You bet he is! THis is a piece from the LA Times.
Only four days ago, the nation’s voters were asked to accept John McCain’s assurances that Sarah Palin, known to only a tiny portion of the public and barely to McCain himself, was fully suited to be vice president.
But now the magnitude of McCain’s gamble is becoming clear.
For every piece of the portrait of Palin that the McCain campaign sketches, a far more complicated picture of the Alaska governor is drawn.
The youthful mother of five whose placement on the ticket was meant to reinforce traditional values has now revealed that her unmarried teenage daughter is pregnant — a piece of information that the family and the campaign said they had hoped to keep private.
The woman introduced to America as a reform-minded Washington outsider who opposed the infamous “bridge to nowhere” — the symbol of McCain’s hatred of wasteful spending — originally supported its construction. The governor who in her introductory speech decried the practice of budgetary “earmarks” sought, as the state’s chief executive and as mayor of Wasilla, hundreds of millions of dollars in such federal funding for local projects.
Moreover, Palin has now retained a lawyer to represent her in a controversy the McCain campaign said it had fully researched — Palin’s role in dismissing a state police official who had refused to fire a trooper who divorced Palin’s sister.
On Monday, the McCain campaign dispatched lawyers to Alaska in a move described as an attempt to manage a growing crowd of journalists who have traveled there to inspect Palin’s background. But the move raises the impression that the McCain campaign didn’t know everything about his No. 2 and is now racing to learn what it can while trying to avoid tough questions about the Arizona senator’s decision-making process
One Republican strategist with close ties to the campaign described the candidate’s closest supporters as “keeping their fingers crossed” in hopes that additional information does not force McCain to revisit the decision. According to this Republican, who would discuss internal campaign strategizing only on condition of anonymity, the McCain team used little more than a Google Internet search as part of a rushed effort to review Palin’s potential pitfalls. Just over a week ago, Palin was not on McCain’s short list of potential running mates, the Republican said
The campaign has little room for error. A new CBS News poll found that 66% of registered voters were undecided about Palin. And although enthusiastic support from the GOP base is important, strategists know that McCain cannot win without appealing to moderate voters as well — a bloc that the campaign had hoped Palin’s middle-class roots would help win over