So, what is the net benefit of picking Palin going to be?
McCain's gambling, to say the least. He probably chose her hoping that she would help rally the Republican Party's lukewarm right wing base (Palin is a staunch pro life socon who once supported Pat Buchanan) and give the more conservative Democrats and independents who supported or approved of Hillary Clinton's campaign a reason to vote for him. It looks crass and patronizing, of course, but some of Clinton's supporters can obviously be had: they went for the proposition that Hillary Clinton, graduate of Wellesley College and Yale Law School, partner of the Rose Law Firm and First Lady of the United States, is at heart a beer and whiskey guzzling working woman from the Midwest who likes to hang around gas stations chatting up commuters about the high price of gas. Some of these people can be hustled. McCain isn't going to get the liberal and feminist wings of Clinton's supporters (especially not with someone like Palin on the ticket), but he's really only looking for a few blocs of votes in key states like Ohio, where shaving a few points off the Republicans' usual gender gap just might be enough to give him the state in a close election.
I think Palin's downside is huge and it probably says a lot about where McCain thinks he is that he threw a Hail Mary like this and nominated someone he scarcely knows himself: if everything works out Palin will increase the level of enthusiasm and turnout among the Republican Party's base and draw some conservative, low income working class women his way, but her conservative ideology is likely to incite as much opposition as it does support (even among the intended target group of working class women), and she has almost no experience at the national level, which leaves open all sorts of possibilities for time-wasting pratfalls that McCain simply can't afford.
I agree that this probably wasn't a very smart move by the Republicans. The idea was probably to attract dissapointed Hillary fans... But indeed, if Hillary openly speaks out against her, it's probably not going to work.
And I also agree that many Republicans probably won't dig the idea of a female president... And well... If McCain gets elected to be president, he'll be just one year away from the American life expectancy by the end of his first term... There might be quite some conservatives who won't be willing to take the risk.
Do you folks read blogs? Apparently there is a whole bunch of stuff out now that claims the Down's syndrome baby is not Sarah Palin's, but apparently her daughters.
Bizarre!
I love John, I love Paul, And George and Ringo, I love them all!
The idea was probably to attract disappointed Hillary fans...
Or more particularly, the broader demographic of working-to-middle class women (and not only women), who, in the Democratic primaries tended to prefer Clinton to Obama. Reagan Democrats, in other words: there are a lot of them in the suburbs of states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, and that, of course, is where the election is going to be decided. But Palin's hard core conservatism on a lot of the social issues could cut against her among these people (the socons are already Republican), so expect her to talk a lot about her track record as an Alaskan reformer (the populist angle), with a few bits of "hockey mom" nonsense ( ) thrown in as well.
Do you folks read blogs? Apparently there is a whole bunch of stuff out now that claims the Down's syndrome baby is not Sarah Palin's, but apparently her daughters.
That was Desperate Housewives, wasn't it?
A few blogs are worth reading, but a lot more of them give the impression they were written by guys in tin foil hats who spend their "recreational hours" at the asylum sitting at computer terminals. ("But it's good for them: they get to express themselves.")
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Here we go: the bloggers were onto something, but got it wrong. Any other goodies, Ms. Palin?
To rebut rumors, Palin says daughter, 17, pregnant
By Steve Holland Monday, September 1, 2008; 12:03 PM
ST. PAUL (Reuters) - The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said on Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.
Bristol Palin, one of Alaska Gov. Palin's five children with her husband, Todd, is about five months pregnant and is going to keep the child and marry the father, the Palins said in a statement released by the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
Bristol Palin made the decision on her own to keep the baby, McCain aides said.
"We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us," the Palins' statement said.
"Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support," the Palins said.
The Palins asked the news media to respect the young couple's privacy.
"Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family. We ask the media, respect our daughter and Levi's privacy as has always been the tradition of children of candidates," the statement concluded.
MCCAIN KNEW
Senior McCain campaign officials said McCain knew of the daughter's pregnancy when he selected Palin last week as his vice presidential running mate, deciding that it did not disqualify the 44-year-old governor in any way.
In the short period since she was announced last Friday, Palin has helped to energize the Republican Party's conservative base, giving the McCain camp fresh energy going into the campaign for the November 4 election against Democrat Barack Obama.
McCain officials said the news of the daughter's pregnancy was being released to rebut what one aide called "mud-slinging and lies" circulating on liberal blog sites.
According to these rumors, Sarah Palin had faked a pregnancy and pretended to have given birth in May to her fifth child, a son named Trig who has Down syndrome. The rumor was that Trig was actually Bristol Palin's child and that Sarah Palin was the grandmother.
A senior McCain campaign official said the McCain camp was appalled that these rumors had not only been spread around liberal blog sites and partisan Democrats, but also were the subject of heightened interest from mainstream news media.
"The despicable rumors that have been spread by liberal blogs, some even with Barack Obama's name in them, is a real anchor around the Democratic ticket, pulling them down in the mud in a way that certainly juxtaposes themselves against their 'campaign of change,"' a senior aide said.
Wow... She's been in the public eye for three days now and already it's one scandal after the other... I wonder if some people (including Palin herself) are already regretting this choice...
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^ She may turn out to be a sort of low-rent Ted Stevens: sitcom level family melodrama instead multi-million dollar graft.
Investigators Are Looking at Governor About Firing
By MICHAEL LUO Published: August 29, 2008
DENVER — In unveiling Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as Senator John McCain’s running mate, the campaign is portraying her as a champion of ethics reform for taking on members of her own party whom she saw as beholden to special interests.
But just a few weeks ago she became the subject of a state ethics investigation.
This month, a bipartisan panel of state legislators appointed an independent investigator to look into whether Ms. Palin had fired a top law enforcement official in her administration because he had failed to dismiss a state trooper who was involved in a divorce with Ms. Palin’s sister.
State Senator Hollis S. French II, a Democrat and former prosecutor who is directing the inquiry and picked the independent investigator, said his sense was that the inquiry would probably not turn up a “smoking gun on the governor” but that it “certainly has the possibility of giving her an ethical black eye.”
The questions began in mid-July, shortly after Ms. Palin fired Walt Monegan, the public safety commissioner and a former Anchorage police chief. Ms. Palin said she had wanted to take the department in a different direction.
A week later, however, Andrew Halco, a former state legislator who ran against Ms. Palin for governor in 2006, published a lengthy article on his blog highlighting a bitter back-and-forth between members of Ms. Palin’s extended family and the trooper, Mike Wooten. Ms. Palin’s sister, Molly McCann, was divorced from Mr. Wooten in 2005 and was locked in a bitter custody dispute.
An internal police investigation conducted in 2005, prompted by complaints from Ms. McCann and her family, eventually resulted in Mr. Wooten’s being suspended for illegally shooting a moose and using a Taser on his stepson, although most of the complaints were dismissed.
A judge in the couple’s custody case questioned the family’s motives for filing the complaints. “It appears for the world that Ms. McCann and her family have decided to take off for the guy’s livelihood,” the judge said, according to a recording of a hearing.
The McCain campaign issued a statement on Friday saying, “Governor Palin has been fully cooperative in this situation and has nothing to hide.”
The inquiry by the Legislature centers on what Mr. Monegan later described as pressure from members of Ms. Palin’s administration and her husband, Todd, to fire Mr. Wooten. The governor herself also raised the subject of Mr. Wooten with him, Mr. Monegan has said.
Mr. Monegan, who did not return telephone calls on Friday, told The Anchorage Daily News that Mr. Palin had showed him some of the findings of a private detective the family had hired to investigate Mr. Wooten and accused him of a variety of transgressions, including drunken driving and child abuse.
Mr. Palin told the newspaper that Mr. Wooten had made threats against his wife and her family.
As part of her efforts to demonstrate that she welcomed the Legislature’s inquiry, Ms. Palin asked the state’s attorney general to look into the accusations as well. Ms. Palin initially denied there had ever been pressure applied to Mr. Monegan.
This month, however, she released an audio recording of a top aide’s questioning of a police lieutenant about why no action had been taken against Mr. Wooten. Ms. Palin also disclosed there had been more than two dozen inquiries from members of her staff to the public safety department about him, but she said she had played no role in the inquiries.
Excerpts of the audio recording released by the governor showed Frank Bailey, the state’s director of boards and commissions, pushing Lt. Rodney Dial in February about Mr. Wooten.
“Todd and Sarah are scratching their heads, ‘Why on earth hasn’t this, why is this guy still representing the department?’ ” Mr. Bailey said to the lieutenant.
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This won't surprise anyone either, I imagine:
Palin backed abstinence-only education Posted: Monday, September 01, 2008 1:27 PM by Mark Murray
From NBC's Katie Primm and Mark Murray
By way, as has been pointed out, Palin backed abstinence-only education during her 2006 gubernatorial race. In an Eagle Forum Alaska questionnaire, Palin gave this response to the following question:
Will you support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of for explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics, and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?
Palin: Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.
*** UPDATE *** NBC's Abby Livingston adds that a McCain spokesperson in May 2007 said the Arizona Republican supported abstinence-only education, too. "Sen. McCain believes the correct policy for educating young children on this subject is to promote abstinence as the only safe and responsible alternative. To do otherwise is to send a mixed signal to children that, on the one hand they should not be sexually active, but on the other here is the way to go about it. As any parent knows, ambiguity and equivocation leads to problems when it comes to teaching children right from wrong. Sen. McCain believes that there are many negative forces in today’s society that promote irresponsible and dangerous behavior to our children. The public education system should not join this chorus of moral equivocation and ambiguity.”
"We were, obviously, just kidding!" says presidential candidate John McCain By Amanda Huggenkiss Published: September 1, 2008
According to a statement issued today by Republican presidential nominee John McCain, he was "Just kidding" last Friday, when he announced that he chose 44 year old Sarah Palin as his running mate for the 2008 United States presidential election.
"People always take presidental campaings way too seriously", said McCain. "So I decided to pull an old fashioned prank by naming an unexperienced 44 year old mayor of a small town in Alaska with a closet full of skeletons as my running mate. I still can't believe the media actually bought it!".
According to a spokesman of the Republican Party, Palin was in on the joke. It will be releaved later this week who McCain's real running mate will be.
Here we go: the bloggers were onto something, but got it wrong. Any other goodies, Ms. Palin? ...
Finally, from an "unimpeachable source", the convoluted truth is finally revealed. What a tangled web we weave ...
*********************************************************************************************************** "Repub Candie VPiLF Sarah Palin, former beauty queen and snowmobile mogul, apparently made believe she was pregnant for the fifth time after keeping the make believe pregnancy a secret for seven months to protect her daughter from the disgrace of bearing a child of John McCain. The neanderthal Repub Prez candie promised Palin that he would name her to be his running mate if she would cover up his rendezvous with Palin's teen age daughter.
Palin and McCain go back to the days of his judgeship in the Miss Alaska Beauty Pageant when contestant Sarah played the skin flute in the POW's Juneau Hilton Hotel room. The McCain campaign has called in Cleaner, Bill Clinton to advise all parties. Clinton was last seen comforting Palin's teen daughter... " ***********************************************************************************************************
"We were, obviously, just kidding!" says presidential candidate John McCain By Amanda Huggenkiss Published: September 1, 2008
According to a statement issued today by Republican presidential nominee John McCain, he was "Just kidding" last Friday, when he announced that he chose 44 year old Sarah Palin as his running mate for the 2008 United States presidential election.
"People always take presidental campaings way too seriously", said McCain. "So I decided to pull an old fashioned prank by naming an unexperienced 44 year old mayor of a small town in Alaska with a closet full of skeletons as my running mate. I still can't believe the media actually bought it!".
According to a spokesman of the Republican Party, Palin was in on the joke. It will be releaved later this week who McCain's real running mate will be.
OK, I made that up...
Cute! Except isn't her first name Ivana, not Amanda (Ivana Hugenkiss) ?
I love John, I love Paul, And George and Ringo, I love them all!
"We were, obviously, just kidding!" says presidential candidate John McCain By Amanda Huggenkiss Published: September 1, 2008
According to a statement issued today by Republican presidential nominee John McCain, he was "Just kidding" last Friday, when he announced that he chose 44 year old Sarah Palin as his running mate for the 2008 United States presidential election.
"People always take presidental campaings way too seriously", said McCain. "So I decided to pull an old fashioned prank by naming an unexperienced 44 year old mayor of a small town in Alaska with a closet full of skeletons as my running mate. I still can't believe the media actually bought it!".
According to a spokesman of the Republican Party, Palin was in on the joke. It will be releaved later this week who McCain's real running mate will be.
OK, I made that up...
Email a copy of this to the McCain campaign; it's probably better than any of their ideas and they may want to use it (make sure you charge them a huge fee).
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) thrown in as well.
