The American Spectator

Jay Leno will have a field day with this one, and the writers at Saturday Night Live are probably exchanging high fives at how Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign has made their job so easy.

McCain’s choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate excited the Republican Party’s conservative base, generating $10 million in new contributions and attracting overflow audiences.

Critics carped about her relative inexperience, but Palin struck many as just the right balance for the GOP ticket. Conservatives pushed back hard against the likes of Paul Begala, who denounced Palin as “completely unqualified” for the vice presidency and called McCain’s running-mate pick “shockingly irresponsible.”

Then, shortly before noon yesterday, Reuters reported that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant. Within minutes, the McCain campaign issued a 131-word statement from the Palins, saying that their daughter would be marrying soon, and that they were “proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents.”

“As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support,” the Palins said in a statement that cryptically referred to the presumed father of their grandchild only by his first name. “We ask the media to respect our daughter and Levi’s privacy as has always been the tradition of children of candidates.”

SYMPATHIZERS IMMEDIATELY focused on the human dimension of Bristol Palin’s plight, but cold-eyed realists saw the makings of a first-class public relations nightmare.

Campaign staff told reporters that McCain had known of Bristol’s pregnancy and had seen it as no hindrance to putting Palin on the ticket. OK, fine — so why weren’t the Palins advised to disclose the pregnancy before the veep selection was announced?

According to Time magazine, Bristol’s situation was no secret in Wasilla, Alaska. Did the McCain campaign suppose the media would ignore the story until Nov. 5, by which time Bristol would be seven months along?

McCain advisors said they went public with Bristol’s pregnancy in response to “despicable rumors that have been spread by liberal blogs” asserting that Sarah Palin’s fifth child, Trig, born in April with Down syndrome, was actually Bristol’s child and that the governor had faked pregnancy in order to keep her daughter’s pregnancy secret.

As truly despicable as those rumors were, Bristol’s actual pregnancy was indeed kept secret — at least outside of Wasilla — and it’s possible that the bloggers who spread the rumors were basing their wild theories on garbled gossip from Alaska.

The story was thoroughly mishandled by the McCain campaign and continues to be mishandled. How long do they suppose it will take reporters to identify the mysterious Levi? Less than 24 hours, I’ll bet. So why didn’t they fully disclose his identity in their statement?

HOWEVER MISHANDLED the story may have been, social conservatives immediately rallied to the pro-life message of Bristol’s decision.

James Dobson of Focus on the Family weighed in with a supportive statement. On CNN, Bill Bennett slammed the network for “attack journalism” in trying to tie Bristol’s pregnancy to her mother’s opposition to sex education in schools. On Fox News, Bill Kristol said it was “inappropriate” and “disgusting” for colleague Morton Kondracke to use the situation to criticize abstinence education.

Perhaps most surprising was the response from Sen. Barack Obama, who told reporters in Michigan that the press should “back off these kinds of stories.”

“You know my mother had me when she was 18 and how a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn’t be a topic of our politics,” Obama said.