Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, is John McCain’s new choice for Vice President. Palin brings an interesting combination of political and personal characteristics to the McCain ticket.  She fought vigorously against the widespread corruption in the Alaska political system, even to the detrment of her own party.  She hunts, fishes, and won a beauty pageant in 1984.  She has five children including an 18-year old son who deploys soon to Iraq and an infant with Down Syndrome, and calls herself a “hockey mom.”  She is strongly “pro-life”, meaning she opposes abortion, but supports capital punishment.  (I have to say, I have never understood how you can be pro-life in one breath and embrace the killing of a human being on death row in another.  But I digress.)

For the McCain ticket, Palin brings credentials where McCain is lacking. She enhances his “maverick” status, which has waned in recent months as he waters down his personality for the presidential campaign. Unlike McCain, Palin is an active churchgoer (Pentecostal) and wants creationism to be taught in schools alongside evolution, bridging the mistrust the Religious Right holds against McCain.

Astrologically (born February 11, 1964) , she has at least four planets in Aquarius (Mercury, Sun, Mars and Saturn) and possibly the Moon as well, if she was born after noon.  Aquarius is the sign of the activist, the renegade – the individualist who isn’t afraid to buck the system.  With no planets in water signs other than Chiron, Palin is not a very emotional person and this is heightened by the strong Aquarian influence which is more interested in rational thinking and ideas than emotional viewpoints. 

That Aquarian individuality is tempered with a triple conjunction of Saturn and Mars to the Sun.  Saturn is the ancient ruler of Aquarius, and lends its focus on solitude and a tendency towards rigidity which in the case of Palin may exacerbate the fixed nature of the Aquarian personality. Palin is conservative under the Saturn/Mars/Sun conjunction, but the Aquarian influence makes her quirkily so.

Neptune squares her Sun – the very same aspect in Obama’s chart that has suspicious astrologers claiming Obama is deceptive.  (See my earlier article.)  Neptune/Sun aspects tend to show that the individual has experienced difficulty expressing herself as an individual, and that there is a tendency for others to be unable to see her clearly because she becomes a hook for their projections. 

Palin’s birthchart also shows that she has an exact opposition from Chiron to Pluto, and by association to Uranus as well.  I would be surprised if she has not had painful experiences in her life – that Chiron/Pluto opposition indicates an indivdiual who must continually face her inner demons so that they can be vanquished.

This is an interesting time for Palin – transiting Saturn has been aspecting this opposition, coinciding with the birth of her son with Down Syndrome.  Transiting Neptune is affecting her as well – passing over first her Sun, then Mars, then Saturn over the next several years.  This Neptunian time shows that she is prone to overidealizing the realities in her life, and there is a danger of not seeing things as they really are.

Update: Depending upon the time Palin was born, her Moon was either in Capricorn (morning) or in Aquarius (afternoon).  I’m going to go for Capricorn because without that earthiness and practicality at a deep emotional level her chart would not have the discipline and drive to achieve that Palin demonstrates.  The  Moon shows the way we respond when we’re backed against the wall – our instinctive nature, and Palin’s Troopergate scandal, where she fired a public safety commissioner for not firing her former brother-in-law during his messy divorce from her sister, demonstrates the ruthless side of Capricorn for which the ends justify the means.

She’s an interesting choice for an already interesting election!  Tomorrow I’ll look at how she and McCain will likely get along.