Opinion: Sarah Palin’s husband, Todd Palin, under fire in Alaska, campaigns in Maine
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We know Alaska Governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin loves her First Dude. Still, we were a little surprised at how she went on about him during a rally in a hockey rink in Johnstown, Penn. She mentioned that she planned to attend an NHL game in Philadelphia on Saturday night and added:
‘Sorry my husband won’t be there. He’ll be up in New Hampshire today and then Maine. I think you would like Todd. We need to bring him here so you can meet him. He’s a guy like many of you. He works with his hands, he works up in the North Slope oil fields, and he’s a world-champion snow-machine racer. And he’s a proud member of the United Steelworkers Union. Hard-working all-American guy, and I tell ya, he would feel right at home here.’
A couple of hours later, we received an e-mail from the McCain campaign, offering ‘A little color from Todd Palin’s event today on the trail.’
More than 500 people showed up, said the campaign, when Palin visited Moosehead Trail Trading Post in Palmyra, Maine. They shook his hand, asked for autographs and posed for pictures.
Added Sarah Palin’s spokeswoman Maria Comella:
‘He spoke to the crowd about the importance of a McCain-Palin ticket and received loud cheers when he noted the McCain-Palin ticket had picked up the NRA endorsement.’
Now, as noted elsewhere on this blog, the campaign is a turning into a series of back-and-forths designed to win the upper hand in the battle for better PR.
So, on the day after a committee of the Alaska Legislature found that Todd Palin’s pervasive influence in the Alaska governor’s office made state employees uneasy, perhaps it’s no shock that the campaign wants to let the world know about his efforts on behalf of the McCain-Palin ticket.
And that his wife, like most any candidate out there on the trail, wants the blue-collar, socially conservative voters in the battleground state of Pennsylvania to know: He’s just like them.
--Robin Abcarian