Okay, which obvious point do you want regarding Babygate? Or is it Babygate II? As you probably know, on Labor Day, the McCain campaign released this statement from Sarah Palin, McCain’s running-mate, and her husband Todd:
We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us. Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support.
Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family. We ask the media to respect our daughter and Levi’s privacy as has always been the tradition of children of candidates.
The Palins sacrificed their 17-year-old daughter’s privacy themselves in order to smother a fast-spreading rumor (or conspiracy theory) that Sarah Palin’s fifth child, born this past April, was really Bristol’s child. So how to process all this…bizarreness?
First, isn’t it curious that a rumor about a secret pregnancy was squelched by the disclosure of a real pregnancy? What are the odds? I’m not suggesting the above statement from the Palins is a lie. This could well be a case of reality being far more strange than fiction. But it is darn weird. At a luncheon for journalists and politicos on Monday afternoon, several prominent journalists were shaking their heads in disbelief that the first day of the convention was being dominated not by Gustav and the cancellation of the nighttime program but by the Palin family soap opera.
Second, imagine if any thing of this sort had happened on the Democratic side. Wouldn’t social conservatives be expressing frothy outrage? Or at least implying outrage? I’m reminded of how Newt Gingrich used to try to exploit whatever was in the news to depict the Democrats as the party of family and societal dysfunction. During the 1992 convention, he said, “Woody Allen having nonincest with a nondaughter to whom he was a nonfather because they were a nonfamily fits the Democratic platform perfectly.” And then there’s the time in 1991, after a South Carolina woman named Susan Smith killed her two daughters, that Gingrich said, “I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. The only way you get change is to vote Republican.”
An out-of-wedlock birth ain’t murder; still, it does not take much imagination to conceive how right-wingers would use such a family matter should it happen to a Democrat.
Third, bloggers and webbies will, no doubt, continue to pursue the original rumor. Fine. But they ought not dump unproved allegations onto the Internet. There is a place for decency on the Internet–even if the overall mission is aimed at undoing the work of an administration that misled the nation into war. Meanwhile, reporters and political ops sitting around doing nothing in St. Paul, realizing that the Palin family is also embroiled in another dicey matter (an investigation into whether Sarah Palin applied pressure to get her ex-brother-in-law fired from his job as an Alaskan state trooper), are wondering what else might come out about Palin and her family. After all, the convention has three more days to go.
