By The River

Let us dispense immediately with the thought that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was chosen as John McCain's running mate to "reach out" to disaffected, diehard Hillary Clinton supporters. She is a darling of the hard right, of the religious right, forced on McCain--who met her only once--by Karl Rove, who I suspect would rather have the Republican Party go down to defeat than have a squishy moderate pro-choicer like Tom Ridge or ex-Democrat Joe Lieberman on the ticket. The idea that Hillary's most fervent supporters would support Palin simply because she is a woman is ludicrous, as you will see.

Republican leaders in Alaska say the McCain team didn't send anyone to Alaska to vet Palin (read about 3/4 of the way down the linked story), which if true is an incredibly foolish mistake that hints of a last-minute change-of-mind after Karl Rove warned against picking Lieberman. You can't get the true measure of a person without talking to people who inhabit the same environment he or she does. My gut feeling is that this is going to end badly for McCain, perhaps with a Thomas Eagleton-like withdrawal of Palin from the ticket. He had apparently met her only once.

So who is Sarah Palin? Her choice should quiet Republican claims that Barack Obama is "inexperienced." She has been governor of Alaska, a state with 650,000 residents, for 18 months. Prior to that, she was mayor of the town of Wasilla, Alaska, which on the official city website is listed a having a population of 6,715. To put those population figures in central Pennsylvania terms, she was the governor of a state with a population just a little more than the combined populations of Dauphin, Cumberland, Lebanon and Perry counties. She was the mayor of a town with a population falling between that of Steelton and Camp Hill. And let's not forget her two terms on City Council in Wasilla. She was elected governor with a vote total of 114,697 votes, a couple of hundred MORE votes than President George W. Bush received in 2004--in York County, Pennsylvania.

So okay, Palin hasn't exactly been voted for by huge numbers of people. In fairness, many Democrats in 2004 would have been quite willing to have former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont--a state with even fewer residents than Alaska--become President. And Delaware, home of Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, has just 844,000 people.

But where does Palin stand on the issues of the day? Her Palin-for-Governor website has been scrubbed of specific issue papers, but the record is there. She is against abortion except to save the life of the mother, and would require victims of rape or incest to bear their attacker's baby. Palin, 44, has been deified in pro-life circles for refusing to get an abortion, as 80 percent of mothers in the same situation do, after being told her fetus would have Down Syndrome.

The baby is now four months-old and has accompanied Palin on her initial campaign forays with McCain. But here is where the lack of vetting could get interesting. Palin kept her pregnancy a secret for seven months. Why? There is a belief among some in Alaska that this is actually her 16-year-old daughter's baby. The daughter disappeared from school for several months, supposedly with a persistent case of mononucleosis. True? Who knows. Unfair and intrusive? Probably. But if Palin is going to push to take away a woman's right to choose, and hold herself up as a holy paradigm--Focus on the Family founder James Dobson called it "bravery and integrity in action"--it goes with the territory if you're running to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

Palin is an evangelical Christian, and attends fundamentalist churches. She is against embryonic stem cell research, and favors the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in public school biology classes. She said that in a televised debate while running for governor in 2006.

And on the environment? Her views line up squarely with those of Big Oil. She strongly favors drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and opposed the decision by the federal Environmental Protection Agency to list polar bears as an endangered species.

How has Palin been as governor? Good in some respects, Republican in others. She is under investigation by the Alaska Legislature for supposedly pressuring, or having her staff pressure, the head of the Alaska State Police to fire her sister's husband, who was then involved in a bitter divorce and child custody dispute, and then firing the head of the state police when he refused to fire the trooper. Palin's brother-in-law sounds like no prize, but governors must refrain from allowing their personal feelings to trump law and common sense. In fact, the whole brother-in-law saga sounds like a trashy reality TV show, which may actually play well in some quarters of the electorate.

Palin deserves credit for having come this far, and for attacking some of the corruption in the Alaska Republican Party, one of the more snakebitten political organizations to walk the Earth. She would probably be a welcome addition to the U.S. Senate. But she isn't ready to stand next-in-line to a 72-year-old President with persistent skin cancer problems that he still won't allow his doctors to fully discuss.