Your Daily McCain/Palin Scandal
Despite McCain’s claim that Sarah Palin was subjected to “a six-month long rigorous vetting process,” Palin did not meet with McCain in person until the day before he announced her as his running mate:
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was not subjected to a lengthy in-person background interview with the head of Sen. John McCain’s vice presidential vetting team until last Wednesday in Arizona, the day before McCain asked her to be his running mate, and she did not disclose the fact that her 17-year-old daughter was pregnant until that meeting, two knowledgeable McCain officials acknowledged Tuesday.
Sarah Palin did not see fit to pass this information on to the public when McCain named her as his running mate, and McCain clearly never gave any serious consideration to what would happen when the story came out. Indeed, he appears not to have thought that the story would become public, since he only instructed Sarah Palin to acknowledge the truth after rumors started swirling that Bristol Palin had given birth to five-month-old Trig Palin.
McCain and his advisers decided that Bristol Palin’s pregnancy “was not disqualifying,” and that the public would shrug it off as a non-issue, if they even thought about it at all:
“We made a political determination that the American people would not object to a female candidate with a 17-year-old daughter who was pregnant,” [Steve] Schmidt said Tuesday. “We believed that parents all over America would understand that life happens. The team made a recommendation to the senator that these issues were not disqualifying.”
That was naive at best, and stunningly arrogant at worst.
So naturally, McCain’s response is to blame the media:
Faced with tough questions about Sarah Palin, John McCain’s campaign and other Republicans are responding with a defensive crouch — lashing out at the media to deflect Palin from scrutiny and to rally a party base that has fallen hard for the conservative Alaska governor.
McCain aides, responding to questions about Palin’s qualifications to be vice president as well as her family life — including her pregnant and unwed teenage daughter — have aggressively turned the tables on the media by questioning reporters’ motives and suggesting a sexist double standard.
Throughout the party, at various venues throughout the Twin Cities, other Republicans have picked up the media-bashing banner, knowing instinctively that little else can better rally the spirits of their faithful than pitting the purportedly “liberal media” against their new shining star.
Howard Kurtz makes an insightful observation (unusual, but it happens). It’s the last sentence in this snip that struck me, but I’ll quote the paragraphs above it for context:
I’ve talked to many political professionals over the years who were mad at the media, or me in particular.
But I’ve never quite had a conversation like the one Tuesday night with Steve Schmidt.
He was absolutely furious as he unloaded on the journalistic community for, in his view, unfairly savaging Sarah Palin.
Sure, it is in his interest to try to get the press to tone things down. But Schmidt — a hard-headed, no-nonsense, on-message strategist — really sounded shell-shocked. And so he was saying things on the record that senior aides usually say only under a cloak of anonymity.
That doesn’t make his accusations right. But it does suggest to me that a brewing conflict between McCain and his media chroniclers — one that makes the ol’ Straight Talk Express days a distant memory — has reached the boiling point. And that there are gender and cultural issues swirling around Palin’s nomination that would have created conflict even without the added complication of her daughter’s pregnancy.
Exactly. Which is why McCain and his handlers should have known better than to think that when a socially conservative Republican vice-presidential candidate — who wants to criminalize all abortions with only one exception — reveals that her 17-year-old, unmarried daughter is pregnant, that is not going to fly under the radar.
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