Friends: VP choice has 'very strong' values

— -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, barely a year into her term, received a harrowing call in December from the physician reviewing her prenatal tests. The doctor asked her to come in for a talk.

Palin, who already had developed a reputation for directness, instead took the news over the phone, learning that her fifth child, Trig, had Down syndrome.

"I've never had problems with my other pregnancies, so I was shocked," Palin told the Anchorage Daily News in May. "It took a while to open up the book that the doctor gave me about children with Down syndrome."

She said there was never any doubt she would have her son, who was born in April.

Friends said Palin's resolve during the subsequent doctor visits, medical tests and Trig's birth offers insight into a woman who lived her principles and treasured her family as she faced one of her most difficult personal challenges.

"She's very, very strong in her values," said Curt Menard, mayor of Matanuska-Susitna Borough, who said he has known Palin since she was 3. "I don't think there was ever a question that they were going to have the baby."

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain introduced Palin, 44, as his running mate Friday. She is her party's first female candidate for vice president.

McCain met Palin at the National Governors Association meeting in Washington in February and came away "extraordinarily impressed," according to a statement from McCain's campaign. On Thursday, McCain invited her to become his running mate.

Palin, the daughter of a teacher and a school secretary, is a former point guard who took her high school basketball team to the state championships in 1982. She won her first race for City Council of Wasilla in 1992 by casting herself as "a new face." McCain and other supporters sounded a similar refrain Friday, playing up the fresh voice she could bring to the presidential race.

Democrats, including presidential nominee Barack Obama's campaign spokesman Bill Burton, questioned her relative inexperience, but Palin has beat back similar criticism before. In 1996, at 32, she was elected mayor of Wasilla, a city of 9,780 located about 40 miles north of Anchorage. She ousted a three-term incumbent for the position and focused her tenure on reducing taxes.

"I was just your average hockey mom in Alaska, coaching some basketball on the side," Palin said during a rally in Dayton, Ohio, where her selection was announced. "My agenda was to stop wasteful spending, cut property taxes and put the people first."

Palin beat incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski, a fellow Republican, in a 2006 primary and then beat a former governor, Democrat Tony Knowles, in the general election, becoming the state's first female governor.

Among Palin's accomplishments in the State House: passing legislation that began a competitive process to construct a gas pipeline and overhauling the state's ethics laws.

"She's a solid individual," said Gene Therriault, the Republican Senate Minority Leader in the Alaska Legislature. "I think she is a person who holds her principles very near and dear."

Critics argue that she is overly aggressive, noting that a nickname she picked up for being a strong basketball player, "Sarah Barracuda," stuck with her for her political career. A citizens group considered advocating for her recall as mayor after she fired several department heads.

Former Wasilla city councilman Nick Carney, who recruited Palin but later became one of her strongest critics in Wasilla, told the Anchorage Daily News in 2006 that he believed she made the staff changes as retribution because they supported her opponent in the race.

Palin faces an ongoing state investigation of accusations that she fired the state's public safety commissioner this year because he would not fire a state trooper who is her sister's ex-husband. She has denied any wrongdoing.

Earlier this month, Palin released recordings of a phone conversation between one of her aides and a state trooper lieutenant in which the aide said the governor was troubled that her ex-brother-in-law remained on the force.

The trooper, Mike Wooten, was reprimanded and suspended for five days in 2006 for allegedly drinking beer while on duty and driving his marked patrol car, illegally killing a moose and using his Taser on his 10-year-old stepson, state records show.

Andrew Halcro, who ran against Palin as an independent in 2006 and now runs a blog critical of her, credited Palin with shaking up the Republican establishment in Alaska but also described her as "vindictive." "It seems her vindictiveness is what's gotten her into trouble with this trooper out here," he said. "She couldn't just let it go and walk away."

Palin ran for governor in part on a platform of cracking down on ethical violations. When she was chairwoman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which helps oversee the state's energy industry, Palin complained about ethics violations by Randy Ruedrich, a fellow member of the commission who also chairs the Alaska Republican Party. Palin quit the commission in 2004. Ruedrich, who had resigned from the commission in 2003, paid a $12,000 fine in 2004 for engaging in partisan political activity on the job.

Palin's family moved to Alaska in 1964 when she was 3 months old. She graduated from Wasilla High School in 1982. She received a bachelor's degree in communications and journalism from the University of Idaho in 1987, according to a National Governors Association biography.

She competed in the Miss Alaska contest after being chosen Miss Wasilla in 1984, according to the Daily News. Adrian Lane, a longtime family friend who lives in Wasilla, said he remembers her playing basketball at a young age with all the boys in the neighborhood.

"People misread her," Lane said. "She's strong. People aren't going to run over her."

She is married to Todd Palin, a lifelong Alaskan who is a production operator on the North Slope and a four-time champion of the Iron Dog, the world's longest snowmobile race.

Palin, who enjoys fishing and hunting, attends a non-denominational evangelical church with her family when she is in Wasilla.

"What I've seen in private is what you see in public," said pastor Larry Kroon of the Wasilla Bible Church. "I think her faith and her integrity are both very real."

The Palins have four children in addition to Trig. At the rally Friday, Palin said her oldest son, Track, enlisted in the U.S. Army last Sept. 11 and will deploy to Iraq this Sept. 11.

•Contributing: David Jackson in Dayton, Ohio, and Matt Kelley in Washington. Fritze reported from McLean, Va.