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Hassan Arif
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Until recently, Sarah Palin was a little-known first-term governor from Alaska, a post she had served in for less than two years. Before that, she was mayor of a town with 7,000 people, roughly the size of New Maryland or Quispamsis. When Republican John McCain announced that Palin would be his running mate, the media, the public, and the Democrats were caught off guard.

Enlarge Photo

AP

Republican vice presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, speaks during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.

She's young, new, charismatic, and controversial. All these elements have combined to create a media firestorm around her. This is virtually unprecedented for a vice-presidential nominee, as conventional wisdom states that vice-presidential nominees do not matter very much. Coverage of her is overshadowing John McCain and, to some extent, Barack Obama as well. Even here in Canada, CBC's The National had their lead story on Palin, with news about our own impending election relegated to second place.

Palin embodies a rare combination - she is both ordinary and exotic at the same time, no doubt elements which add to her appeal.

She is ordinary in that she and her family are genuinely typical people. Until recently, she was a small town mayor, she's a working mother, and both she and her husband are union members. The story of her daughter's teenage pregnancy only added to this sense of realism, as this brought home a problem faced by many families across North America.

Sarah Palin is not from a wealthy or well-connected family like George W. Bush and John McCain. She is not Ivy League-educated like Barack Obama and the Clintons. She essentially embodies the ordinary. She and her family are the types of people you could run into in small town coffee shops across Canada and the United States.

There is also the exotic and foreign. She is from Alaska, a state where frontier life is still alive and moose is a staple of the local diet. Alaska, as a state that is remote from the continental United States, is a place that is not familiar to most Americans. Furthermore, there is a certain eccentricity to her and her family. For example, her children have unusual names like Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig.

Some aspects of her background would actually seem more familiar to Canadians than to Americans. She's a "hockey mom" and is from the "Great White North." Also, her accent sounds eerily similar to a Western Canadian accent. It is easy to imagine her being from Kamloops, Red Deer or Moose Jaw.

Then, there is the controversy. Almost from the moment she was announced as vice president, scandals and controversies erupted. Many observers saw her appointment by McCain as "gimmicky" and respected historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, noted that Palin is the least experienced vice-presidential pick in a century.

Soon after, there was news that she is under investigation in Alaska for exercising undue influence to have a state trooper, her sister's ex-husband, fired. More serious is that Palin may have fired Alaska's Public Safety Commissioner for not following her wishes in this regard.

The report on this investigation is scheduled to come out in October, less than a week before election day. Hardly an opportune time.

Furthermore, as mayor of Wasilla Alaska she was almost impeached for firing two city employees who did not support her bid for mayor.

Palin touts her opposition to the controversial "bridge to nowhere" (a costly Washington pork barrel project) even though she initially supported the project, and as governor she kept the funds for her state even after the project was cancelled. Also, Palin may have ties with the controversial Alaska Independence Party, which includes members who advocate Alaska's secession from the United States.

The above is not even a complete list of the controversies surrounding Palin. The rate that these controversies and scandals are erupting makes it hard for even the 24-hour news networks to keep up. This heavy media scrutiny and attention, which has previously been mainly directed towards Barack Obama, caught the McCain campaign off guard. In the United States, higher media interest is a mixed blessing, for while it entails more coverage, it also entails a heavy parsing of every word and action by reporters looking for controversy.

Palin's speech at the Republican National Convention was electrifying and rallied the party base, but it's not likely to put to rest these controversies. The Republican right has found a new hero in Palin, but moderate and swing voters may become increasingly alarmed at the controversies, at her lack of experience, and at her hardline views on many social issues - Palin opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest, she supports abstinence-only sex education, and she believes that global warming is a myth.

Also, voters on the left may be more energized to turn out and volunteer for Obama's campaign by what they see in Palin as a new threat from the right.

These social issues also may re-ignite divisions and cultural wars. This belies earlier predictions that the "post-partisan" candidacies of John McCain and Barack Obama would bring such cultural wars to a close and "move us beyond the battles of the 1960s."

John McCain's choice of Palin was a risky one and, at this point, it is hard to know how it will all turn out. A new unpredictable drama has been injected into the 2008 race as this election enters the homestretch.

Hassan Arif is a graduate of UNB Law School and received his MA in Political Science at Carleton University. He resides in Fredericton.