An unplanned teenage pregnancy in a white middle-class political family where the mother is pro-life would throw a diaphragm into the works of most political campaigns, writes QUENTIN FOTTRELL
GREETINGS FROM Chicago, Illinois, the home state of your man with the funny name. The weather here is 50/50, pretty much like the prospects for Barack Obama's bid for the White House. As we know, teenage pregnancy and family values have temporarily trumped gas prices here as the water cooler topic.
The pressing issue of the economy has been conveniently strapped to the baby seat, while the subject of race remains an inaudible crackle on the baby monitor.
No sooner had John McCain chosen Sarah Palin - yes, her again! - than the Baked Alaska hit the fan. After news broke that her 17-year-old daughter Bristol was pregnant with her pin-up boyfriend, 18-year-old Levi Johnston, the Republican Party issued this phony and dismissive, if clever and pithy, soundbite: "Life Happens." It sounds like a mid-western family drama on the WB channel. It's not. Bristol will soon join 400,000 other American teenagers with child.
It has taken the heat off Palin's other issues that have been chewed over by commentators this past week: her initial support for the "Bridge to Nowhere", the failed Alaskan bridge to an island with 50 residents, her interest in creationism, her opposition to "explicit" sex education, which would involve the distribution of condoms in schools . . . this in a country where 10,000 teenagers contract a sexually transmitted disease every day, according to the American Social Health Association.
Still, an unplanned teenage pregnancy in a white middle-class political family where the mother is pro-life would throw a diaphragm into the works of most political campaigns. And Palin is not just pro-life. She believes a woman - or a minor - should have a child even in the case of incest and rape, and only makes an exception where the mother's life is at risk. This stance, supposed to indicate strength of character and single-mindedness, even worries some Republicans.
This sensational family values role is nothing new. In 1992, George Bush snr's vice-president, Dan Quayle, tried to make political capital out of the sitcom character Murphy Brown for being a single mother. The writers incorporated his comments into the show to portray him as a potato head. Their message to Quayle: a party against big government that values insurance and drug companies over affordable healthcare cannot afford to talk.
The Republican commitment to old-fashioned American values has never been what it seems. In 1980, Ronald Reagan gave an infamous speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three black civil rights activists were murdered 16 years earlier, a tragedy that was later turned into the film Mississippi Burning.Reagan said: "I believe in state's rights." He was thought to be reaching out to southern white segregationists. If that was the case, it worked.
But back to Chicago. As Palin was giving her "pit bull with lipstick" speech last Wednesday at the Republican Convention, 450 miles away in St Paul, Minnesota, I was in Chicago watching Oprah's open-air season premiere in Millennium Park where she was hosting the US Olympic athletes. Oprah and Obama, the most famous and successful black man and woman in American popular culture today, perhaps more than anyone, best embody the reality of the American dream.
Obama has tackled family values and race fairly and squarely. He has gone to great lengths to avoid being cast as the angry black man and plays good cop to his running-mate Joe Biden's bad cop. But he has taken a hard stance on black men who are deadbeat dads because it's a problem . . . and perhaps to appease white folk who fear a black US president might incite some kind of Malcolm X social revolution.
Now the family values shoe is on the other foot. In response to "Life Happens", Obama said his own mother was 18 when she had him, while Biden said Bristol's privacy should be respected. Palin only partly agrees with this principle. If she could, she would breach the privacy of millions of women by overturning Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling which legislated for abortion. And she's not alone. "Abort73.com" T-shirts are not hard to spot here in America's midwest.
Family values aside, her candidacy is obviously a half-baked attempt to sucker punch Obama for rejecting Hillary Clinton. Maybe Obama thought he'd get Wild Bill along for the ride, or maybe he was nursing his wounds from the primaries. Whatever the reason, Palin may play well among certain white evangelical voters, but she won't convert disaffected Clintonites. As one female voter told USA Today:"Palin's anti-choice position is truly the bridge to nowhere."
If McCain had tried to match Obama's skin colour rather than Clinton's gender, the accusations of tokenism might stick. The Las Vegas Sunnewspaper cartoonist Mike Smith put it best with a cartoon of a woman having a series of bizarre non sequiturs: "If I can't have Hillary, then I'll just vote for McCain . . . If I can't have a mattress, I'll just sleep on this bed of nails . . . If I can't have toenail clippers, then I'll just use this chainsaw."
As Oprah might say, I am feeling her pain.