Teen Pregnancy BringsNormalcy to McCain

When a politician is chosen as a candidate to the Vice-Presidency of the U.S., he or she is examined in depth. It is an analysis so rigorous that the first thing [a candidate] has to show is his or her medical record. The fact that, for example, Obama’s campaign didn’t ask Hilary Clinton’s [campaign for] information on the health of the Senator demonstrates clearly that naming her as a candidate for Vice President was never proposed even as a remote possibility.

However, it seems that the campaign of John McCain barely examined Palin before offering her the position of Vice-Presidential candidate. In fact, the senator only met with her a single time. So he knows little about her. Like her potential voters. So little that yesterday, the U.S. woke to an unexpected piece of news: the eldest daughter of Sarah Palin, Bristol—17 years old and unmarried—is five-months pregnant.

So [this] ardent evangelical protestant who opposes abortion to the extent that she decided to have a son with Down’s Syndrome has a seventeen-year old single, pregnant daughter. It seems, at least, like bad news for the Republicans. Of course McCain’s campaign and the family have reacted with agility.

The first thing that they made clear was that Bristol is going to marry her boyfriend (the fact that the mother of the girl is a member of the National Rifle Association and has, accordingly, a propensity to pull the trigger does not appear to have influenced the decision of the young man, whose name has been made public).

Now the second phase will be, probably, to use the news to demonstrate that the Palins are an American family like any other. Because the U.S. has a teenage pregnancy rate similar to that of South Africa or Indonesia and much higher than that of Western Europe, although the problem is centered in Black, Native American and Hispanic communities.

It also demonstrates that the nonsense that the bloggers on the left wrote last weekend, when they insisted that Palin’s little son, Trig, was not in reality hers but Bristol’s, is a lie. Because Trig is only four months old, and Bristol is five-months pregnant.

Bristol’s pregnancy could be a blessing in disguise. When a candidate for the presidency like John McCain doesn’t know how many houses he has (the correct response is seven), believes that someone who makes less than 3.75 million euros a year belongs to the middle class, and has a wife who has declared her favorite form of transportation is private plane, teenage pregnancy can give him a touch of normalcy.

As a professor of Public Administration at Hamline University pointed out to the journalists here a short while ago, in the Xcel Center where the Republican Convention is taking place, “McCain has not done a good job connecting with the concerns of the middle or working class.” Perhaps, in getting pregnant, Bristol Palin helps him out on this account.