Alaska is an Augean Stables of political corruption. For years, the state government, and its representatives in Washington, have functioned as a gigantic money-laundering operation, bringing home implausible am-ounts of federal cash to pay for grandiose public projects that serve no one but whose construction fills the pockets of important political contributors. Palin has tackled that culture. She challenged her own Republican party's leaders by running against them in the state's primary election. Once elected, she began dismantling the cash machine that had sustained government and politics. She work-ed with Democrats - in a real display of bipartisanship, as opposed to the rhetorical sort so beloved in Washington - to get the work done. This offers real hope for a becalmed Republican party. After almost a decade in which the party has squandered its enormous advantage in a trail of incompetence, corruption and narrow-minded extremism, John McCain's only hope is to offer the American people a vision of political reform in a conservative framework. Sarah Palin helps him to do that.

There's something else Alaskans - and other Americans - like about her. She's a leading woman politician who does not subscribe to the extremism of many of the so-called leaders of the women's movement. She is deeply and devoutly anti-abortion. She embraces wholeheartedly the role of "hockey mom" (a sort of Arctic Circle version of the celebrated "soccer mom"). She doesn't feel it necessary to complain about the unfairness of a male world.

Feminist leaders in America have for too long been allowed to get away with their claim that they alone represent women in the country. Yet their extreme views - especially support for abortion on demand, including of the grotesque method of partial-birth abortion - are not shared by all women. It's possible to be a real woman, successful and fulfilled, and still believe in the rights of the unborn.