Campaign Diaries

I was going to stay away from Sarah Palin today as I have been focusing on her pick for days now, but she remains the main topic of the political conversation for the fifth day in a row now. Talk about the vetting she received and about the various controversies the press is working on continues to overshadow the preparations for the convention’s first night.

Given that Palin has become comedy fodder, that Wonkette is using a “Fail-o-meter,” that Politico is raising the name of Eagleton, it is easy to conclude that Palin has become an utter disaster for the McCain campaign but we are not there yet, far from it. The most tangible impact of her pick up to now has been to fire up the conservative base and rally social conservatives to McCain’s sides. That is something McCain needed and that he could not have won without. The relentless attacks on Obama’s character were increasing the party’s cohesion, but that is nothing compared to the excitement Palin appears to have generated. After all, she even got James Dobson to be enthusiastic about McCain’s candidacy.

Palin’s big test will come tomorrow night. The problem, of course, is that a lot of what Palin might say might be immediately contradicted by new revelations on Thursday morning and in the days ahead. The New York Times and other papers have sent an army of investigators to Alaska to do some research on Palin (something the McCain campaign should have done more carefully). Even if nothing else comes to light, that will continue to feed revelations about “troopergate” and the Alaska Independence Party.

Much of the news about Palin isn’t necessarily that interesting, but given the fact that even the political press knows little about her, every new tidbit of information is being portrayed as explosive information instantaneously. And this is the true danger for McCain: a slow slow drip of news. If the Alaska Independence Party story generates a new headline every time another AIP member steps forward to talk about Palin, how many more days will that last? At this point, all the talk about Palin has become a gigantic distraction from the McCain campaign’s other goals of the week.

It is certainly possible - and many are making this argument - that Palin will come to be viewed as an “average” American, a hokey mom people can relate to. But when US Weekly gives her the Britney treatment, it’s a sure indication that her pick could quickly degenerate into something very different. Note that the second bullet point is devoted to troopergate… something that the McCain campaign was surely not expecting to become this big:

Average mom or (dare we say it) a celebrity? [Update: Palin is also on the cover of OK!, though the cover is far friendlier and highlights "A Mother's Painful Choice."] the Even Levi is now heading to the Republican convention. Some of this was inevitable with this unknown a pick, but a lot of is the fault of the McCain campaign.

The campaign insists that Palin was fully vetted - McCain himself reassured reporters today, and so did Culvahouse; there was also this full push-back in the Washington Post - and that Palin was put through as thorough a vetting as the other contenders. They surely knew about “troopergate,” perhaps about Bristol’s pregnancy, but I find it hard to believe that they were aware of Palin’s campaigning for the bridge to nowhere in 2006. It would not have taken them very long to find this, but would the McCain campaign then have made her opposition to the bridge to nowhere such a central part of her introduction on Friday?

Whenever a campaign has to spend days justifying the fact that is has vetted its running-mate, that’s precious lost time. Let’s do our daily recap of which stories are generating buzz besides what concerns Palin’s private family life. The day began with reports on the millions of dollars of earmarks Palin asked for Wasilla as mayor - even hiring a lobbying firm. That certainly makes it more difficult for her to run as an anti-earmark crusader today.

Then, there is the Alaska Independence Party. As reported yesterday, officials of the AIP were suggesting yesterday that Palin was a former member of the AIP. We now know that Sarah Palin was not a registered member of the AIP, as the McCain campaign showed that she had been a registered member of the Republican Party since 1982.

However, we knew yesterday that Palin filmed the welcome video of their convention last year and we learned today that that her husband Todd was a registered member of the party until 2002. Questions are now surrounding whether Palin attended the AIP’s convention in 1994. And this is where the slow slow drip of news is concentrating today, as ABC has found two officials of the AIP who say she did. The McCain campaign says she did not, in what ABC describes as a “he said/she said” game. When a campaign does not want a story to become big, “he said/she said” is generally not the best course.

Given that the AIP is now looking even more of a fringe group than it did yesterday since Ezra Klein reports it is an affiliate of the Constitution Party (a party that wants to “restore American jurisprudence to its original Biblical common-law foundations”), the story is likely to continue to stay in the news. Indeed, the far-right extremist angle of attack is what Democrats have apparently chosen to emphasize, in what they also view as a way to rally back registered Democrats and Clinton supporters who might be tempted to view McCain as a moderate. Democrats are starting to pound on Palin as an extremist social conservative, faulting for instance the ease with which she mixes religion and politics.

That theme is generating some unwelcome coverage. While the McCain campaign was surely eager to tout its conservative credentials, articles such as this one from Time was probably not what it had in mind - and given that there now are dozens of reporters roaming in Alaska, in Anchorage and in Wasilla, expect much more of this:

[In 1996] Palin was a highly polarizing political figure who brought partisan politics and hot-button social issues like abortion and gun control into a mayoral race that had traditionally been contested like a friendly intramural contest among neighbors… While Palin often describes that race as having been a fight against the old boys’ club, Stein says she made sure the campaign hinged on issues like gun owners’ rights and her opposition to abortion (Stein is pro-choice).

Governing was no less contentious than campaigning, at least to begin with. Palin ended up dismissing almost all the city department heads who had been loyal to Stein, including a few who had been instrumental in getting her into politics to begin with… Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

Who knew being the mayor of such a small town could lead to this much contention and controversy? In what has to be one of the worst press Palin has gotten in the mainstream media since Friday, Time goes on to describe Palin as an opportunist who gave up her focus abortion in 2006 when she decided to run for Governor, focused on corruption and decided that abortion would “distract” her from that message. The article defines “Sarah-dipity” as “that uncanny gift of knowing exactly what voters are looking for at a particular moment.”

One area in which the McCain campaign is also pushing back reports is Palin’s ties to Pat Buchanan, ties they categorically deny, pointing out that Palin supported Steve Forbes in 1996. But that only goes to show how unprepared the McCain campaign was, as it took them 5 days after these reports first emerged to take such a strong move to counter them. Also, if Democrats want to make an issue of this to rally Jewish voters (and I reported the other day that Rep. Wexler of Florida had certainly jumped on the opportunity), they still have material to use - Buchanan’s calling Palin a “brigader” and her wearing a Buchanan button when the former candidate visited Alaska in 1999.

Update: If you are wondering what voters who had heard little about Palin until this week-end and who don’t follow every detail of the news are learning about her now, just check this summary of tonight’s CBS news.