First Dude of the Wild Frontier

At the Mocha Moose cafe on the frontier in Wasilla, the word on Todd Palin, Alaska's 'First Dude', is that he is... Well, that he is "not real outgoing".

It is probably a good idea to give the man some space, should you come across him supping his cup of Joe after he has run the kids to school and is bleary-eyed from being up all night tinkering with the racing snowmobile, and running practice dashes through the moonlit tundra.

There is no doubting that he is the strong, silent type, the John Wayne kind of American, the sort you can still find in Alaska even if they are disappearing from the touchy-feely new world of Hollywood cowboy movies.

"Todd's not real outgoing, and he's not very flamboyant," says his old snowmobile racing rival, Chuck Baird. "Sometimes people mistake that for being stuck-up. He's just a really down-to-earth good guy."

Like his archetype, Palin, 44, an Alaskan born and bred, boasting a dash of Eskimo blood from his mother's side, is a man you can rely on.

He will do you a favour when you are in trouble, they say at the Mocha Moose, and "it never changed him one iota" when his wife Sarah became governor and the most powerful person in the state. But you do not want to get on his bad side.

It's a frontier thing.  Millions were charmed by his broad-shouldered self-assurance when he appeared at the Republican National Convention with his wife and brood as she became McCain's wild card pick for 'Veep'.

They saw a man with big hands who did not need a college degree to earn $100,000 a year on the oil rigs, a caribou hunter who retreats to the wilderness in the summer to harvest wild salmon with the commercial fishing license which is his family birthright, a local hero who has won the 2,000-mile Tesoro Iron Dog snowmobile race, the world's toughest, four times.

Even the drunk-driving ticket he picked up when he was 22 just adds to his standing as a 'true Alaskan'. Everybody drinks in Alaska.

But the trouble is that the Hatfields and McCoys, legends of the Hillbilly blood feud, were frontier folk too. It is a small world in Wasilla, pop 7,000, and only a little bigger in Juneau, the state capital, and the nights are dark and long. Things get personal, and are hard to forget.

When John Bitney, who had orchestrated Sarah Palin's victorious campaign for governor, offended the First Dude by dating a woman who had been married to a friend of his, he got fired.

When Walter Monegan, Alaska's public safety commissioner, failed to respond to a personal visit from Todd demanding that he dismiss the state trooper who had been married to Palin's sister Molly, he too got fired.

That story, 'Troopergate', is threatening to blow up into a scandal that will embarrass McCain. It involves a messy divorce, a dispute over child custody, and allegations of 'loose canon' Trooper Michael Wooten, the former brother-in-law, roaring around drunk in his squad car, waving beer bottles from the window. A state ethics commission of inquiry is under way.

John McCain may have forgotten the old saw: you can take the man out of the frontier, but can you take the frontier out of the man? ·