Palin style, to be both plainspoken and inscrutable. For example: "Take the words of General MacArthur. He said, 'We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.' " And "Do you want me to make a positive difference and fight for all our children's future from outside the governor's office?" (Read...
...With salmon and wood smoke fragrant in the endless summer evening, amid wet socks and waders and red rubber fishing gloves, Palin tells TIME, "I cannot predict what's going to happen. I don't know what doors will be open or closed by then. I was telling Todd today, I was saying, 'Man, I wish we could predict the next fish run so that we know when to be out on the water.' We can't predict the next fish run, much less what's going to happen...
...even a flat no can mean maybe, this answer will almost certainly be taken to mean "Yes, she's running," heedless of the widely spouted view that she blew her chance with the decision to quit her current job. Left, right and center, pundits opined on the lightness of Palin's résumé and her vanished chance to beef it up. How could she seek a promotion when she didn't finish the job she had? Even a fan like columnist Fred Barnes, writing in the pro-Palin Weekly Standard, declared glumly, "Forget about Sarah Palin...