Running-mate Palin prepares for speech of her life

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin will make the most important speech of her life tonight amid controversy surrounding her selection.

In her speech to the national convention in St Paul, Minnesota, she will set out to prove she has the experience necessary to be a heartbeat away from America’s top job.

Mrs Palin, Alaska’s first female governor and a self-styled “hockey mum”, is at the centre of a political storm which has raised serious questions about John McCain’s judgment.

The mother of five has been out of sight since being introduced as Mr McCain’s surprise running mate on Friday, but is due to deliver a high-profile speech at the party’s convention tonight.

Originally heralded as a breath of fresh air and a popular maverick who would galvanise conservative activists and reinvigorate Mr McCain’s campaign with her devout Christianity and pro-life stance, Mrs Palin is now being portrayed as a risky, inexperienced, and controversial choice.

Serious questions have been asked about the extent to which the McCain campaign team vetted her beforehand.

Mr McCain insisted he was “very proud” of Mrs Palin and that he was pleased with the results of the selection process yesterday.

But her unwed teenage daughter is pregnant, her office is being investigated over the Troopergate scandal, and it has emerged the presidential hopeful met the 44-year-old former beauty queen only once before making his decision.

The Arizona senator cancelled an appearance on CNN yesterday after tough questioning of his campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds on Monday night revealed he could not point to a single specific example of Mrs Palin’s experience.

It has also been reported that she may have only travelled abroad on two occasions, once last year to Germany and Kuwait to visit Alaska National Guard troops, and once to Ireland.

If the Republicans are elected in November, Mrs Palin would immediately take over as America’s commander-in-chief if anything happened to Mr McCain, who is 72 and has suffered from skin cancer.

In an unusual move, and as if to answer critics’ queries as to where Mrs Palin had been during the last few days, the McCain campaign released a photo of Mrs Palin with first lady Laura Bush and Mr McCain’s wife Cindy in Minneapolis, Minnesota. No details of what the meeting was about accompanied the release.

It also emerged that in January Mrs Palin laughed on air after a talk radio host described one of her political opponents as a “cancer” and a “bitch”.

Her then-opponent, the Alaskan state senate president Lyda Green, is a cancer survivor and a recording of the interview had received more than a quarter of a million hits on YouTube by this morning.

More details emerged yesterday about the teenage boyfriend of Mrs Palin’s pregnant 17-year-old daughter Bristol after the campaign announced they were going to marry and their baby was due in December.

Levi Johnston, an 18-year-old high school hockey player, described himself as a “f*****’ redneck” in an obscenity-laden entry on the popular networking site MySpace, which has since been taken down.

His profile said he was “in a relationship” but that he did not want children.

The New York Daily News described him as “a superhunky bad-boy ice hockey player from cold country” while the New York Daily Post reported he was once teammates on a youth squad with Mrs Palin’s eldest son Track, 19, now in the US Army.

It also emerged Mr McCain has opposed proposals to spend federal money on teen-pregnancy prevention programmes and voted to require poor teenage mothers to stay in school or lose their welfare benefits.

With only two years experience in state office, Mrs Palin, who was previously a small town mayor, was a surprise choice as Mr McCain’s running mate.

Her office remains under investigation over the dismissal of a commissioner who allegedly refused to fire her former brother-in-law Mike Wooten, an Alaskan state trooper, following a messy divorce from her sister.

Arthur Culvahouse, the lawyer who conducted her background review during the secretive search, said Mrs Palin voluntarily told the McCain campaign about her pregnant teenage daughter and her husband’s two-decade-old drink driving arrest.

She also greatly detailed the dismissal of the state’s public safety commissioner Walter Monegan that has touched off a legislative investigation which is due to report just five days before November’s general election.

But Mrs Palin underwent a “full and complete” background examination and everything that came up as a possible red flag during the review had now been made public, Mr Culvahouse said.

Senior McCain adviser Nicolle Wallace told ABC’s Good Morning America that the McCain campaign had been forced to reveal the pregnancy publicly because of “lewd and outrageously false rumours” spread by “Democratic-leaning blogs and a few in the mainstream” media.

These completely unfounded rumours claimed Mrs Palin’s fifth child, Trig, who was born with Down’s syndrome in May, was actually her granddaughter and that she had faked her own pregnancy earlier this year to cover up for Bristol.

Mr McCain’s Democratic rival Barack Obama said any suggestion his campaign was involved was “offensive” and declared that candidates’ families, and especially their children, were “off limits”.

Shortly after Mrs Palin was named on the ticket, the McCain campaign dispatched a team of a dozen communications operatives and lawyers to Alaska.

That fuelled speculation that a comprehensive examination of her record and past was incomplete and being done only after she was selected.

Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser, said no matter who the nominee was, the campaign was ready to send a “jump team” to their home state to work with the nominee’s staff, work with the local media and help handle requests from the national media for information.

At several points throughout the process, Mr McCain’s team warned Mrs Palin that the scrutiny into her private life would be intense and that there was nothing she could do to prepare for it.