VEEP

Palin Fallout Scrambles Campaign's First Day

by Will Englund

Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008


The Gulf Coast was less than devastated, and the first night of the Republican convention was drastically truncated, but Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin provided plenty to talk about on Monday with announcements that her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant; that her husband had been arrested 22 years ago for drunk driving; and that Palin has hired a lawyer to defend her in the investigation into the police scandal that has been brewing in Anchorage since July.

John McCain's aides insisted that the governor had been properly vetted before he announced her as his running mate on Friday. Steve Schmidt, a top strategist for the presidential candidate, said that McCain learned of Bristol's pregnancy last week in a "private conversation" with the governor. He would not say whether that conversation was before or after McCain had settled on Palin. Hardly anyone else in the McCain camp knew of the pregnancy, a top aide said.

In a statement, Palin asked the press to respect her daughter's privacy. Bristol, she said, is in her fifth month of pregnancy, intends to bear the child, and will marry the father.

Palin's backers were quick to express their support. A senior McCain aide said, when asked if the events of the day had thrown Palin off: "She's a mother. We'd like to think this story will last a cycle and go on. They are a very tight family. Many, many American families have experiences like this. They are a very warm, loving family, very supportive; everybody is doing the right thing. Unfortunately, it has to play out in the public spotlight. We hope the media will be respectful."

Bristol's condition was hardly a well-kept secret. Friends of friends of the family had been gossiping about it as early as Friday. David Pepper, pastor of the Church on the Rock in Wasilla, Alaska, where the Palins had attended regular services until moving to the Governor's Mansion in Juneau in 2006, said on Monday that he has known of the pregnancy for "quite some time."

"Fornication is sin before God," he said, "but even with the best teaching of morality, things like this happen. For any parent, any Christian parent, it would be awkward, it would be a tough thing. But you have to pick up and do the best you can -- try to get their hearts healed."

"It just makes her more real," said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington. "It is more and more common in this country that young women find themselves pregnant out of wedlock, but I think that she's demonstrating that the best way to respond to that situation is to provide support to your daughter."

"Nonmarital" births have risen over the last decade, but only slightly. Among teens, the birth rate dropped dramatically from 1990 and 2005 (with a small uptick since then). Researchers attribute the decline to increased use of contraceptives, although that finding is controversial. Many conservatives, including McCain and Palin, oppose federal support for contraceptive distribution and instead favor abstinence-only education programs. When running for governor, Palin said that she is against "explicit sex education."

Palin's supporters insist that there is no reason to question her ability to campaign for the vice presidency while raising a 5-month-old baby of her own and a teenage daughter expecting her first child. It's "offensive" even to pose the question of family versus career, Schmidt said, because no one would ask it of a male candidate -- though in fact during the Democratic primaries some wondered publicly whether John Edwards should continue campaigning while his wife was ill with inoperable cancer.

Schmidt lashed out at speculation on the blogosphere that Bristol was actually the mother of Trig Palin, who was born in April after the governor had announced to the surprise of staff and acquaintances that she was pregnant. A McCain aide suggested to Reuters that those rumors would be an "anchor" weighing down the campaign of Democrat Barack Obama.

"We don't go after people's families," Obama said Monday in Monroe, Mich. "It's not appropriate and it's not relevant. Our people were not involved in any way in this, and they will not be. And if I ever thought that it was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that, they'd be fired."

Palin has stepped into a whirlwind, and it's not apt to die down. Geraldine Ferraro, whom Walter Mondale picked as his vice presidential running mate in 1984, said yesterday that she had doggedly prepared herself on the issues but was caught flat-footed by a press frenzy, which refused to go away, over her husband's business dealings. "I didn't expect it," she said. "I should have."

Bill Andresen, who was an aide to Sen. Joe Lieberman in 2000, said that being picked as a running mate means an immediate end to routine and familiarity. "You find yourself with a new staff of people who you don't know and who don't know you," he said. Palin has had to navigate the national attention with her own brand-new staff, including Tucker Askew, a former aide to President Bush, as counselor; and Maria Comella, who worked for Rudy Giuliani's campaign, as press secretary.

Todd Palin's drunk-driving arrest in 1986, when he was 24, seems to be essentially a nonissue. More problematic is the state Legislature's investigation into the firing of Alaska's commissioner of public safety, and accusations that Palin was angry that he hadn't fired a trooper who was her former brother-in-law and was involved in a custody dispute with her sister.

On Monday, the investigative committee announced that Alaska lawyer Thomas V. Van Flein had been hired to defend her; the investigation into possible abuse of her position is scheduled to wrap up by the end of October.

Kirk Victor, Brian Friel, and Marc Ambinder contributed to this story.

  •  
  •