The Democratic Party and their public-relations arm, the MSM, are trying to spin John McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin as a panic move; supposedly, in his panic, he rushed the pick without vetting her properly. Unfortunately for them, one of their own has already debunked that storyline. The Washington Post article chronicling the process that produced Sen. McCain’s decision makes it very clear that his vetting process was very thorough indeed. Along the way, it also makes it clear that he was interested in Palin not primarily because of her gender but because he saw her as a kindred spirit. (This fact worries David Brooks, who concludes from it that she too must not “have an explicit governing philosophy,” and that “she shares McCain’s primary weakness—that she has a tendency to substitute a moral philosophy for a political philosophy.” This makes him the first person to object to the Palin pick on the grounds that she isn’t conservative enough.) The McCain team knew all the issues with Gov. Palin, and judged them insufficient reason not to pick her.Should they have handled the issue of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy differently? John Hinderaker of PowerLine thinks so, arguing that “The time to bring it up was when Palin and her family were first introduced. Bristol was there, and it wouldn’t have been difficult to refer to her fiance, say that she is getting married in October or whatever, and that she will have a baby next winter. Sarah Palin could have added that this wasn’t how she and her husband planned it, but they like their new son-in-law and are totally supportive of their daughter.” OK, true, that would have defused the issue—but wouldn’t it also have defused the Dayton rally? Would that really have been the first impression they wanted to leave? Jennifer Rubin considers the possibility that, though the vicious rumors in the blogosphere changed the tone of the announcement, the timing might have been exactly what the McCain campaign planned all along:

Perhaps Palin was vetted, the problematic issues considered, and the problematic story rolled out on a holiday during a hurricane. That would be the model of competence—the last option, apparently, the MSM would consider as the logical explanation for the events of the last week.

Certainly, as Andrew Malcolm notes, the way the McCain campaign, in the person of campaign manager Steve Schmidt, handled the release of the information had all the appearance of a well-planned move:

It was a classic, illustrative and instructive case of political damage control. Weeks ago one of the first things out of Palin’s mouth when she met with the McCain campaign’s vice presidential vetter was word of her daughter’s condition and her husband’s DUI arrest in the 1980s. Schmidt has known since then that if his boss picked the Alaska governor as the running mate, it had better be the McCain campaign that got the bad news out. And got it out its own way at its own time.

There’s no denying that Labor Day and Gustav between them seem to have blunted the story, but much to the frustration of the MSM, so has the reaction of conservatives. Their problem is that they have no idea what Christian conservatives are actually like, only their own stereotypes of us, and so they expected the stereotype; what they got instead was the reality. Dr. James Dobson is all too often his own worst enemy in his public pronouncements, but his statement in this instance was a perfect example of Christian grace.As a result, the Left has taken its best shot, and most people seem to be looking at this as reason to empathize with the Palins rather than to condemn them; in consequence, Gov. Palin is still very much alive as a political force. A lot will ride on her acceptance speech tomorrow night, but that would be true anyway, and all the attention may only have served to attract even more people to watch. That ups the stakes, but there’s no reason to expect anything from Gov. Palin other than a strong performance. She speaks with both an attractive charm and a sense of serious purpose; she’s clearly a strong, capable woman who just gets the job done, and it comes through in her delivery. All she needs to do tomorrow night is the same thing she always does, and all will be well.Of course, it isn’t in their best interest to allow things to go that smoothly, and so they’re trying to find other charges against Gov. Palin that might actually stick. They’ve tried accusing her of being a past supporter of Pat Buchanan (aided by the fact, as one would expect, that he’s more than happy to claim her); unfortunately for him, his sister Bay doesn’t support his contention, and neither do the records. The charge has also been made that Gov. Palin was at one time a member of the Alaska Independence Party; the McCain campaign has refuted that as well. The media have tried to take a snippet of an interview she did with Larry Kudlow, in which she was dodging VP speculation, and make her look clueless; the charge is unreasonable. Barack Obama is insisting he wants to counter Gov. Palin on the issues, but some of his supporters are unwilling to take that risk, so they’re scrambling around to find some way, any way, to neutralize her by other means—even drawing on arguments they would normally condemn as sexist and demeaning to women—and at this point, it doesn’t seem likely that they’ll give up just because their tactics aren’t working.Unfortunately for them, that might not be a wise approach. The Obama campaign, including the senator himself, and several of his high-profile supporters have already opened themselves up to a charge of sexism from the McCain campaign (delivered, appropriately, by Carly Fiorina) for belittling Gov. Palin’s experience; they’ve also opened themselves up to comparisons between Gov. Palin and Sen. Obama, in which one can make a pretty good argument that Sen. Obama has even less meaningful experience than the woman whose experience he’s belittling (especially when you include all her experience, which he seems resistant to doing). Further, while it was a gracious and truly good thing for Sen. Obama to condemn those who were spreading lies about the Palin family, their dirty, hateful acts (along with the acts of violence committed against people traveling to the Republican convention) have nevertheless tarnished the image of the Obama campaign. (With friends like those, who needs enemies?) They’ve also reminded a lot of folks about Sen. Obama’s “punished with a baby” comment. As a consequence, if they move against Gov. Palin too aggressively, it’s likely to backfire.The problem for them is, there really are a lot of women out there who see themselves in Gov. Palin, who like her, and who don’t like what they’re seeing in response to her from the Left. As John Mark Reynolds writes,

[Palin] is a Renaissance woman, but for some bigots if that breadth of experience was not gained in paid employment or only in government than it counts less or does not count at all. That is offensive, though hard-working women like Palin mostly ignore it and cheerfully go on being awesomely competent.My wife is one of those millions of women and she sees in many sneers about Palin (reducing this brilliant woman to the “beauty queen”) yet another example of some peoples inability to value her experience. The Democratic Party should be warned that they are playing with electoral fire if they act as if all of Palin’s life experience is not of value. My wife will not get mad, but she is getting active.

The reactions of the McCain campaign have only reinforced this; when a reporter asked how Gov. Palin could serve as VP with “a new baby herself, and now she’s about to be a new grandmother trying to support a daughter giving birth to her own child,” Steve Schmidt shot back, “Frankly, I can’t imagine that question being asked of a man. A lot of women will find it offensive.” Clearly, they have no intention of letting the media or the Democratic Party treat her any differently than those folks would allow Republicans to treat a Democratic female candidate (and good for them, I say).Taken all in all, Janice Shaw Crouse concludes, the addition of Gov. Palin to the GOP ticket has “changed the 2008 election parameters,” flattening Sen. Obama’s expected convention bounce and generating a lot of money for the McCain/Palin ticket in the process. This gives Sen. McCain an opportunity, if he will take advantage of it with his speech on Thursday; when most expected his campaign to be dead by this point, if he’s able to generate a bounce, he could come out of the convention ahead—and from there it’s a mighty short sprint to the finish line.

The headline the Washington Post put on this one when they posted it on their political blog, “The Fix,” had to do with Rove’s projection that Sarah Palin will add 2-3 points to the GOP ticket (which, as he notes, could make a big difference in such a tight race), but there’s a lot more to his analysis than that; actually, this interview (about ten minutes long) with the folks from Newsweek is wide-ranging, and Rove has a number of interesting things to say. Whatever you think of the guy’s political morals, he’s a keen judge of the political landscape.

Reporter: Mr. McCain, how do you respond to charges that Palin has no experience?McCain: If Obama had as much experience as Ms. Palin, he’d be ready for the VP slot, too.Good line, and the right tack to take. (HT: Dr. Melissa Clouthier)