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Monday, September 1, 2008
Pregnant daughter: 2-for-2
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
About midmorning Monday, I was seated in a small conference room at a hotel in downtown Minneapolis with about 25 others, most of them Georgia delegates, listening to a prominent U.S. senator discuss the upcoming campaign.
An aide walked into the room and quietly relayed the news of the morning: The 17-year-old daughter of Gov. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, is five months’ pregnant. She is not married but, as Governor Palin announced later, is planning to wed the baby’s father.
As soon as the session ended, the conversation among delegates turned to the question: What will the media make of this?
My response: It’s no big deal. Nobody in the room expressed any particular concern.
“Life happens,” said a John McCain aide later. “An American family,” offered another. The daughter, Bristol, and the baby’s father will marry before the child is born.
The crisis in the family is not that teenagers engage in risky behavior that often has consequences. The crisis is that teens and unmarried adults create life without giving the child an opportunity to grow up in a home with a mother and father present.
So far the Palins are two-for-two on doing the right thing by an unborn child.
How do Dems attack Gov. Palin?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Republicans attending this week’s convention here in Minneapolis-St. Paul have been giddy with excitement about John McCain’s vice presidential choice. I’ve never seen anything generate quite this much excitement among delegates. It would have been a very different convention had it started last Thursday — different in the sense of Republicans being fearful that their party was marching unavoidably to an election-day slaughter.
On Sunday, I rode out to the convention center in St. Paul (a $42 cab ride from the Georgia delegation’s hotel in suburban Minneapolis, an inconvenient location that is a far cry from the perks the party enjoyed in the glory days of Newt Gingrich’s party influence.) Security is as tight as I’ve seen it. Inside, though, the arena is almost intimate. The speaker’s platform is modest, nothing like the set in Denver. At these things go, it’s understated. Quite appropriate, now, for the nation’s circumstances. Sue P. Everhart, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, began her first-day message to the delegation by urging them to “keep our neighbors on the Gulf Coast in our thoughts and prayers.”
The preconvention buzz has been almost entirely about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. The question: How do Democrats, and commentators on the left, take her down? How do you smear the hockey mom?
Democrats who never bothered to notice that Barack Obama had probably fewer than 150 days of active service in the U.S. Senate before seeking the presidency, have been quick to cite her inexperience. Granted, on national security matters, she’s no more experienced than Obama and if you object to her being a heartbeat away from the nuclear trigger, you have to be terrified by the prospect that Obama could be the triggerman. On that issue, it’s hard for Democrats and partisan commentators to play the inexperience card. Give me the option of inexperience in the number two job and inexperience in the Oval Office and I’ll take junior every time.
This is really tricky for Democrats. In attacking her, they’re awfully close to making the argument every woman and every minority has heard about why they’re not promoted. Not ready. Not able to give the job full attention. Throw arrogance — Joe Biden’s strongest suit — against her and there’s a real chance it backfires. She may not know the name of some obscure third world leader, one Republican here noted, but she will know the price of milk — and when it went up.
It’s John McCain’s convention. But if it ends early because of Gustav, the one person they’ll regret missing is not McCain, George Bush or Dick Cheney. It’s Palin. She has this party on a Rocky Mountain high.
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