That’s What You Get When You Don’t Vet

We find out that John McCain did know about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy before he announced her as his running mate, but decided that “it did not disqualify [Palin] in any way.”

Maybe not, but it might have been a good idea to plan for the possibility that either the traditional media or the blogosphere would get hold of the news, would it not?

Josh Marshall suggests that the McCain campaign, which is now, predictably, castigating “liberal bloggers” for spreading the pregnancy rumors, might have better served their own interests had they done this:

Late Update: I’ll note also that the McCain campaign is lashing out at ‘liberal bloggers’ for this story coming to light and even perhaps the Obama campaign. I think we can chalk that down as another intemperate falsehood emanating from their campaign. I will note this. Vetting works in a fairly established way with most campaigns. The standard procedure in a case like this would have been for the campaign to have gone to a trusted reporter — and by that I don’t mean a hack but someone the campaign knew would deal with the story in an appropriate way — and given them the story about the family drama the Palins are going through, how the daughter is planning to have the baby, how it confirms the family’s values, etc. In an ideal world, the daughter’s life would be her own business. But in the world we live in the best for all concerned would be to give it a respectful airing on day one or two and take it off the table rather than have it come out in some more jagged and painful way. We don’t care about Palin’s daughter. Her life is her own. She’s not running for anything. What this does show is much more confirmation of what Republican operatives and pols are saying loquaciously off-the-record: that they don’t think there was any real vetting of Palin. Acting out from the McCain camp will not change that.

I’d also like to point to Steve Benen’s answer to the right’s talking point that Bristol Palin “made the decision on her own to keep the baby.”

I can’t help but notice, though, that the McCain campaign emphasized the fact that she “made the decision on her own to keep the baby.”

That’s nice, but if McCain has his way in office, the choice wouldn’t be up to her at all. Roe would be overturned, and reproductive rights would be dramatically curtailed for every woman in America. Indeed, it’s not just McCain — Sarah Palin told Alaskans during her gubernatorial campaign that she wouldn’t support abortion rights even if her own daughter had been raped. (Palin is also a staunch advocate of abstinence-only education.)

I mean, how crazy is that? How can she continue to claim that abstinence-only education works when her own daughter didn’t abstain?

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