WASHINGTON: “The Mommy Wars: Special Campaign Edition” — Not the headlines that the Republican National Convention (RNC) expected or wanted to see this week. While Hurricane Gustav provided some shelter for Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s pick for his vice president, Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin released the news — while the mainstream media was covering the hurricane — that her 17-year-old-daughter was five months pregnant.
On any other day, the pregnancy story would have dominated the RNC coverage and consumed cable news, but television news is where the anchors are, and they were in Louisiana covering Gustav. Now, as Americans began learning about Sarah Palin this week — Alaskan hunter, hockey mom, former beauty queen, corruption fighter and previously unknown governor — they also began piecing together her family life and all its complications.
The disclosure presented — at the very least — an unwanted distraction for McCain’s campaign as he prepares for his nomination. It also moved the McCain campaign into unfamiliar — and potentially difficult — waters.
And, although McCain’s advisers told reporters they are confident that the story would soon fade, there are worries that other yet unknown tidbits about Palin may interfere with the careful effort by the McCain campaign to portray her as a socially conservative, corruption-fighting hockey mom with five children.
Palin was not one of McCain’s first choices. He initially wanted either Sen. Joe Lieberman, former Democrat (now Independent) from Connecticut, or former Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania. But both men favor abortion rights, a huge issue to the Christian conservatives who make up a crucial base of the Republican Party. The result was a real power struggle — for as word leaked that McCain was considering the men, he was inundated by furious and influential conservatives who threatened an explosive floor fight at the convention and vowed that neither Ridge nor Lieberman would be elected by the delegates. With time running out, McCain turned to Palin, interviewing her one day before publicly announcing she was his running mate. The announcement caused battle lines to be drawn between women across the United States over whether she has overextended herself with five children, including an infant with Down syndrome and a pregnant daughter.
Palin has set off a fierce argument among American women about whether there are enough hours in the day for her to take on the vice presidency, and whether she is right to try. “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,” Don Sipple, a Republican strategist and past adviser to President George W. Bush in Texas, told reporters.
How the country reacts to the pregnancy of Palin’s daughter is more of a sociological question than a political one. McCain’s political opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, reacted quickly. “Let me be as clear as possible,” Obama said. “I think people’s families are off-limits, and people’s children are especially off-limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as governor or her potential performance as a vice president.” Obama said reporters should “back off these kinds of stories” and noted that he was born to an 18-year-old mother. But the issue clearly is a challenge to the traditional image of a potential first family.
“The media is already trying to spin this as evidence that Gov. Palin is a hypocrite, James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, told reporters. “But all it really means is that she and her family are human.” But the family’s personal dilemma, which is not likely to be mentioned by either Sens. Obama or Joe Biden, may have taken away the Republicans’ long insistence that it owns family values. It also has pushed economic issues such as teenage pregnancy, sex education, and the cost of day care for working women, health insurance and equal pay, as well as abortion, more fully into the debate.
There also is little doubt that Sen. Hillary Clinton will campaign more vigorously for the Democrats than she might have after losing out to Sen. Biden to be on the ticket.
