Palin family politics

Washington Post:

One Friday in June, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin joined the chief of the state prison system on a tour of the Point MacKenzie Correctional Farm, a 90-minute drive north of Anchorage. It was a routine visit but for the presence of the governor's infant son, Trig.

Palin held her baby in her arms as the warden drove a short distance around the facility, said corrections director Joe Schmidt, who sat next to Palin. A few days later, the governor got a warning from her public safety commissioner that someone had complained that she did not strap Trig into a car seat for the ride.

Palin dismissed the complaint as petty, and the commissioner, whom she appointed, took no formal action. But the incident shows the degree to which family and politics are bound together in Palin's career.

Of the many striking images of Palin -- sportswoman, beauty queen, populist -- in Alaska the most iconic is working mother, a perfectly coifed professional woman balancing public duties and child-rearing in a charismatic blur of multitasking. The governor shops at the Wal-Mart superstore off Parks Highway and drives the family Suburban herself. Under "business relationships" on a state disclosure form, she listed "family carpooling to youth basketball" because one of the parents is a lobbyist.

Long before she burst onto the national scene last month, Palin made politics a family affair in Alaska. Her role as a wife and mother shaped her entry into politics, proved central to her appeal to supporters and generated the greatest controversies in her abrupt ascension to the GOP ticket. From her children's names to her husband's public celebrity and role as unofficial adviser, Palin has created a reputation among Alaskans less as a rugged individual than as a maverick with a large and colorful family in tow.

Husband Todd, a celebrity in his own right as a champion snowmobile racer before becoming known as "First Dude," confers with Cabinet officials and is copied on the governor's e-mails. Her teenage daughter's pregnancy became a touchstone for a national debate on unwed mothers. And her sister's bitter divorce from a state trooper generated the first scandal in an administration built on vows of openness and rectitude amid a massive corruption investigation then rocking the Republican establishment.

Family offered a human touch as Palin, the mayor of an obscure municipality, positioned herself as a populist reformer against Alaska's notoriously staid and dynastic political order.

Then came the McCain campaign.

"I call her," said former aide Larry Persily, "the victor of circumstances."

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Todd Palin claims Yupik Eskimo blood through his grandmother. When he took a job on the North Slope, working Arctic Circle oil pads for British Petroleum, the family's life assumed a rhythm familiar in Alaska: a week or two at home, a week or two on "the Slope."

And when he won the Iron Dog, he basically owned the state. The endurance race involves six days of steering a snowmobile at 80 mph. From its start in Wasilla, the course runs across two mountain ranges to Nome on the Bering Sea, then back down the Yukon River to Fairbanks.

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"The Palins and the Heaths operate as one unit," said Karen Rhoades, a family friend in Wasilla. "They are not individuals."

Todd Palin works less on the Slope lately and more with the governor. She works most often out of an office in Anchorage, sometimes bringing in one of the children.

In Alaska, they no longer need introduction. Track, 19, was named after the course of the sockeye salmon the family fishes off Dillingham. As his mother frequently mentions on the campaign trail, he joined the Army in 2007 on the anniversary of Sept. 11.

Bristol, 17, was a reference point for environmental concerns long before she became an icon for the antiabortion movement. When reporters asked Palin about a proposed mine that might imperil the world's largest salmon fishery, she signaled her sensitivity to the matter by pointing out, "We named one of our children after Bristol Bay."

She is often photographed with 14-year-old Willow -- like the state bird, the willow ptarmigan, and a nearby town -- and Piper, 7, who shares a name with the bush plane parked at the dock outside the family's house.

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There is much more in a story that covers five internet pages.

It probably dwells too much on the gossip which it reports as such, but it gives you a pretty good idea of how she manages to weave her family into her job and make it work. I think it is still part of her appeal. I recall one of the early pictures of her shows a preschool Piper helping her campaign and waiving to passing cars. Piper was using that same waive as she stood on teh stage with her mother after her introductory speech.

Some have attempted to justify their use of Bristol as an argument against abstinence programs, by saying she was part of the family story that made up Palin's campaign. That is a rationalization that doesn't hold water. If Bristol was polluting Bristol Bay they might have a point, but she was never used by her mother as an example of birth control programs. On top of that the attack was off base anyway since Palin also supports education about contraceptives.