frontierswoman, shoulder to shoulder with her man, firing at the redskins circling the wagon and dispatching the roaring grizzly with a steady aim as it towers over her infant's cradle.

Tie this to the equally potent myth of the ordinary PTA mom taking on the corrupt good ol' boys running City Hall and the allure becomes irresistible. Throw in her manly husband Todd, equally at home on his snowmobile, in his fishing boat or dandling Trig the baby with Down's Syndrome, top off with Palin's Pentecostal faith and 100 per cent 'No' to abortion for any reason, and you can see why McCain thought Palin worth the throw. Her task: to energise the Republican base and - as a working-class woman - to capture some crucial undecided votes in such battlegrounds as Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Europeans awed that a woman wedded to creationism and a big fan of shooting polar bears from helicopters might be one step away from the Oval Office should remember that the very popular Ronald Reagan – another Western governor inexperienced in

international affairs - sat inside the Oval Office for eight years, having publicly affirmed on more than one occasion that he believed the Final Judgement would occur in his life time, probably in Megiddo.

Like Reagan, Palin has a very good sense of political timing. She outmaneuvered the most powerful politicians in Alaska in four short years and has won the esteem of Alaskans by hitting the oil companies with a higher profits tax and distributing some of the take to the citizenry.

Like most soap operas, albeit a good deal faster, the story line has developed several complexities. There's the custody feud with Palin's former brother-in-law cop which prompted Governor Palin to try to get the man bounced from his job. There's the pregnant elder daughter Bristol and her boyfriend Levi Johnson, a lad who looked, at the Convention, like a deer caught in the headlights of Todd and Sarah's Ford 350 pick-up.

Just like Obama, Sarah has a pastor problem. In her case it's Larry Kroon,