Unflippinbelievable: Palin emails released

She has a temper. She hates the "lamestream media". When formulating policy, she likes to consult her husband and "first dude", Todd.

She'll also talk important decisions over with God. And every now and then, you can expect her to issue folksy pronouncements such as "heck!" "you betcha!" or the newly minted: "unflippinbelievable!"

It doesn't take much of a trawl through the 24,000 pages of Sarah Palin's emails, published on Saturday, to get a sense of what makes America's foremost Mamma Grizzly tick.

The former Governor of Alaska is ebullient, energetic and occasionally hypocritical. She continually frets about her public image. When attacked, she asks staff to: "Pray for a mama's strength!"

The Palin Files, as they are already known, were turned over to a ravenous media in the state capital of Juneau.

Some Palin supporters say the glee with which news outfits are sifting through reams of dull correspondence exposes their hidden left-wing agenda.

Other Palinophiles are more relaxed. They believe the decision to release her communications, under Alaskan freedom of information laws, will improve her public image.

"The emails detail a governor hard at work," said Tim Crawford, the treasurer of Palin's federal political action committee.

"Everyone should read them."

Despite the heights to which she has risen up America's political ladder, important aspects of Palin's political identity had been kept under wraps.

Until now, for example, we did not know the high regard in which Palin once privately held President Barack Obama. Neither did we know she has flip-flopped on climate change (a few years back, she accepted mainstream science on the issue). Or that, despite her public calls for cuts to Government spending, she fought vigorously against reductions to her personal budget while in office.

She angled for the vice-presidential nomination months before John McCain picked her, taking calls from presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee.

Palin has recently criticised Obama's use of an autocue. She may have to stop doing that now. In one of the released emails, her aide, Meg Stapleton, tells Palin how she will "provide the answers" to questions being asked in a TV interview and display them on a teleprompter. "It needs to be very conversationally written."

Palin, who is 47, replied by calling Stapleton "awesome", which appears to be her favourite term of endearment for staff. She often uses smiley faces in private correspondence, and her emails contain spelling and grammatical errors, some of which can be explained as the natural result of vigorous use of a BlackBerry.

As far back as 2007, she was asking staff to post positive statements on comment boards below articles about her, saying: "I need folks to really help ramp up accurate counter comments to the misinformation ... being spread."

In June 2008, when a letter in the Anchorage Daily News criticised her failure to attend the Miss Alaska beauty pageant, she drafted a reply. "I'm looking for someone to correct the letter writer's goofy comments, but don't want the letter to come from me." When the same newspaper said she had bought a tanning bed for the governor's mansion, despite having recently campaigned against skin cancer, she launched a witch hunt: "Any idea where this would have come from?"

Soon after being picked as McCain's vice-presidential candidate, Palin was on the verge of quitting. "I feel like I'm at the breaking point with the hurtful gossip about my family," she wrote to aide Rosanne Hughes.

Conspiracy theorists will be upset that potentially the most controversial emails have been redacted for legal reasons, including dealings with oil and gas companies.

- Independent, AP