Alaska turns out to greet Palin

NY Times Caucus Blog:

The last time people in this state saw her in person, Sarah Palin was just their governor.

What a difference two weeks can deliver.

As an airplane carrying Governor Palin, now Senator John McCain’s running mate, touched down in her home state on Wednesday night, it was greeted by hundreds of residents waving signs and chanting her name as confetti spilled over them inside a nearby hangar.

“This is beautiful,” Ms. Palin told the crowd, after she and her husband, Todd, who have been campaigning for days, reunited with her infant son, Trig, and two of her daughters on a tarmac. She told members of her staff whom she spotted in the crowd that she could not wait to give them a hug. “Thank you for holding down the fort,” she said, “and thank you for carrying the water.”

Ms. Palin gave her own constituents a slight variation on the speech she has offered along the campaign trail in the lower 48; some of her stories of Alaska are already known to people here, and she seemed to offer a nod to that. She noted a state-owned luxury jet that she had sold on eBay when she took over as governor, an often repeated story — then glanced self consciously outside.

“I say that hopefully not sounding hypocritical as you watched me walk off that,” she said, pointing a finger at her new campaign plane, now painted with the words “McCain Palin” in blue and parked right outside.

The locals here, crammed into the hangar, some in fold-up chairs, did not seem to mind the new plane in the least.

“She’s a beautiful, good, decent woman with a wonderful family — just look at them,” said Inge Griffin, 76, who said she had lived in Alaska for 55 years and considers herself an unshakable advocate of the governor. Mrs. Griffin said she was less certain of how the rest of the nation has, so far, treated Governor Palin.

...

This photo gives an idea of the turnout. She continues to draw huge crowds of well wishers wherever she speaks. Some stories had pegged this crowd as a few hundred. The Times photo shows a very large crowd and they were not all media. Her plane was packed with a media entourage that had to remove some of their equipment before the plane could take off.

Palin will be seeing her son off to Iraq today. I suspect there will be another large audience.