Purdum notes of the state and its mentality:
John McPhee wrote, “Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own. Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked ‘U.S. Mail.’” That description still fits. The state capital, Juneau, is 600 miles from the principal city, Anchorage, and is reachable only by air or sea. Alaskan politicians list the length of their residency in the state (if they were not born there) at the top of their biographies, and are careful to specify whether they like hunting, fishing, or both. There is little sense of government as an enduring institution: when the annual 90-day legislative session is over, the legislators pack up their offices, files, and computers, and take everything home. Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, maintains no full-time bureau in Juneau to cover the statehouse. As in any resource-rich developing country with weak institutions and woeful oversight, corruption and official misconduct go easily unchecked. Scrutiny is not welcome, and Alaskans of every age and station, of every race and political stripe, unself-consciously refer to every other place on earth with a single word: Outside.
Fine, Todd, but why did she drive out of Anchorage to Wasilla to go to a hospital surely unprepared for a complicated delivery, if a 44-year-old woman had one?
Other than that, Purdum has some very good stuff; give it a read.
Update: And, in "The Rogue," Joe McGinniss offers up a new "crazy like a wingnut" angle: Palin adopted Trig, knowing she was a Down's syndrome baby, so Sarah could be a poster child for the pro-life movement. She had to fly from Dallas back to Mat-Su Regional Hospital in such a hurry because the adoption finalized earlier than she expected. Hey, it's as believable as what Sarah claims.
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