Anchorage Daily News

Wow! Monday was just like last Friday in terms of Gov. Sarah Palin's emerging national story, so here goes.

Legislative investigators feels pressure from McCain campaign. Sen. Hollis French told ABC News today that the McCain campaign is using stall tactics to prevent the Oct. 31 release of the final report on Gov. Sarah Palin's involvement in a personnel matter before state troopers.

"It's likely to be damaging to the governor," said Sen. Hollis French, a Democrat, appointed project manager for a bipartisan state Senate Legislative Counsel Committee investigation of claims that Palin abused her office to get the Alaska public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, fired.

Palin, who has denied any wrongdoing and has said she has nothing to hide, hired private lawyers Saturday, the day after Sen. McCain announced her as his running mate.

"Until then, the governor used state lawyers, and everything was fine," said French.

The campaign denied the charge, saying it had hired the private attorney two weeks ago.

***

The vetting question lingers as "rapid response team" arrives in Alaska. Much of what's out there today questions how much the McCain campaign really knew about Palin when it invited her to the ticket.

> Did any Alaskans get a call? (The New York Times)

"They didn't speak to anyone in the Legislature, they didn't speak to anyone in the business community,"said Lyda Green, the state Senate president who lives in Wasilla, where Palin served as mayor.

Representative Gail Phillips, a Republican and former speaker of the state House, said the widespread surprise in Alaska when Palin was named to the ticket made her wonder how intensively the McCain campaign had vetted her.

"I started calling around and asking, and I have not been able to find one person that was called," Phillips said. "I called 30 to 40 people, political leaders, business leaders, community leaders. Not one of them had heard. Alaska is a very small community, we know people all over, but I haven't found anybody who was asked anything."

The current mayor of Wasilla, Dianne M. Keller, said she had not heard of any efforts to look into Ms. Palin's background. And Randy Ruedrich, the state Republican Party chairman, said he knew nothing of any vetting that had been conducted.

State Sen. Hollis French, a Democrat who is directing the ethics investigation, said that no one asked him about the allegations. "I heard not a word, not a single contact," he said.

> What else don't we know? (Time Video)

> Andrea Mitchell on Palin Vetting (MSNBC Video)

> Three questions Republicans are asking themselves about Palin (ABC News)

What else is out there about Palin?

Was the vetting process complete and professional?

What message will voters hear about McCain's judgment that he chose someone to be his running mate who has almost no national security experience and who is so much of an unknown quantity?

>Face it: They didn't vet her (Talking Points Memo)

The McCain camp had just sent a team of GOP lawyers to Alaska to do what I guess you'd call a post-vetting of Sarah Palin. Now George Stephanopoulos appears to have more. George says the McCainers are sending a "rapid response team of about 10 operatives that includes lawyers" to do the aforementioned deeper vet. A lot of attention is being given to Gov. Palin's daughter's situation.

The much bigger deal is the expanding troopergate investigation, the fact that Palin lied in her Friday speech about her purported opposition to the Bridge to Nowhere, her apparent former membership in the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party and more. Individually, you can come to your own judgment about how consequential these stories are. What they show pretty clearly now -- in addition to the news that the McCain campaign is only now sending in a vetting team -- is that John McCain didn't do any serious vetting of Palin before he invited her to join his ticket and, he hopes, become vice president of the United States.

Fundamentally, of course, this is about McCain. And the real issue here is what this slapdash decision says about his judgment.

> Palin pregnancy news knocks GOP team off-message (Newsday)

No matter how sympathetic voters are to her plight or how much parents might believe it could happen to their daughters, this is not what McCain's camp wanted people to hear in the first 72 hours after introducing Palin.

"It changes the story line from (Republicans) cheering to 'Let's look at the real Sarah Palin,'" said Michigan pollster Ed Sarpolus, an expert in one of the states where Palin is expected to campaign heavily. "It puts a stall in her momentum."

Added independent analyst Stu Rothenberg: "They're trying to introduce this woman as a potential vice president of the United States. You want to demonstrate stature and intelligence and maturity and thoughtfulness and instead the angle is sex, and that's a very different kind of message than the Republicans would want to convey about their nominee."

"She's going to get three strikes, and this is one," said independent analyst Charles Cook.

> Mayor Palin: A rough record (Time, 9/2/08)

But in the first major race of her career - the 1996 campaign for mayor of her hometown of Wasilla - Palin was a far more conventional politician. In fact, according to some who were involved in that fight, Palin was a highly polarizing political figure who brought partisan politics and hot-button social issues like abortion and gun control into a mayoral race that had traditionally been contested like a friendly intramural contest among neighbors.

***

Women on McCain's choice: How could you? Or, thank God you did. Did the move succeed in bringing Hillary voters over? Can evangelicals support a mom who doesn't stay home with her special-needs child or her at-risk teen?

> Sarah Palin's Mommy Problem (Vanity Fair)

With women who raise children, you don't get points for just having children, you have to be their primary caregiver or at least be able to hand them off to one of those menschy stay-at-home-dads-"SAHDs," as they are condescendingly referred to on urbanbaby. But Palin's husband, Todd, works as a production operator at British Petroleum.

In this day and age, plenty of women make the decision that they will not be the primary caretaker of their children. That might be hard to swallow for some, but that's progress. It's what men have been doing since the beginning of civilization. But if that's the case, and if, like Palin, you returned to work three days after your Down syndrome son was born, you don't get "hockey mom" bragging rights to boot. You can't have it both ways.

> Hillary's gone, but the gender issue isn't (Globe and Mail)

The Republicans are clearly trying to attract disgruntled Hillary Clinton voters.

But what kind of twisty mindset would basically substitute one female candidate for another regardless of political beliefs, which, in this case, are miles apart? Palin, a social conservative, is ardently anti-abortion, doesn't believe climate change is manmade and is against "explicit" sex education in schools.

You could argue, in terms of targeting Clinton supporters, that this a deeply sexist move.

(Let's substitute one set of ovaries for another and see if anyone notices!)

Not just Democrats but Republicans have naturally expressed shock and outrage that McCain was reckless enough to pick a 44-year-old female political leader who has virtually no experience with either foreign policy or national issues to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

> Why the Palin baby story matters (National Review)

In the Colorado section, I ran into Sue Sharkey from Windsor. When I asked what she thought, her reaction was not about Palin but herself.

"For me personally, it hit my heart this morning," Sharkey told me, "because I was a 17- year-old girl, just like Sarah Palin's daughter, and I had, I was in those shoes. And my son is with me, who will be 35 years old next week, and so I know what a difficult road there is for her."

"I chose to have my son, and from that point I realized that I was a very strong right-to-life advocate," Sharkey continued, her voice wavering slightly. Roe v. Wade had been passed just the year before, and I already knew girls who were going through abortions. It wasn't a choice for me; it wasn't in my heart to do that. So when I heard the news this morning, it struck close to home for me."

> A story Palin should tell (Washington Post PostPartisan blog)

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column about the problem of teen pregnancy and the tragic impact it has had on so many aspects of life in the nation's capital. Reader response was heavy and in some ways disturbing. While I never used the terms "black or "African-American" in the column, many readers saw the teen pregnancy problem in only racial terms.

An example:

"Stop handing out welfare and housing to teen mothers and teen pregnancy will be cut by one-half in a few years." 7/19/2008 10:59 AM.

Sarah Palin, husband Todd and daughter Bristol are well suited to tell the rest of America that there is more to the problem than that.

***

General reactions to VP Palin worth checking out:

> New Palin details will help, not hurt (Politico)

Fishing permit violations. A blue-collar husband who racked up a DUI citation as a 22-year-old. An unmarried teenage daughter who is pregnant and a nasty child custody battle involving a family member.

All this, to one degree or another, has surfaced in recent days as a result of efforts to discredit or undermine Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. But these revelations may have the opposite effect: In one sense, they could reinforce how remarkably unremarkable she is.

> In political realm, ‘family problem' emerges as test (The New York Times)

Three views from this story:

"Families get in trouble all the time," said Rick Scarborough, a pastor and the founder of the conservative advocacy group Vision America. "From what I see this family is dealing with it honorably. They are going to carry this baby to a full term as a further testimony of their commitment to life."

"I am a high school coach, I interact with 17-year-olds every day," said Fergus Cullen, the New Hampshire Republican chairman. "And there are a lot of parents out there of 17-year-old high school students. If anything, this is a reminder that Sarah Palin is a real person who has the same experiences that regular Americans do."

"There is no such thing as the perfect candidate," he continued. "She is an outstanding choice, very helpful to the ticket."

"When you combine the special-needs infant with the pregnant teen, some voters might wonder why she is pursuing political ambitions at the expense of maternal or family responsibilities," said Don Sipple, a Republican strategist and past adviser to George W. Bush in Texas.

> McCain's Palin choice: A profile in cynicism (Bloomberg.com)

When you turn a blind date into a marriage in a matter of hours, there may be surprises during the honeymoon. And there were, including the shocker that Palin's unmarried teenage daughter is five months pregnant. McCain adviser Fred Malek says everyone who needed to know knew before the announcement. Other advisers were as stunned by the news as by the original selection.

The vice presidential choice is the only truly presidential decision a candidate makes. For someone who talks about himself as a man of honor, above politics, who believes that his No. 2 must be ready to be commander-in-chief on Day 2, this is an impetuous, superficial, reactive move designed to excite the fringe of his party and attract disenchanted women from the other.

This would be cynical for someone for whom age isn't an issue. For someone 72 with four bouts of cancer, it's a violation of his duty to do the country no harm. That's true no matter how much you love the Sarah Palin made-for-TV movie.

> AARP focus group is not happy with Palin (Time, The Swampland blog)

Another week, another Frank Luntz/AARP focus group of undecided voters, this one in Minneapolis and with bad news for John McCain: They don't like the choice of Sarah Palin for vice president.

Only one person said Palin made him more likely to vote for McCain; about half the 25-member group raised their hands when asked if Palin made them less likely to vote for McCain. They had a negative impression of Palin by a 2-1 ratio, a fact that was reinforced when they were given hand-dials and asked to react to Palin's speech at her first appearance with McCain on Friday. The dials remained neutral as Palin went through her heart-warming(?) biography and only blipped upward when she said she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, which wasn't quite the truth, as we now know.

Palin baby's daddy is "sex on skates" (New York Magazine)

We have a different question: HOW HOT IS THE BABY DADDY? Eighteen-year-old Levi Johnston is a hockey star and high school classmate of Bristol Palin. They'd been dating awhile, and now with the whole pregnancy thing are planning on getting married. Look at that face. John McCain is definitely winning the cougar vote now on top of the Jamie-Lynn Spears vote.

Johnston is basically the quintessential example of that guy who you are constantly worried is going to impregnate your daughter (and occasionally does). He's a handsome stud, an athletic star, and he has a criminal record. (For illegally fishing Alaska king salmon from Moose Lake out of season. Best crime ever!)

Dude, Honest Abe himself would want this guy in the Lincoln bedroom.

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