Parties jockey to guide flood of data about Palin
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Ready or not, the American electorate is taking a crash course in Sarah Palin. On broadcast and cable television, in newspapers, magazines, and all over the Internet, a gusher of fact, fiction, and half-truths about the first-term Alaska governor is filling what until 13 days ago was an empty vessel of public awareness of the Republican vice presidential nominee.
Both parties are struggling to craft a coherent narrative about Palin - Republicans portray her as a feisty, conservative maverick who will shake up Washington; Democrats paint her as a novice with extreme views and exaggerated accomplishments.
Yesterday, John McCain's campaign announced it has assembled the "Palin Truth Squad" to "set the record straight against Internet and liberal smears of Governor Palin." Democrat Barack Obama's presidential campaign earlier this year created a "Fight the Smears" website to debunk bogus rumors and Internet claims about the background of Obama and his wife, Michelle.
An independent research group, FactCheck.org, issued a lengthy report this week called "Sliming Palin" that seeks to refute several "dubious Internet postings and mass e-mail messages making claims about McCain's running mate . . . We find that many are completely false."
Among the findings were that Palin:
Did not cut funding by 62 percent for special needs education but actually tripled per-pupil spending over three years.
Did not, while mayor of Wasilla, demand that any books be banned from the public library but asked the librarian a hypothetical question about what would happen if she wanted certain books removed.
Was never a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, which seeks a referendum on whether the state should secede from the United States, but that her husband, Todd, was a member for almost seven years until 2002. She did attend at least one AIP party convention held in Wasilla while she was mayor and, as governor, sent a brief video greeting - viewed as of yesterday about 375,000 times on YouTube - to this year's convention. In the video, she urged party members to "Keep up the good work, and God bless you."
As a candidate for governor, was open to teaching faith-based creationism in public schools along with evolution, but "has not actively pursued such a policy as governor."
This report on her record by FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of many examples of the scrutiny of Palin since McCain announced her selection 13 days ago. The most frequently examined point is Palin's assertion that she stopped the infamous $398 million federal earmark for a "bridge to nowhere." Many news organizations said that statement was untrue, although the McCain-Palin campaign continues to assert it. Obama's campaign flatly calls it a lie.
Palin campaigned in 2006 in favor of the federal funds for the bridge to an island with 50 inhabitants and an airport and abandoned it only last year "after the project had become an embarrassment to the state, after federal dollars for the project were pulled back and diverted to other uses in Alaska," according to the Associated Press.
Similarly, media outlets have reported that Palin, who portrays herself as an antipork politician in the mode of McCain, hired a lobbyist and went to Washington to win $27 million in federal earmarks for Wasilla while she was mayor. These reports point out that Alaska leads the nation in requests per capita for federal money for special projects.
Complicating the mainstream media's vetting of her record is the cyberspace torrent - viral e-mails and Internet blog postings. Some are true, others false or partly true, and each side tries to knock them down or pump them up, depending on whether a particular point advances or detracts from the partisan story line.
"The Internet is intense, difficult to sort through, and the speed of it is unprecedented, but other pieces of this process are not unprecedented," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. He cited the cases of Democrat Walter Mondale picking Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate in 1984 and Republican George H.W. Bush choosing Dan Quayle four years later.
"Outside their little political orbits, nobody knew Ferraro, nobody knew Quayle, and nobody knew Palin," Sabato said. "When you put a new person in line potentially to become the most powerful person in the world, people have lots of questions."
The explosion of new media has transformed the way people absorb political information, particularly for young voters.
Jennifer Greer, a University of Alabama professor, said that at a freshman seminar on media and politics, "there was almost a screaming match back and forth" as students argued about what they had heard about Palin, information mostly gleaned from blogs, chatrooms, and social networking sites on the Internet. "I haven't seen anything like it," said Greer, who chairs the journalism department. "They give a lot of weight to what they read on the Internet, and I'm trying to teach them to look at the source and ask themselves why they trust that source."
While the campaign has kept Palin out of range of reporters' questions, the once-blank canvas of her record and life experiences is being filled in by news reports on a daily and often unflattering basis.
For instance, The
The Anchorage Daily News reported Sunday that in June, Palin billed the state $640 to travel about 600 miles from Juneau, the capital, to Wasilla to attend the graduation of a program at the Wasilla Assembly of God church she once attended.
The paper also quoted comments she made at the church that became grist for bloggers who have been highlighting Palin's religious beliefs.
"I think God's will has to be done, in unifying people and companies to get that [natural] gas line built, so pray for that," she was quoted as saying. ". . . But really all of this stuff doesn't do any good if the people of Alaska's hearts isn't right with God."
The newspaper said Palin's remarks were recorded by the church and copied to other Internet sites.
