Campaign sparks VP flashbacks

Time flies when you’re in the political spotlight.

It’s hard to believe nearly four years have passed since the Valley’s own Sarah Palin was tapped by U.S. Sen. John McCain as his running mate on the Republican ticket in the 2008 presidential election.

“It seems like only yesterday I got that phone call,” recalled Frontiersman reporter Greg Johnson, then the paper’s managing editor. “It was 5 in the morning, and I had had about three hours sleep, getting home at 1 a.m. after putting our Friday morning edition to bed.”

That was Friday, Aug. 29, 2008, the morning the Palin announcement was made.

“It also was the last three hours of sleep I think any of us at the Frontiersman got until after the election that November,” Johnson said.

Our hometown governor was more than in the national spotlight. Instantly, she was in the crosshairs of the global media. Often, in the background of those targets were Wasilla and the Valley.

Chances are, more than 99 percent of the voting American public had never heard of Wasilla, Alaska, before that day.

Fast-forward four years and the memories came flooding back this past week with a phone call from Janesville, Wis. We found ourselves on the other end of a long-distance call from a reporter for the Janesville Gazette, the hometown newspaper for U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the newly announced running mate for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Although more than 2,700 miles separate the communities, the first question the reporter asked was, “when is this going to stop?”

Of course, she was talking about the intense scrutiny that comes with being the hometown of a candidate suddenly thrust into the spotlight of a presidential election. Media from around the world scrambled to be first on the scene.

What better place to get the inside scoop than a person’s hometown? What little nuggets of information can be found by talking to longtime friends, family acquaintances and former local political foes?

Fortunately for the folks at the Gazette, their hometown boy is a seven-term U.S. Congressman and is hardly an unknown. Another major difference is that, while Wisconsin is a wonderful state, it doesn’t have the mythical lure of Alaska.

Palin’s announcement set off a perfect political storm that’s unlikely to be repeated. Not only was she relatively unknown to most U.S. voters, she was a former beauty queen and from the mysterious Last Frontier, where everyone lives in Jack London’s Alaska, fighting off polar bears while riding our dogsleds to the next trading post.

You can’t control how the outside world — including other news media — perceive you or your local culture. In the weeks following Palin’s announcement, depending on which account you read, Wasilla was either a quaint, picturesque town filled with Alaska charm at the foot of Denali, or a northern colony of barely literate rednecks.

The best advice we have for the good folks in Janesville, Wis., is to just be themselves and continue to serve their community as the hometown newspaper.