Palin

Again. It seems that one result of the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain/Dobson's pick for Republican VP candidate is that Obama's acceptance speech got blown completely off the radar. I suspect that was part of the reason, although perhaps from this perspective the smallest part, but it worked better than anyone had any right to expect.

About the whole pregnant/unwed daughter-children should be out of the spotlight mantra: in spite of what you may hear from the knee-jerk right-wingers, most of the left-wing blogs I read have refused to comment on the story, except to agree that it should not be part of the mix. So has the Obama campaign. However, I ran across this interesting little tidbit this morning, via John Aravosis:

The Republican message about the Palin offspring comes across as contradictory: Hey, media, leave those kids alone — so we can use them as we see fit.

If you doubt this scenario, consider this: On Wednesday morning, a teenage boy from Alaska stood in a receiving line on an airport tarmac, being glad-handed by the potential next president of the United States — because he got his girlfriend pregnant. TV cameras were lined up in advance. The mind boggles.

"Either the children are out of bounds, and you don't put them in the photo ops, or you don't complain when somebody wants to talk about them. You can't have it both ways," said John Matviko, a professor at West Liberty State College in West Virginia and editor of "The American President in Popular Culture."

"Right now, it looks like they're being used by the campaign more than the media are using them," he said....

Aravosis notes one key fact: "AP fails to mention why we all started talked about Palin's daughter's pregnancy. Because John McCain leaked it to Reuters." Unfortunately, he doesn't provide a link or any other back-up, but he's generally pretty reliable, if somewhat shrill. However, given that little bit of information, the AP story makes a lot more sense.