So you can accept a premise in which an alien being comes to Alaska in the guise of an angel, but not the premise that a fictional governor inspired by Sarah Palin turned down the opportunity to run for Vice President?
Authors use characters inspired by real life figures all the time. For example, three of the central characters in Neil Stephenson’s Seveneves are clearly modeled after Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Hillary Clinton and Malala Yousafzai (but in a timeline where Hillary actually wins the Presidency). That doesn’t mean that those characters’ biographies or actions have to exactly match their real-world counterparts.
