1 Sep

A Lose/Lose Situation for Palin?

Posted by David W. Fenton in 2008 Election, Damned Republicans, Politics on Sep 1, 2008

So, if her daughter is really five months pregnant now, that means it’s virtually impossible for the daughter to have been the mother of Trig Palin (the child with Down Syndrome born just over 5 months ago).

OK, so the rumors about Palin’s fake pregnancy are scotched, but there are still plenty of details about the actual chain of events of the last few hours leading up to the birth of Palin’s last child that would make me question a parent’s judgment:

  1. When she began leaking amniotic fluid at 4am, she decided to go ahead and deliver the address she was scheduled to deliver the next day to a Texas audience
  2. Rather than going directly to a Dallas medical center for care immediately after the address, she instead went to the airport, to board a plane for an 8-hour flight back to Alaska.
  3. Once in Alaska, rather than availing herself of one of the large medical centers in Anchorage, she instead chose to travel back to Wasilla, an hour away, to deliver the child in the small local hospital in her home town.

Now, the weirdness of these decisions in regard to the health and safety of the baby (who was one month premature) is bad enough in the context of a coverup — in that case, at least, it would be plausible that they’d decided to take these risks in order to maintain the coverup. But if the Governor were the actual mother, what in the hell was she thinking by endangering the life of a child that she already knew faced lots of hurdles in terms of health?

Even leaving aside the optics of a pro-choice, anti-sex ed. mother having a child get pregnant out of wedlock, I can’t see how the refutation of the earlier rumor gets her out of hot water on the question of judgment. She looks more and more to me like the kind of caricature career mother that Democrats are so often accused by Republicans of being — it was more important to her to deliver that political speech in Texas than it was to make sure her baby was born in the safest possible and least risky environment.

How can the Palin choice attract mothers and women when she appears to be such a bad one? At the very least, it calls into question her judgment under pressure.