The following is an excellent article by the highly esteemed Ron Walters. Dr. Ron Walters is distinguished leadership scholar and professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park.
(NNPA)----The truth about Republican presidential nominee John McCain is that because he has been unable to mobilize the base of his party (a fact on which the media has refused to focus) he has had to rely on his vice presidential pick, Sarah Palin, to do so. Hiding under her skirt of popularity, his campaign has come alive, with Palin as the putative nominee instead of him.
But because he has put her out there, Palin runs the risk of being vetted in public and it will not wash to say that her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol’s pregnancy is out-of-bounds. Remember the firestorm cause by Republican vice presidential candidate, Dan Quayle’s rant against the fictional TV character “Murphy Brown,” who wanted to have a baby out of wedlock during the 1992 campaign, in a speech where he was trying to promote “family values”?
Because of the high number of teen pregnancies in the Black community, conservative politicians have made subtle inferences about the immorality of Blacks and linked it to the Democratic Party for some time. At the same time, when they were in power, Republicans systematically cut job training, youth programs, poverty programs and anything that would help young teenagers have live positive options.
Rejecting help for pregnant teens seems to be a practice of Sarah Palin, who cut a program proposed by the Alaskan legislature just this year from $5 million to $3.6 million. This mirrors John McCain’s history of cutting programs aimed at reducing teen pregnancy over his career. Hypocrisy is not even close to the image they present as they embrace Bristol Palin and her unwed lover on the stage of the Republican convention and legitimize their role in this election.
There is a question whether conservatives will be embarrassed as Sarah Palin’s record comes more fully into view, with tidbits like the patriotism she and her husband showed as members of the Alaska Independence Party which wanted to secede from the U.S., or that she lied about her support of the “bridge to nowhere”, or putting the executive jet on E-Bay, or any number of things. Conservatives may feel locked in because she is the only “reliable conservative” on the ticket and therefore, may hold their nose and support her even though there are serious conflicts with their basic ideology and the Palins’ past behavior.
What I think we will see, therefore, is that independents will reject Sarah Palin’s hard right posture toward things like abortion rights and continue to move toward Obama. However, Obama has to release Hillary Clinton or some credible surrogate from his campaign to expose the readiness of the new Republican star to be a heartbeat away from a 72-year-old president. Remember John Kerry?
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