Palin has been hailed as whistleblower, and records show claims about her to be accurate on this front.

The Christian Science Monitor:

She blew the whistle on state GOP Chairman Randy Ruedrich when he was a fellow oil and gas commissioner. In 2003, he was forced to resign his regulatory post and pay a record $12,000 fine. She and a Democratic state lawmaker filed an ethics complaint against the state attorney general, Gregg Renkes, who resigned under fire.

“The Randy Ruedrich thing was a huge deal. I think that’s when her popularity really started to increase,” says Ivan Moore, an Anchorage-based pollster who generally works for Democrats.

…

Palin has paid a price for her outspokenness. Mr. Ruedrich, still party chairman, seldom talks to her, and the state party gave her no money during the general election.

Further research has found that Palin may have had political cause to level charges against Ruedrich on the issue she turned him in on. He was advocating on behalf of a company with plans to drill for coal bed methane in Palin’s borough of Mat-su.

Another article in the Christian Science Monitor reports:

The anything-goes attitude is also part of its draw. Many residents boast that they have escaped the stifling regulations and frou-frou trappings of the big city they dismissively call “Los Anchorage.”

Such antigovernment attitudes helped launch Palin’s political career as a “hard-core conservative” who resisted controls on business.

“Zoning, you used to be not even able to say the word,” says Michelle Church, former director of a local land-use planning group and now a borough assembly member from Palmer. During Palin’s time as mayor, the very idea caused opponents to pack public meetings, she says. “Every time someone would go up and speak in favor [of zoning], these guys would yell, ‘Lock and load!’”

But a local revolt broke out about five years ago over proposed coal bed methane drilling in residential and recreational areas of the borough, signaling a shift in public attitudes.

Opposition to the plan, pushed by Colorado-based Evergreen Resources Inc., united right-wing property-rights advocates and left-wing environmentalists. Both factions worried about noisy machinery, truck traffic, and water pollution. Palin, who by that time was a rising Republican star with a plum job on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, turned whistle-blower on fellow commissioner Randy Ruedrich, also the state GOP chairman. She charged, in part, that he’d used his post to advocate for Evergreen Resources’ coal bed methane drilling.

Mr. Ruedrich was forced to resign in late 2003 from the conservation commission – which was supposed to regulate coal bed methane development in Mat-Su Borough – and later paid a $12,000 fine for misusing his office. Evergreen Resources was sold in 2004 to Pioneer Natural Resources, which dropped the coal bed plans.

Mixed views of Palin

Turning in Ruedrich endeared Palin to the public statewide, says Steve Haycox, a cultural historian at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. “She is dedicated to the highest and best possible of democratic principles, and what she saw offended her,” says Mr. Haycox.

It established Palin’s reputation as a corruption foe, in contrast to her earlier hands-off-business philosophy. She’s now got an image of a Big Oil-battling populist, often working on the issue in concert with Democrats.

But Ms. Church, the borough assembly member, says Palin made a cynical political calculation to take on Ruedrich during the coalbed-methane furor. “She’s very smart and very politically shrewd. I think she just looked at the opposition and the audience and figured there was no way they could come out clean on this, and she bailed,” Church says.

The Los Angeles Times reported Palin later quit her position on the oil and gas commission “out of disgust for the back scratching she observed between the industry and her fellow commissioners.”