Naysayer.(The Talk of the Town)(critics of Governor Sarah Palin)

Two Fridays ago, Lyda Green, the president of the Alaska state senate, awoke at about 6 A.M. to a call from one of her aides. "She started yelling," Green said last week, over the telephone from Wasilla, Alaska. "I said, 'I can't hear you. What are you saying?' She finally got it out: 'McCain has chosen Palin as his running mate!' I was just silent."

Since the Palin announcement, a number of intriguing critics of the Governor have gained notoriety. There's Anne Kilkenny, a voter registrar and housewife who observed Palin up close on the Wasilla city council in the nineteen-nineties. She wrote a long antiPalin missive that coursed through the Internet last week with the speed of one of those viral e-mails tarring Obama. And there's Mudflats, the anonymous Alaskan blogger who has become a go-to source for Palin muckraking in the liberal blogosphere.

But in the competitive world of Alaskan Palin critics Green stands apart. She's sixty-nine years old, a conservative Republican who represents Palin's home town. Palin supported Green when she first ran for the state senate. Unlike some partisan critics, when Green speaks ill of Palin she sounds more like a disappointed grandmother than a political hit woman. Her official biography lists her interests as "family, reading, bridge, piano, traveling, tennis," and on the morning of the Palin announcement she was sleeping in past six only because she had been up late sewing.

A reporter from the Anchorage Daily News called later that Friday morning, and Green didn't think twice about rendering her judgment on Palin. "She's not prepared to be governor," she said, in comments soon posted on the paper's Web site. "How can she be prepared to be vice president or president? Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"

Green and Palin were friends and ideological allies throughout the nineties. "If you had looked at our resumes, as far as being pro-life, pro-N.R.A., pro-family, pro-parental control, saving taxpayer dollars, keeping government out of our lives, we would have been identical," she said. She traces the chill in their ...