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Palin pregnancy news knocks GOP team off-message

BY CRAIG GORDON | craig.gordon@newsday.com

5:54 AM EDT, September 2, 2008

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Sarah Palin was on a roll, fresh-faced and fiery, just the boost of energy John McCain's slow-but-steady campaign needed.

Now that's over.

So far anyway, it doesn't look as if news that Palin has a pregnant teenage daughter is enough to knock her off McCain's ticket.

But the news does seriously knock Palin and McCain off-stride and off-message - just as they were trying to introduce her to a broader audience - and just as the public was trying to fix an image of Palin as a would-be vice president in their minds.

No matter how sympathetic voters are to her plight, or how much parents might believe it could happen to their daughters, this is not what McCain's camp wanted people to hear in the first 72 hours after introducing Palin.

"It changes the story line from [Republicans] cheering to 'Let's look at the real Sarah Palin,'" said Michigan pollster Ed Sarpolus, an expert in one of the states where Palin is expected to campaign heavily. "It puts a stall in her momentum."

Added independent analyst Stu Rothenberg: "They're trying to introduce this woman as a potential vice president of the United States. You want to demonstrate stature and intelligence and maturity and thoughtfulness, and instead, the angle is sex, and that's a very different kind of message than the Republicans would want to convey about their nominee."

Many experts said Palin could weather the story about her daughter because most voters are willing to accept that it's a private, family matter. "She going to get three strikes, and this is one," said independent analyst Charles Cook.

The real danger for Palin would come if this revelation were the first of a steady drip of stories - and already, news came out yesterday of her husband's long-ago drunken-driving charge and the fact that she hired a lawyer to defend herself in an ethics probe in Alaska.

For McCain, the timing couldn't be worse. He's already struggling to get his message out at a storm-shortened convention this week - and Palin's news takes the public's attention away from his attacks on Barack Obama.

It also dramatically raises the stakes for Palin's acceptance speech to the nation, originally scheduled for tomorrow night. No longer is that speech merely a high-energy, get-to-know-you address, like her appearance Friday as McCain's running mate. Now it becomes a closely watched moment where the country will try to take her measure - as a possible president, and perhaps, rightly or wrongly, as a mother.

That notion yesterday rankled some delegates - that voters might use the episode to question how a mother of five, including a 4-month-old with Down syndrome, can take herself away from her family to run for the White House.

"There are going to be people saying, 'She shouldn't be doing that. She should be at home.' But that's her decision, and her husband supports her, so we should stay out of her life," said Audra Shay, 36, an alternate delegate and mother of two from Louisiana.

The silver lining for McCain is that the news seems to draw conservatives even closer to the McCain-Palin ticket - in effect, Palin's daughter is doing what anti-abortion activists urge others to do: having the baby and marrying the father.

And just as the Palin pick all but dared Democrats to challenge her credentials as a two-year Alaska governor, some Republican strategists yesterday said Democrats will pay the price if their activist supporters point out that the "family values" party has a teen pregnancy in the family.

Obama saw the dangers of that yesterday, issuing a statement where he said Palin's daughter was off-limits in the campaign - and noted he was born to an 18-year-old mother, just a year older than Bristol Palin.