Sarah Palin...fisherwoman to guv.

marjorie says...

Here's an interesting piece on Sarah Palin by one of my fellow writers at the New Mexico Independent, Joel Gay:

The Sarah Palin I knew

As a longtime Alaska journalist and resident who once knew Gov. Sarah Palin and followed her political rise, I have to wonder what John McCain was thinking when he asked her to be his vice presidential nominee.

Sure, she's a lot of things McCain is, was or needs. The 44-year-old is a political maverick, a Republican who challenged the Alaska GOP's old-boy network and won. She is a fiscal and social conservative who opposes abortion rights. She's a photogenic former beauty queen with five kids, including one just born with Down syndrome and another in the Army heading to Iraq. She's a commercial fisherman and a moose hunter and her husband races snowmobiles.

In many respects she's the perfect choice, a combination of exotic and salt-of-the-earth to balance concerns that McCain is too old, too white and too rich. But there are so many questions surrounding his decision that I can hardly imagine how Palin will strengthen the McCain candidacy. And I like her.

Or at least I did when I knew her in the 1990s. She and her husband, Todd, had a commercial salmon fishing operation in Bristol Bay, and I operated the tender boat that steamed by their site daily and purchased their fish. Sarah and Todd were smart, polite and cheerful — not exactly common traits among setnetters — and I counted them among my favorite fishermen, not to mention my top salmon producers.

Read the rest over at the NMI