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