This article is by Jo Becker, Peter S. Goodman and Michael Powell.


WASILLA, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.


So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of
Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister,
to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms.
Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for
running the roughly $2 million agency.


Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin
hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.


When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the
legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with
her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is
not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative
projects.


And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who
chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her
phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.


“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”


Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old
boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic
44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval
ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to
her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals,
Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.


But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla
and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for
attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” —
contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.


Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired
officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between
government and personal grievance, according to a review of public
records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators
and local officials.


Still, Ms. Palin has many supporters. As a two-term mayor she paved
roads and built an ice rink, and as governor she has pushed through
higher taxes on the oil companies that dominate one-third of the
state’s economy. She stirs deep emotions. In Wasilla, many residents
display unflagging affection, cheering “our Sarah” and hissing at her
critics.


“She is bright and has unfailing political instincts,” said Steve
Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska. “She taps very
directly into anxieties about the economic future.”


“But,” he added, “her governing style raises a lot of hard questions.”


Ms. Palin declined to grant an interview for this article. The
McCain-Palin campaign responded to some questions on her behalf and
that of her husband, while referring others to the governor’s
spokespeople, who did not respond.


Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell said Ms. Palin had conducted an accessible and
effective administration in the public’s interest. “Everything she does
is for the ordinary working people of Alaska,” he said.


In Wasilla, a builder said he complained to Mayor Palin when the
city attorney put a stop-work order on his housing project. She
responded, he said, by engineering the attorney’s firing.


Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a
premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials
sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of
e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff
members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas
seeking public records.


Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska professor, sought the e-mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears. (Ms. Palin said the scientists had found no ill effects,
and she has sued the federal government to block the listing of the
bears as endangered.) An administration official told Mr. Steiner that
his request would cost $468,784 to process.


When Mr. Steiner finally obtained the e-mail messages — through a
federal records request — he discovered that state scientists had in
fact agreed that the bears were in danger, records show.


“Their secrecy is off the charts,” Mr. Steiner said.


State legislators are investigating accusations that Ms. Palin and
her husband pressured officials to fire a state trooper who had gone
through a messy divorce with her sister, charges that she denies. But
interviews make clear that the Palins draw few distinctions between the
personal and the political.


Last summer State Representative John Harris, the Republican
speaker of the House, picked up his phone and heard Mr. Palin’s voice.
The governor’s husband sounded edgy. He said he was unhappy that Mr.
Harris had hired John Bitney as his chief of staff, the speaker
recalled. Mr. Bitney was a high school classmate of the Palins and had
worked for Ms. Palin. But she fired Mr. Bitney after learning that he
had fallen in love with another longtime friend.


“I understood from the call that Todd wasn’t happy with me hiring John and he’d like to see him not there,” Mr. Harris said.


“The Palin family gets upset at personal issues,” he added. “And at our level, they want to strike back.”


Through a campaign spokesman, Mr. Palin said he “did not recall” referring to Mr. Bitney in the conversation.


Hometown Mayor


Laura Chase, the campaign manager during Ms. Palin’s first run for
mayor in 1996, recalled the night the two women chatted about her
ambitions.


“I said, ‘You know, Sarah, within 10 years you could be
governor,’ ” Ms. Chase recalled. “She replied, ‘I want to be
president.’ ”


Ms. Palin grew up in Wasilla, an old fur trader’s outpost and now a
fast-growing exurb of Anchorage. The town sits in the Matanuska-Susitna
Valley, edged by jagged mountains and birch forests. In the 1930s, the
Roosevelt administration took farmers from the Dust Bowl area and
resettled them here; their Democratic allegiances defined the valley
for half a century.


In the past three decades, socially conservative Oklahomans and
Texans have flocked north to the oil fields of Alaska. They filled
evangelical churches around Wasilla and revived the Republican Party.
Many of these working-class residents formed the electoral backbone for
Ms. Palin, who ran for mayor on a platform of gun rights, opposition to
abortion and the ouster of the “complacent” old guard.


After winning the mayoral election in 1996, Ms. Palin presided over
a city rapidly outgrowing itself. Septic tanks had begun to pollute
lakes, and residential lots were carved willy-nilly out of the woods.
She passed road and sewer bonds, cut property taxes but raised the
sales tax.


And, her supporters say, she cleaned out the municipal closet,
firing veteran officials to make way for her own team. “She had an
agenda for change and for doing things differently,” said Judy Patrick,
a City Council member at the time.


But careers were turned upside down. The mayor quickly fired the
town’s museum director, John Cooper. Later, she sent an aide to the
museum to talk to the three remaining employees. “He told us they only
wanted two,” recalled Esther West, one of the three, “and we had to
pick who was going to be laid off.” The three quit as one.


Ms. Palin cited budget difficulties for the museum cuts. Mr. Cooper
thought differently, saying the museum had become a microcosm of class
and cultural conflicts in town. “It represented that the town was
becoming more progressive, and they didn’t want that,” he said.


Days later, Mr. Cooper recalled, a vocal conservative, Steve Stoll,
sidled up to him. Mr. Stoll had supported Ms. Palin and had a
long-running feud with Mr. Cooper. “He said: ‘Gotcha, Cooper,’ ” Mr.
Cooper said.


Mr. Stoll did not recall that conversation, although he said he
supported Ms. Palin’s campaign and was pleased when she fired Mr.
Cooper.


In 1997, Ms. Palin fired the longtime city attorney, Richard
Deuser, after he issued the stop-work order on a home being built by
Don Showers, another of her campaign supporters.


Your attorney, Mr. Showers told Ms. Palin, is costing me lots of money.


“She told me she’d like to see him fired,” Mr. Showers recalled.
“But she couldn’t do it herself because the City Council hires the city
attorney.” Ms. Palin told him to write the council members to complain.


Meanwhile, Ms. Palin pushed the issue from the inside. “She started
the ball rolling,” said Ms. Patrick, who also favored the firing. Mr.
Deuser was soon replaced by Ken Jacobus, then the State Republican
Party’s general counsel.


“Professionals were either forced out or fired,” Mr. Deuser said.


Ms. Palin ordered city employees not to talk to the press. And she
used city money to buy a white Suburban for the mayor’s use — employees
sarcastically called it the mayor-mobile.


The new mayor also tended carefully to her evangelical base. She
appointed a pastor to the town planning board. And she began to eye the
library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library
director to remove books they considered immoral.


“People would bring books back censored,” recalled former Mayor John
Stein, Ms. Palin’s predecessor. “Pages would get marked up or torn out.”


Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the
librarian about removing books from the shelves. The McCain-Palin
presidential campaign says Ms. Palin never advocated censorship.


But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues
that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and
that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms.
Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and
said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.


“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said.
“It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from
the library and she didn’t even read it.”


“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”


Reform Crucible


Restless ambition defined Ms. Palin in the early years of this decade. She raised money for Senator Ted Stevens,
a Republican from the state; finished second in the 2002 Republican
primary for lieutenant governor; and sought to fill the seat of Senator
Frank H. Murkowski when he ran for governor.


Mr. Murkowski appointed his daughter to the seat, but as a
consolation prize, he gave Ms. Palin the $125,000-a-year chairmanship
of a state commission overseeing oil and gas drilling.


Ms. Palin discovered that the state Republican leader, Randy
Ruedrich, a commission member, was conducting party business on state
time and favoring regulated companies. When Mr. Murkowski failed to act
on her complaints, she quit and went public.


The Republican establishment shunned her. But her break with the
gentlemen’s club of oil producers and political power catapulted her
into the public eye.


“She was honest and forthright,” said Jay Kerttula, a former Democratic state senator from Palmer.


Ms. Palin entered the 2006 primary for governor as a formidable candidate.


In the middle of the primary, a conservative columnist in the
state, Paul Jenkins, unearthed e-mail messages showing that Ms. Palin
had conducted campaign business from the mayor’s office. Ms. Palin
handled the crisis with a street fighter’s guile.


“I told her it looks like she did the same thing that Randy
Ruedrich did,” Mr. Jenkins recalled. “And she said, ‘Yeah, what I did
was wrong.’ ”


Mr. Jenkins hung up and decided to forgo writing about it. His phone rang soon after.


Mr. Jenkins said a reporter from Fairbanks, reading from a Palin
news release, demanded to know why he was “smearing” her. “Now I look
at her and think: ‘Man, you’re slick,’ ” he said.


Ms. Palin won the primary, and in the general election she faced
Tony Knowles, the former two-term Democratic governor, and Andrew
Halcro, an independent.


Not deeply versed in policy, Ms. Palin skipped some candidate
forums; at others, she flipped through hand-written, color-coded index
cards strategically placed behind her nameplate.


Before one forum, Mr. Halcro said he saw aides shovel reports at Ms.
Palin as she crammed. Her showman’s instincts rarely failed. She put
the pile of reports on the lectern. Asked what she would do about
health care policy, she patted the stack and said she would find an
answer in the pile of solutions.


“She was fresh, and she was tomorrow,” said Michael Carey, a former
editorial page editor for The Anchorage Daily News. “She just floated
along like Mary Poppins.”


Government


Half a century after Alaska became a state, Ms. Palin was
inaugurated as governor in Fairbanks and took up the reformer’s sword.


As she assembled her cabinet and made other state appointments,
those with insider credentials were now on the outs. But a new pattern
became clear. She surrounded herself with people she has known since
grade school and members of her church.


Mr. Parnell, the lieutenant governor, praised Ms. Palin’s
appointments. “The people she hires are competent, qualified, top-notch
people,” he said.


Ms. Palin chose Talis Colberg, a borough assemblyman from the
Matanuska valley, as her attorney general, provoking a bewildered
question from the legal community: “Who?” Mr. Colberg, who did not
return calls, moved from a one-room building in the valley to one of
the most powerful offices in the state, supervising some 500 people.


“I called him and asked, ‘Do you know how to supervise people?’ ”
said a family friend, Kathy Wells. “He said, ‘No, but I think I’ll get
some help.’ ”


The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable
directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her
former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and
chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic
development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an
Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.


To her supporters — and with an 80 percent approval rating, she has
plenty — Ms. Palin has lifted Alaska out of a mire of corruption. She
gained the passage of a bill that tightens the rules covering
lobbyists. And she rewrote the tax code to capture a greater share of
oil and gas sale proceeds.


“Does anybody doubt that she’s a tough negotiator?” said State Representative Carl Gatto, Republican of Palmer.


Yet recent controversy has marred Ms. Palin’s reform credentials.
In addition to the trooper investigation, lawmakers in April accused
her of improperly culling thousands of e-mail addresses from a state
database for a mass mailing to rally support for a policy initiative.


While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her
administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle
discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant
told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private
address on a “personal device” like a BlackBerry “would be confidential
and not subject to subpoena.”


Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state
business. A campaign spokesman said the governor copied e-mail messages
to her state account “when there was significant state business.”


On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Ms. Palin’s
state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide fired back:
“Frank, this is not the governor’s personal account.”


Mr. Bailey responded: “Whoops~!”


Mr. Bailey, a former midlevel manager at Alaska Airlines who worked
on Ms. Palin’s campaign, has been placed on paid leave; he has emerged
as a central figure in the trooper investigation.


Another confidante of Ms. Palin’s is Ms. Frye, 27. She worked as a
receptionist for State Senator Lyda Green before she joined Ms. Palin’s
campaign for governor. Now Ms. Frye earns $68,664 as a special
assistant to the governor. Her frequent interactions with Ms. Palin’s
children have prompted some lawmakers to refer to her as “the
babysitter,” a title that Ms. Frye disavows.


Like Mr. Bailey, she is an effusive cheerleader for her boss.


“YOU ARE SO AWESOME!” Ms. Frye typed in an e-mail message to Ms. Palin in March.


Many lawmakers contend that Ms. Palin is overly reliant on a small
inner circle that leaves her isolated. Democrats and Republicans alike
describe her as often missing in action. Since taking office in 2007,
Ms. Palin has spent 312 nights at her Wasilla home, some 600 miles to
the north of the governor’s mansion in Juneau, records show.


During the last legislative session, some lawmakers became so
frustrated with her absences that they took to wearing “Where’s Sarah?”
pins.


Many politicians say they typically learn of her initiatives — and vetoes — from news releases.


Mayors across the state, from the larger cities to tiny
municipalities along the southeastern fiords, are even more frustrated.
Often, their letters go unanswered and their pleas ignored, records and
interviews show.


Last summer, Mayor Mark Begich of Anchorage, a Democrat, pressed
Ms. Palin to meet with him because the state had failed to deliver
money needed to operate city traffic lights. At one point, records
show, state officials told him to just turn off a dozen of them. Ms.
Palin agreed to meet with Mr. Begich when he threatened to go public
with his anger, according to city officials.


At an Alaska Municipal League gathering in Juneau in January,
mayors across the political spectrum swapped stories of the governor’s
remoteness. How many of you, someone asked, have tried to meet with
her? Every hand went up, recalled Mayor Fred Shields of Haines Borough.
And how many met with her? Just a few hands rose. Ms. Palin soon walked
in, delivered a few remarks and left for an anti-abortion rally.


The administration’s e-mail correspondence reveals a siege-like
atmosphere. Top aides keep score, demean enemies and gloat over
successes. Even some who helped engineer her rise have felt her wrath.


Dan Fagan, a prominent conservative radio host and longtime friend
of Ms. Palin, urged his listeners to vote for her in 2006. But when he
took her to task for raising taxes on oil companies, he said, he found
himself branded a “hater.”


It is part of a pattern, Mr. Fagan said, in which Ms. Palin characterizes critics as “bad people who are anti-Alaska.”


As Ms. Palin’s star ascends, the McCain campaign, as often happens
in national races, is controlling the words of those who know her well.
Her mother-in-law, Faye Palin, has been asked not to speak to
reporters, and aides sit in on interviews with old friends.


At a recent lunch gathering, an official with the Wasilla Chamber
of Commerce asked its members to refer all calls from reporters to the
governor’s office. Dianne Woodruff, a city councilwoman, shook her head.


“I was thinking, I don’t remember giving up my First Amendment
rights,” Ms. Woodruff said. “Just because you’re not going gaga over
Sarah doesn’t mean you can’t speak your mind.”

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