McCainiac: Palin family needs privacy

by Frank James

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Steve Schmidt, Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign senior strategist, visited the media area at the Xcel Energy Center today to answer my colleagues' questions and get out the campaign's messages.

Among those messages:

If the family of Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain's vice presidential choice, has its privacy violated, it won't be the McCain campaign's fault. Rather, we in the media will be to blame as the prying meanies we are.

(Of course, we in the media weren't the ones who chose the Alaska governor even after being fully aware that her 17-year old daughter was pregnant, which is what the McCain campaign says it did.

it was the McCain campaign who created the present situation, not the media. If people in the campaign, especially the candidate, were so concerned about the Palins' privacy, including the privacy of the 17-year old pregnant daughter, they probably wouldn't have nominated the Alaska governor.

When you have a vice presidential candidate like Palin who isn't widely known, there's going to be a great hunger for information about her and her family. That desire for information would exist even if the family were fairly boring. For better or worse, the Palins aren't boring.

Meanwhile, the story of the teen-aged Bristol Palin is a very compelling, human story that many families have faced. So just on a human level, there's plenty of interest in the fact that she is pregnant and a teenager who just happens to be the daughter of the woman who is soon to become, if nothing changes, the Republican Party's official vice presidential nominee.)

Schmidt also said the McCain campaign was decent enough not to announce the choice of Palin on the same day that Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama made his big speech last Thursday, thereby giving Obama a clear opportunity to speak to voters.

(Schmidt said that with a straight face. In fact, he seems to say everything with a poker face. He must've been absent when the humor genes were being handed out. Everyone knows the McCain campaign announced Palin last Friday only hours after Obama finished his speech in order to squelch Obama's post-convention bounce.)

After being asked about Palin's qualifications to be president, Schmidt delivered the answer that we've been hearing a lot of ever since McCain announced his choice. She has more executive experience than Obama, who Schmidt credited with just one year in the Senate. Schmidt also said she had more real achievements compared with Obama who, he said, has no real accomplishments, save for the non-proliferation treaty that got a 99-0 vote and was so unimportant, it wasn't written about by any news organization in the "Western" media except for Congressional Quarterly.

(Obama has actually been in the Senate three years. I'll leave it to the Obama campaign to defend his legislative achievements but I will say that Obama generally talks about his efforts on ethics reform as an accomplishment as well.)