In early June of America's transitional year to a Democratic administration, the late night television host David Letterman made a crude joke about one of the losing vice-presidential candidate's daughters. The joke pertained to the Alaskan Governor's visit to New York, in part to attend a political event. It made a crack about the Governor's daughter getting "knocked up" during a baseball game.
The indignant Governor and former beauty contest runner-up was on the morning Today Show the next day to express her outrage and to defend not only her daughter but all young women against such crude innuendos. The issue was electrified by the contention that her 14 year-old-daughter had been the intended target of the joke rather than her 18-year-old, who had in reality been "knocked up."
A week of charges and apologies kept the issue and Governor Sarah Palin on the airwaves. Then came calls for Letterman's resignation. But nowhere was the possibility mentioned that Palin herself had laid the foundation for the joke by exploiting her older unmarried teenage daughter's pregnancy during her failed vice-presidential campaign the previous fall.
At the end of August of the election year, the surprise announcement of Sarah Palin as the Vice-presidential candidate shot her to national attention. That was a time when the Republican Party needed a dramatic boost for a shot at the election in which the western industrialized world's first non-white presidential candidate had a strong lead but was thought to be vulnerable to racial bias. The arch-conservative Palin was not only attractive, peppy and outspoken, she was a gun-slinging hockey mom who embodied the traditional family values to win over the Christian right credited with winning the election for the Republican candidate four years earlier.
The surprise nomination was followed by the announcement that Palin's unmarried teenaged daughter was pregnant. That seeming contradiction of Christian tenets regarding chastity was turned into a family-values lesson for conservatives whose standards met up with the human frailties of adolescent children. The young couple was embraced at the Republican convention. The father-to-be was presented as a future member of the family through an assured marriage.
By the time of the Letterman joke in June, the promised marriage had long been called off after the child's birth in December. The intended in-law family had been involved in legal skirmishes, including the arrest of the teen father's mother on drug charges. The father of the new Palin child had made the talk-show rounds and the young Palin mother had created a presence as an advocate of abstinence for teens, an approach to birth control she first admitted in a January interview simply didn't work.
Coarse and ill-spoken as the Letterman joke was, no headlines would have been made on the basis of the sleepy late-night television viewer response. Important as they were, the late night talk shows had "soft" impact on audiences, as in the case of the presidential candidate John McCain, who stood up a date with Letterman in favor of a morning opportunity in a studio across the way during the presidential campaign. The veteran entertainer and politician later glossed over the obvious dereliction on a commitment and no long-term harm ensued.
The incident of the Palin joke, on the other hand, only picked up momentum as efforts were made at redress. As a late-night staple, Letterman would benefit from the publicity but he had no greater stakes to gain. Palin, by contrast, was kept alive by the incident, as she repeatedly has been since her surge to national attention.
Organizations such as Sarapac were established in January to promote Palin as a possible contender for leading the country in the next presidential election. In that context, the fanning of the Letterman joke called into question the sincerity of conservatives such as Palin and her supporters. It suggested an orchestration of an ill-conceived and insincere message aimed at an audience seen as less astute and more gullible than they.
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