Sarah Palin, John McCain and the Politics of Privacy

Look: I’m a mother and among my primary role models as a parent is the female grizzly. (You mess with the cub and I’ll eat you. Simple as that.)

Thus, were I running for office, I would do all I within my power to protect my children from the slings and arrows of the media scrutiny that must, of necessity, be focused on me. So I am extremely sympathetic to the plight of Sarah Palin with regard to her daughter, Bristol.

And just speaking personally, I feel protective of a seventeen-year-old, who looks like a sweet girl, who is now going to be dealing with the difficulties of pregnancy, motherhood and, it seems, marriage. (I also worry about Levi, the new, very young, huz-to-be—another sweet looking kid, for all his adolescent tough talk on his now-disappeared MySpace page.)

Nor do I see Bristol’s pregnancy as some kind of denouncement of Palin’s idiotic and infuriating support of abstinence only education in public schools.

The truth is, kids are kids. The best of parents can have kids who rebel, do dumb things, make gigantic mistakes, even mistakes with serious, life-changing consequences.

For the most part, however, what a candidate’s kids do is not really our business.

But in the days since Bristol’s pregnancy was announced, the increasing sanctimoniousness and control freak-ism coming out of the McCain camp and the RNC is starting to get on my nerves.

(Most recently, McCain cancelled an appearance on the show of soft-ball question maven, Larry King, after CNN’s Campbell Brown, not exactly an attack dog herself, asked some probing questions of McCain staffer about Palin. Oh, please. Cut the theatrics.)

Evidently it’s getting on the LA Times’ Tim Rutten’s nerves too.

Here’s a big clip from the heart of Rutten’s column today:

…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.

The McCain campaign would like to cut off discussion of Palin’s views as quickly and as completely as possible. That’s because McCain’s desire to find a female running mate whose views on abortion wouldn’t further alienate the religious right led him into a reckless and ill-considered decision. 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. ABC-TV first reported — though the McCain campaign denies — that she flirted with a secessionist, state’s rights political party. On Tuesday, an online piece by Time magazine reported that, as newly elected mayor of Wasilla, Palin tried to fire a librarian who refused to cooperate in banning books from the public library.

If McCain and his people think they can obscure this sort of record behind an appeal to privacy, they’re kidding themselves…

Yep. No kidding about that.

PS: That little banned books thingy, together with Palin’s high priced campaign to persuade Alaskans that it’s okay to shoot wolves from helicopters, her opposition to federal protection for the Polar Bear, and her support of teaching creationism in schools, are among my favorites in terms of reasons why I don’t want to see Palin as my Vice President—those and the fact that she’s scarily unprepared to step in as POTUS, should the need arise.

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PPS: I’m going to try to live blog tonight, but with (eeek!) dial-up only, which is all that’s available where I am in West Glacier, MT, it may be a tad challenging. So I’ll see how it goes.

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(Photo: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)