Mayor Sarah Palin, center, with members of the Wasilla, Alaska, City Council in 1999. Ms. Palin repaired the city’s infrastructure, but critics noted a continuing pattern of pursuing vendettas and a heavy reliance on longtime friends.

This article is by Jo Becker, Peter S.Goodman and Michael Powell.

WASILLA, Alaska - As the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Governor Sarah Palin, 44, walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform.
But throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.
When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.
“She is bright and has unfailing political instincts,” said Steve Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska. “She taps very directly into anxieties about the economic future.
“But,” he added, “her governing style raises a lot of hard questions.”
Ms. Palin declined to grant an interview for this article. Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal email accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.
State legislators are investigating accusations that Ms. Palin and her husband pressured officials to fire a state trooper who had gone through a messy divorce with her sister, charges that she denies. But interviews make clear that the Palins draw few distinctions between the personal and the political.
Last summer State Representative John Harris, the Republican speaker of the House, received a phone call from Mr. Palin .
The governor’s husband s aid he was unhappy that Mr. Harris had hired John Bitney as his chief of staff, the speaker recalled. Mr. Bitney was a high school classmate of the Palins and had worked for Ms. Palin. But she fired him after learning that he had fallen in love with another longtime friend.
“I understood from the call that Todd wasn’t happy with me hiring John and he’d like to see him not there,” Mr. Harris said.
Through a campaign spokesman, Mr. Palin said he “did not recall” referring to Mr. Bitney in the conversation.

Hometown Mayor
Ms. Palin grew up in Wasilla, an old fur trading outpost and now a fast-growing exurb of Anchorage. After winning the mayoral election in 1996, Ms. Palin presided over a city rapidly outgrowing itself. Septic tanks had begun to pollute lakes, and residential lots were carved, seemingly without a plan, out of the woods. She passed road and sewer bonds, cut property taxes and raised the sales tax.
But careers were turned upside down. In 1997, Ms. Palin fired Wasilla’s longtime city attorney, Richard Deuser, after he issued a stop-work order on a home being built by Don Showers, one of her campaign supporters.
Ms. Palin ordered city employees not to talk to the press. And she used city money to buy a white Suburban for the mayor’s use - employees sarcastically called it the mayor-mobile.
In 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Laura Chase, the campaign manager during Ms. Palin’s first run for mayor in 1996, and former Mayor John Stein, Ms. Palin’s predecessor. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.
“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.
“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”

Ambition and Reform
Restless ambition defined Ms. Palin in the early years of this decade. She raised money for Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican from the state; finished second in the 2002 Republican primary for lieutenant governor; and sought to fill the seat of Senator Frank H. Murkowski when he ran for governor.
Mr. Murkowski appointed his daughter to the seat, but as a consolation prize, he gave Ms. Palin the $125,000-a-year chairmanship of a state commission overseeing oil and gas drilling.
Ms. Palin discovered that the state Republican leader, Randy Ruedrich, a commission member, was conducting party business on state time and favoring regulated companies. When Mr. Murkowski failed to act on her complaints, she quit and went public.
The Republican establishment shunned her. But her break with the gentlemen’s club of oil producers and political power catapulted her into the public eye.
“She was honest and forthright,” said Jay Kerttula, a former Democratic state senator from Palmer.

Government by Yearbook
Half a century after Alaska became a state, Ms. Palin was inaugurated as governor and took up the reformer’s sword.
As she assembled her cabinet and made other state appointments, a pattern became clear. She surrounded herself with people she had known since grade school and members of her church.
The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director, and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year.
To her supporters - and with an 80 percent approval rating, she has plenty - Ms. Palin has lifted Alaska out of a mire of corruption. She gained the passage of a bill that tightens the rules covering lobbyists. And she rewrote the tax code to capture a greater share of oil and gas sale proceeds.
“Does anybody doubt that she’s a tough negotiator-” said State Representative Carl Gatto, a Republican from Palmer.
Yet recent controversy has marred her reform credentials. While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a BlackBerry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”
During the last legislative session, some lawmakers became so frustrated with her absences that they took to wearing “Where’s Sarah?” pins.
Many politicians say they typically learn of her initiatives - and vetoes - from news releases.
Mayors across the state, from the larger cities to tiny municipalities along the southeastern fjords, are even more frustrated. Often, their letters go unanswered and their pleas ignored, records and interviews show.
Dan Fagan, a prominent conservative radio host and longtime friend of Ms. Palin’s, urged his listeners to vote for her in 2006. But when he took her to task for raising taxes on oil companies, he said, he found himself branded a “hater.”
It is part of a pattern, Mr. Fagan said, in which Ms. Palin characterizes critics as “bad people who are anti-Alaska.”
As Ms. Palin’s star ascends, the McCain campaign, as often happens in national races, is controlling the words of those who know her well. Her mother-in-law, Faye Palin, has been asked not to speak to reporters, and aides sit in on interviews with old friends.
At a recent lunch gathering, an official with the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce asked its members to refer all calls from reporters to the governor’s office. Dianne Woodruff, a city councilwoman, shook her head. “I was thinking, I don’t remember giving up my First Amendment rights,” Ms. Woodruff said. “Just because you’re not going gaga over Sarah doesn’t mean you can’t speak your mind.”