ANALYSIS: Sarah Palin remains popular with Republican Party delegates at their convention in St Paul Minnesota. But questions about her - and John McCain's choice of her - are mounting elsewhere, writes Peter Wallsten
ONLY FIVE days ago, voters in the upcoming US presidential election were asked to accept John McCain's assurances that Alaska governor Sarah Palin, known to only a tiny portion of the public and barely to McCain himself, was fully suited to be vice-president.
But now the magnitude of McCain's gamble is becoming clear.
For every piece of the portrait of Palin that the McCain campaign sketches, a far more complicated picture is drawn.
The youthful mother of five, whose placement on the ticket was meant to reinforce traditional values, has revealed that her unmarried teenage daughter is pregnant; information that the family and the campaign said they had hoped to keep private.
The woman introduced to the US as a reform-minded Washington outsider who opposed the infamous "bridge to nowhere" - the symbol of McCain's hatred of wasteful government spending - originally supported its construction.
The $398 million bridge would have connected Ketchikan, on one island in southeastern Alaska, to its airport on another nearby island. But in September 2007, Alaska decided the bridge really was going nowhere, officially abandoning a project that had become a symbol of federal pork-barrel spending. Palin originally supported its construction, then didn't and has since sought to deny her initial enthusiasm for it.
The governor, who in her introductory speech decried the practice of budgetary "earmarks", sought, as the state's chief executive and as mayor of Wasilla, hundreds of millions of dollars in such federal funding for local projects.
Moreover, Palin has retained a lawyer to represent her in a controversy the McCain campaign said it had fully researched - Palin's role in dismissing a state police official who had refused to fire a trooper who divorced her sister.
On Monday, the McCain campaign dispatched lawyers to Alaska in a move described as an attempt to manage a growing crowd of journalists who have travelled there to inspect Palin's background. But the move raises the impression that the McCain campaign did not know everything about his number two and is now racing to learn what it can while trying to avoid tough questions about the Arizona senator's decision-making process.
"I really hope McCain did his homework," said David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush. "I cannot stifle a growing sense of unease that he didn't."
A former McCain adviser, Mike Murphy, said this week that it remains an open question whether "the running mate in a good or bad way becomes a window into the skills of the nominee".
One Republican strategist with close ties to the campaign described the candidate's closest supporters as "keeping their fingers crossed" in hopes that additional information does not force McCain to revisit his running-mate decision.
The unease comes as Palin (44), prepares for her next big public test: a prime-time, nationally televised speech today to the Republican National Convention.
She no doubt will receive an enthusiastic welcome from delegates and party activists who continued to express unqualified excitement about Palin's presence on the ticket.
As a staunch opponent of abortion, Palin has invigorated religious conservatives and other members of the Republican Party base who have been cool to McCain's candidacy and reluctant to work for the campaign with the same verve that fuelled Bush's 2004 re-election.
And the speech by Palin was shaping up as a dramatic moment in a convention that so far has been muted by the onslaught of Hurricane Gustav.
But while party grass roots remain protective of Palin, the campaign has moved from celebratory mode into a full defensive posture.
Critics also continue to question why McCain, after months of assailing Democratic nominee Barack Obama as lacking foreign-policy experience, would tap a running mate who has been governor for less than two years and before that was mayor of Wasilla with a population of 7,000.
The campaign has little room for error. A new CBS News poll found that 66 per cent of registered voters are undecided about Palin. And while enthusiastic support from the party base is important, strategists know that McCain cannot win without appealing to moderate voters - a bloc that the campaign had hoped Palin's middle-class roots would help win over.
"She remains very popular in the convention hall," said Murphy, "but it's the rest of the country that matters."
Palin could face questions on other facets of her past, such as her 1990s membership in a states' rights group that has pushed for more than 30 years to give Alaskans a vote on whether to secede from the union.
As mayor of Wasilla, Palin made regular trips to Washington seeking federal aid. The city received $26.9 million in earmarks during her tenure between 2000 and 2003, according to the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense, which tracks pork barrel spending.
Palin has requested 31 earmarks in the 2009 federal budget worth about $197 million. On Friday, she portrayed herself as a champion of curbing the "abuses" of earmark spending.
For McCain, the Friday surprise of introducing Palin resulted in a weekend of buzz and anticipation. But if additional surprises surface about Palin and her political profile, McCain could face unthinkable choices.
Might he be forced to anger conservatives by dumping Palin? Could he risk an admission of poor judgment, tainting what he has long claimed as a key strength?
And if a new stumbling block could have been discovered by a more careful search, critics no doubt would question a well-known trait of McCain's: that he sometimes makes decisions on emotion instead of careful deliberation.
"John McCain is decisive and listens mainly to John McCain," said David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union. "That is either comforting or discomforting, depending on whether you're trying to get him to do what you want."
- (Los Angeles Times)