Whoever wins Tuesday`s election, Sarah Palin, who shot to international fame barely two months ago, is likely to stay in the forefront of American politics for some time to come.

`I`m not doing this for naught,` Republican vice presidential nominee Palin said this week, when asked if all the mudslinging in the current campaign made her long for a return to the more sedate politics of Alaska, where she is governor.

Palin, who is also an ex-beauty queen, moose hunter and mother of five, rose from obscurity to become the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket at the end of August when she was picked by John McCain as his running-mate.

She immediately ignited the party`s conservative base, but since then she has been the target of almost daily attacks and ridicule amid a string of gaffes and scandals. Republican aides have even rounded on her as a `diva` and `whack job.`

`I think that, if I were to give up and wave a white flag of surrender against some of the political shots that we`ve taken, that would bring this whole` endeavor to nothing, Palin told ABC on Thursday.

On Thursday, two days after the elections, Republican heavyweights are planning to meet to draw up a strategy for the next mid-term congressional elections in 2010, the daily online Politico said.

There is no doubt that the 44-year-old Palin`s future role in the party, if the ticket loses, will be one of the themes.

`She definitely is going to be the most popular Republican in this country when this thing is over,` Republican strategist Ed Rollins, and former political director to president Ronald Reagan, told CNN.

`She`ll basically spend the next three of four years, running around doing Lincoln Day dinners and raising money for people. She`s got to gain a lot of substance before she`s a viable candidate for president.`

The carefully coiffed conservative Christian was once dubbed `America`s Hottest Governor.`

She has cast herself as a maverick, a reformer and an anti-corruption star. Yet recent polls have found she may be dragging down the Republican ticket amid fears she is too inexperienced to be the nation`s second in command.

Interviews in which she gave Alaska`s proximity to Russia as evidence of her foreign policy experience, and suggested, wrongly, that the vice president was in charge of the US Senate have set alarm bells ringing.

The scandal surrounding the firing of her brother-in-law, a state trooper involved in a messy divorce with her sister, has also raised concern. Palin, who paints herself as a reformer, was found to have abused her powers in an initial Alaska probe.

As Alaska governor, Palin has earned approval ratings of 80 percent. But she has only led the vast, oil-producing northwestern state since December 2006, when she became the youngest person ever to hold Alaska`s governorship.

Now she has become only the second woman ever to run on a major-party White House ticket, after Democrat Geraldine Ferraro who ran as VP in 1984.

Born on February 11, 1964 in Idaho, Palin grew up in the town of Wasilla, Alaska -- population 8,500 -- when her family moved there. She led the high school basketball team, where she earned the nickname `Sarah Barracuda` for her aggressive, determined style.

She studied journalism at the University of Idaho and worked in Anchorage as a television sports reporter before moving into politics.

She returned to Wasilla in 1992 to serve on the city council. Later she successfully challenged the incumbent-mayor and held office from 1996-2002.

On taking office as governor in 2006, she immediately began a drive focusing on legislative ethics, pushing through a reform bill within six months of her election win.

Palin has a son, Track, in the US army who deployed to Iraq on September 11, and daughters Bristol, 18, Willow, 14, and Piper, seven. She has also a young son, Trig, with Down Syndrome, who was born in April.

Her husband Todd, 43, is a former commercial fisherman who now works in Alaska`s oil fields and who is a champion snowmobile racer, a four-time winner of the Alaska Iron Dog competition. Alaskans have dubbed him `The First Dude.`