I ask the question only because Minnesota is referred to as The Star of the North in our official state motto, L’Etoile du Nord. It also comes up in our state song, Hail Minnesota.
The official state website is called Minnesota North Star.
We have North Star Commuter Rail.
And of course our hockey team was the North Stars until they moved to Dallas and became the (ordinary) Stars. But if you’re a puckster looking at it from the Mexican state of Chihuahua, the Dallas team may still be the North Stars to you.

But North Star-ness is all relative to one’s position. Since Minnesota was once the northern most U.S. State, “North Star” made a certain geographic sense. But now the northernmost title for States of the Union goes to Alaska, no contest. Accordingly, the North Star is featured on Alaska’s flag.
There’s a New Jersey-sized section of Alaska called the Fairbanks North Star Borough.

And according to a controversial profile of Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair, the ex-Governor and conservative firebrand is rather fond of the name North Star.

It was a baking-hot Kansas afternoon, and from the lobby I watched as three slender, solemn young hairstylists and makeup artists approached a front-desk clerk at the Hyatt Regency hotel, in Wichita. The tallest of them said, “We’re here for North Star.” The desk clerk understood. He nodded and directed the three women to the Keeper of the Plains suite, on the 17th floor, where North Star herself awaited. The North Star is mentioned in Alaska’s state song and appears on its state flag. Fairbanks lies in a region called the North Star Borough. Palin is on the way to making North Star a personal brand. If she ever does run for president, it might well serve as her Secret Service code name.

I should point out, though this will come as no surprise, that the Palin profile is not flattering. The author, Michael Joseph Gross, claims that he wanted to write a positive piece but was unable to once he started talking to real, anonymous-by-request people. That may be true, but one must wonder how hard he tried. When the person you are writing about refuses to speak to you and you wind up interviewing restaurant servers to find out what kind of tipper your subject is (not very good, it turns out), I’d say the odds already favor a negative result.

But it does lead me to this question – would Governor Palin’s Minnesota non-admirers be able to stomach her adoption of “North Star” as a “personal brand”?

North Star? That’s us! Not only have we claimed it in all the ways I already described, but we serve as the headquarters for Polaris, a snowmobile company that has taken the North Star’s given name as its own.

But here’s the unfortunate truth – even Polaris itself can’t lay an unassailable claim to the title “North Star”. Sure, it has been the pole star for one half of planet Earth for many years and since it appears motionless in the sky it has served as a vital navigation guide to seafarers for centuries. But due to a rotational wobble called the Precession of the Equinoxes, even Polaris will one day lose the title “North Star” to a different twinkler named Vega. But don’t despair. In Twenty six thousand years, Polaris will get it back.

Fickle universe!

If you became president, what would you choose as your code name?