The arrival of Sarah Palin has electrified John McCain's campaign, but time will tell if she is an asset or liability, writes Denis Stauntonin St Paul
AT THE END OF Sarah Palin's electrifying speech to the Republican national convention in St Paul this week, as she stood with her family and cradled her four-month-old baby, John McCain made a surprise appearance onstage. "Don't you think we made the right choice?" he asked the crowd, who had spent much of the previous 40 minutes on their feet, cheering his vice-presidential running mate.
Palin's performance in St Paul convinced many Republicans not only that she was the right pick for McCain but that the 44-year-old Alaska governor represented the future of their party. Speaking in the authentic voice of small town America, she was at once conservative and contemporary, a working mother who can hold her own in a man's world while remaining rooted in traditional values of religious faith and patriotism.
She skewered Barack Obama as a lightweight, metropolitan elitist, heaped scorn on political commentators who questioned her credentials and made a powerful case for McCain as a true American hero who should be president. A few minutes after she started speaking, she left her script to acknowledge a group of fellow "hockey moms" on the floor. "You know what they say about the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?" she said. "Lipstick."
It was hard to believe that, less than an hour earlier, many Republican insiders feared that in choosing Palin, McCain may have thrown away any chance he had of defeating Obama in November.
For almost a week, revelations about her family and questions about her background had provided rich fodder for newspapers, blogs, talk shows and supermarket tabloids. And after less than two years as governor of one of the least populous states, was this former mayor of Wasilla (pop 7,025) ready to take over as president if anything should happen to McCain, a 72-year-old cancer survivor?
Palin did not have a passport until 2006 and the only countries she has visited outside the US are Iraq, Kuwait, Germany, Ireland and Canada. Her spokeswoman acknowledged this week that Palin's Irish visit was actually a refuelling stop at Shannon.
The media frenzy began in earnest on Monday when Palin announced that her 17-year-old daughter Bristol was five months pregnant and planned to keep her baby and marry the child's father Levi Johnston (18), a local high-school hockey star. The announcement came in response to unfounded claims on liberal blogs that Palin's baby son Trig, who was born with Down syndrome, was actually Bristol's.
Obama moved swiftly to declare Palin's family off-limits for his campaign, reminding supporters that his own mother was just 18 when he was born. Some Democrats sought to highlight Palin's opposition to explicit sex education and her support for an "abstinence only" programme but soon new questions were surfacing about the Alaska governor.
Palin faces investigation by a bipartisan state legislative body over her firing last July of public safety commissioner Walter Monegan after he refused to sack Mike Wooten, a state trooper who had been married to the governor's sister. Palin insists that her family feud with Wooten had nothing to do with the commissioner's firing but Monegan this week released e-mails from the governor that ridiculed an internal investigation into her brother-in-law.
Palin's family had accused Wooten of shooting a moose without a permit, using a Taser stun gun on his stepson, and drinking while driving a trooper vehicle. "This trooper is still out on the street, in fact he's been promoted," she wrote in February. "It was a joke, the whole year-long 'investigation' of him. This is the same trooper who's out there today telling people the new administration is going to destroy the trooper organisation, and that he'd 'never work for that b***h', Palin'."
Palin portrays herself as a fearless reformer who has confronted a corrupt "old boys' network" in Alaska, trumpeting an ethics reform bill she introduced and boasting about how she dismissed her personal chef and sold the governor's jet on eBay. Critics claim that, even as mayor of Wasilla, Palin was a controlling figure who was quick to turn policy disagreements into personal grudges and sometimes sought to exceed her authority.
Within months of taking office, she fired the police chief, the finance director and the city planner and she tried to get rid of library director Mary Ellen Emmons after Palin asked the librarian how she felt about censoring books in the library.
"I told her clearly, I will fight anyone who tries to dictate what books can go on the library shelves," Emmons told the local Frontiersmannewspaper. Palin said later that her inquiry was "rhetorical", just a way to get to know the city's employees.
Baptised a Catholic, Palin spent much of her life in a Pentecostal church run by pastor Ed Kalnins, who has preached that critics of President George Bush will be banished to hell. She now attends the non-denominational Wasilla Bible Church, where she was present last month during a sermon by David Brickner from the controversial Jews for Jesus, which tries to convert Jews to Christianity.
Brickner said that political violence in Jerusalem today is a sign of God's judgment on those who do not accept Jesus. "What we see in Israel, the conflict that has spilled out throughout the Middle East, really which is all about Jerusalem, is an ongoing reflection of the fact that there is judgment," he said, adding that his son had seen it first-hand on a recent visit to Israel.
"When Isaac was in Jerusalem he was there to witness some of that judgment, some of that conflict, when a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went ploughing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment - you can't miss it."
Before her speech this week, Palin met pro-Israel groups to reassure them about her views on the Middle East and McCain campaign officials are confident that other questions about her past will fade as voters get to know her.
As Republicans leave St Paul, however, they know that Palin remains the biggest gamble of this extraordinary election year, one that could carry them back into the White House - or derail McCain's entire campaign.