Sarah Palin, steel magnolia

The ballerina-pink Beehive, in a 1,400-square-foot ranch house, is a cut-and-color shop. A haircut is $30, discounted to $20 if you get the $95 color treatment. In a downstairs nursery, the stylists' babies play with mannequin heads. In a phone interview, Mrs. Steele, 37, described a kind of "Steel Magnolias" on permafrost, featuring Ms. Palin as a recurring presence.

Ms. Palin's appointments were multitasking events, Mrs. Steele recounted. The governor would sit in full foil, checking her BlackBerry, writing speeches and chatting with customers as her daughter Piper played nearby.

"Brooke, my manager, is always telling hunting stories with Sarah," Mrs. Steele said. "Brooke is a cute blond babe, but she wants to get a bigger grizzly than her husband got last year." (For the record, Brooke Mongeau said her husband's grizzly was nine and a half feet.)

As Mrs. Palin became a public figure, Mrs. Steele said, she gave more thought to her image.

"She's very involved in her look and how she's perceived," Mrs. Steele said. "We would talk a lot about how if she looked too pretty or too sexy, people wouldn't listen to her. How important it was for people to see her as an intelligent, smart woman. It was comical when her hair was down, how big a difference that would make, especially when she was running for governor."

With more-established salons throughout the valley, the Beehive would seem a surprising choice for Wasilla's then-mayor. Mrs. Steele started the salon in 1997 when she, a recently separated mother of two, put a salon chair in her garage and painted the interior Barbie pink.

Mrs. Steele relied on word of mouth through local congregations: "We're all really strong Christians in this shop."

Around 2000, the mayor called, needing rescue from a bad color job. Back then, Mrs. Steele recalled, Ms. Palin often wore her hair loose. "She'd just say, 'Whatever is quick and easy, let's just roll up our sleeves and get this going.' "

[snip]

Over the years, Mrs. Steele said, their lives have intertwined. Ms. Palin attended Mrs. Steele's bridal shower; this spring, the five "Beehive Beauty Shop girls" were invited to a baby shower for Ms. Palin's son. Hairdresser and client belong to Wasilla Bible Church.

During Palin appointments, Mrs. Steele, divorced and financially stressed, confided in her client. "Sarah was always saying that God was in control and to have faith that there is a reason for everything," Mrs. Steele said. "We would say it together."

Mrs. Steele became engaged. In June 2006, Ms. Palin attended her bridal shower, presenting her with a bright red coffeepot.

"When she became governor," Mrs. Steele said, "she still came to my small salon in my small town to get her hair done, instead of Anchorage, the big city" -- an hour's drive away. Mrs. Steele gave birth to her third child and began bringing the baby to the Beehive. When Ms. Palin asked how she was doing, Mrs. Steele burst into tears, overwhelmed by competing needs.

"Sarah said: 'If you love what you do, if you were a stay-at-home mom, a part of you would miss what you love. And if you were at work, you'd miss your kids,' " she recalled. Ms. Palin told her "not to make excuses for why I am not a stay-at-home mom or have my kids at the shop."

When Mrs. Steele expressed frustration with her industry, Ms. Palin told her to stop complaining and "run for something!" (She didn't.)

Mrs. Steele's fourth pregnancy overlapped with Mrs. Palin's fifth. "She kept it quiet," Mrs. Steele said. "But I remember her hair was acting different. And I thought, 'Something is going on!' "

For the May baby shower for Trig Palin, the Beehive women filled a basket overflowing with homemade gifts: baby blankets, including one sewn from material with salmon and moose designs, and a breast-feeding blanket. In camouflage.

This is where I came from, a place like this. These women are the kind of women my sister and my mother are, even though they live in a small town far, far away from Alaska. I could be reading this story about my own town (except whitetail deer would replace bear).

Reading this story, I understood more than anything else I've read about Sarah Palin why she's made that gut connection with so many Americans. She really is from a small town, and does not seem to have forgotten that. Think about the powerful message this sends to small-town, rural and working-class voters. Think about what it says about the place she comes from internally, and how she interprets the world. This is a woman who goes to the small-town beauty shop to trade hunting stories with her girlfriends, and to pray with them through their crises -- and she didn't stop going there when she became governor of the state.

Obviously no criterion to select the second to the most powerful man on earth, and I'm not arguing that it is, so don't be obnoxious in the comboxes. But if you are going to extend your empathy to the African-American who votes for Barack Obama because he sees in Obama something deep and important about himself, and finds that makes Obama trustworthy, you have to extend your empathy to the small-town, rural folks who see the same in Sarah Palin, and have confidence in her. Her experiences have given her a certain place from which she judges the world, and it's a place shared by tens of millions of Americans -- men and women whose views and values are scarcely represented in American newsrooms.

CNN said today that both Obama and McCain are out now campaigning on their personalities and biographies. And why not? In the real world, issues don't matter. As the liberal blogger Ezra Klein points out:

The McCain campaign's decision to lie about, well, everything, really needs to be understood as more than the outcome of John McCain's consuming ambition. It is a rational and obvious response to the rules laid down by the media. Indeed, McCain's spokesperson Brian Rogers says this directly to The Politico's Jonathan Martin. "We ran a different kind of campaign and nobody cared about us. They didn't cover John McCain. So now you've got to be forward-leaning in everything."

And it's true. Earlier this year McCain made poverty tours and offered policy speeches. No one cared, Obama retained his lead. It was only when he began offering vicious attacks and daily controversies that he began setting the pace of the coverage. The McCain campaign learned something important about the media: It's an institution that covers conflict. If you want to direct its coverage, give it more conflict than your opponent. And so they have.