Sensitive Sarah

By GottaLaff

Sarah Louise Palin is the best candidate ever! Except when it comes to getting to know anything more about her or her positions on major issues:

How sensitive is Sen. John McCain's campaign about his presumptive running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin?

Well, there's the fact that they appear unwilling to let her be alone with the media. God forbid anyone should ask about her views on, say, global warming -- she doesn't believe that human activity has anything to do with it. Perhaps they don't want anyone to hear her explain why she opposes hate-crime laws?

When CNN's Campbell Brown asked McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds mildly aggressive questions about Palin's pregnant teenage daughter [view video here], and about the governor's lack of experience with national security issues, the campaign's response was to angrily cancel the senator's scheduled appearance on Larry King's show on Tuesday.

That'll show them. (It had the ancillary benefit of sparing McCain the awkward experience of answering direct questions, albeit it avuncular King-like ones, about Palin.) The McCain campaign's major defensive effort on Palin's behalf, however, has been the categorical insistence that any discussion of her 17-year-old daughter's pregnancy is out of bounds, an unacceptable invasion of the family's privacy.

As has Obama's campaign.

Both the McCain campaign and Obama are partly right. [...]

That said, the fact of Bristol Palin's situation and the way in which she and her family have chosen to deal with it are legitimate issues, because they involve public policy issues on which Sarah Palin, candidate for vice president, has taken political positions. Palin, for example, opposes sex education in schools, including all access to contraceptive information for adolescents. Similarly, she believes that abortion should be illegal.

The piece goes on to make the point that they are free to make these decisions.

The point is that the Palins were able to make all these decisions according to the dictates of their own consciences, formed by their own religious convictions, within the privacy of their own family and according to its values and traditions. What they decided is nobody's business but theirs; the fact that they were free to arrive at their own decision is everybody's business.

The particular brand of social conservatism in which Sarah Palin quite evidently believes deeply would deny other American families and other American women the freedom to make these same intimate decisions according to the dictates of their own consciences, religious convictions and traditions.

Freedom to choose only goes so far, you know. The cut-off point is obviously the kinds of choices that Democrats support.

The McCain campaign would like to cut off discussion of Palin's views as quickly and as completely as possible. [...] He picked a vice president he hardly knew -- and now, his campaign would like to buffalo the electorate into doing the same.

That's unlikely. Reporters are beginning to work their way across Alaska, reconstructing Palin's personal history. [...]

If McCain and his people think they can obscure this sort of record behind an appeal to privacy, they're kidding themselves even more than they're trying to kid the voters. Palin is beginning to look less like Dan Quayle and more like Tom Eagleton...

Secrets have a way of leaking out. The question is, how forgiving and/or tolerant will voters be? Or have they been desensitized to secrecy after having to endure the past 8 years of the Bush presidency?