Sarah's hometown

Since John McCain chose Sarah Palin, reporters have been ascending to Alaska to find out more about her. Perhaps they'll find all sorts of sleaze, but they'll also discover something about Alaska which, let's face it, is rather foreign to most of us in the lower 48.

Time reporter, Nathan Thornburgh wrote up his visit to Palin's hometown, Wasilla, Alaska. He seems utterly charmed by the friendliness of the place. He also found out that the whole town seemed to know of Bristol Palin's pregnancy and didn't much care.

Wasilla seems at times to be utterly without guile. It's a large part of the town's charm, and it's exactly the quality that could make an unorthodox pick like Palin pay off. Don't get me wrong — she's a tough politician with sharp enough elbows on her own. But still, she appears to be more steeped in the values of her hometown than any politician I've ever come across.

Maybe that means Palin is a little too much Northern Exposure for America—after all, her father's good friend Curt Menard happily showed me a picture of the governor as a high schooler in 1981, in a root cellar with family and friends, helping skin and cube and cure a whole moose. It's enough to make you almost miss fake hunters like John Kerry and Mitt Romney.

People in Wasilla are Alaskan tough, so not only does a thing like teen pregnancy not seem like anyone's damn business, but it's also not seen as the calamity so many people in the lower 48 might think it is. This is dangerous country — it's not just the roughneck jobs on cable reality shows. It's real life here. I listened to the absolutely heartbreaking story of how the godfather of Track Palin, Sarah's oldest son, died in small plane crash just minutes after having dropped off four kids. Another family invited me into their home and told their incredible story; with one son in Iraq, their other son was working on a conveyor line in Anchorage, got caught in the belt and had his head partially crushed. He lived to stand across the kitchen table from me and his parents, looking fully healed just three months later, grinning at his dumb luck and wondering what comes next in life. "It makes you realize that a thing like a little teenage pregnancy isn't such a big deal," his mom said. "Bristol—and lots of other girl like her out there — are going to be just fine."

The one false note in Thornburgh's piece is this line.

The fact is, regardless of what you will hear over the next few days, Bristol's pregnancy is not a legitimate political issue. Sarah Palin is a longterm member of a group called Feminists for Life, which is not opposed to birth control. So you probably can't tag her for consigning young people to unwanted pregnancies. (emphasis added)

Probably? What's that about? Of course, she's not consigning young people to unwanted pregnancies, no matter what choices her daughter has made. Is that just a bit of the east coast reporter coming out here? You can probably consign that one adverb to the delete button for this story.