I'm getting the distinct impression that Bristol Palin worships her mother somewhat less than the frothing lunatics that populated mom's campaign rallies:
The expression on her face as she says that preaching abstinence is unrealistic is just priceless. Her mouth says "unrealistic", but you can see that her mind is thinking "horseshit." But for all that Bristol Palin describes the rewards of caring for a baby (and we'll see how rewarding she finds it when she's barely 20 and has a two-year-old screaming "No!" all the time), she baldly says that she wishes this had happened ten years from now.
Note also the focus on "choice" and "decision". I don't recall any lefty bloggers saying that Bristol Palin "should" have an abortion. We may have said that she "should" have taken control over her life and responsibility for her sexuality and used contraception, but part of "choice" is the choice to have a baby, and most of us respected that choice, even if we didn't respect Bristol Palin's mother seeking to deprive other girls of the choice Bristol had. After all, choice involves a multiple of options, all of which have costs and benefits.
It's interesting to me how 20 years after Dan Quayle attacked a fictional character who was a mature adult for having a baby out of wedlock, here is the daughter of the nation's most prominent so-called "family values conservative" going on national television and speaking, sometimes plaintively and with longing for the normal teenaged life she's going to miss, about how much her life has changed and how teens should wait ten years longer than she did and how she wants to be an advocate for teen pregnancy prevention.
Note how the atmosphere in the room changes when Bristol's mom comes barging in, trying to finesse the issue of teenage pregnancy into simultaneously a joy for them and something to be avoided in other people's families -- which of course echoes the right's view on abortion, government funding, and indeed just about everything:
I'm not at all convinced that Sarah Palin was "just down by the river and decided to drop in", but it's interesting to note how she takes this brutally honest teenager dealing with this huge life change and turns her back into a political prop; a poster child for the Sarah Palin School of Family Values. Palin talks about extended family and having people to pitch in when for a generation Republicans have been attacking black inner-city families for raising their children in the same way. I guess if you're white and have money and power, extended family is a perfectly fine structure for raising children.
Rebecca Traister:
Bristol's interview was nearly painful to listen to, so vulnerable and untrained was her description of her love for her son, and her wish that she hadn't had him so young. These sounded like the pure and comparatively unscripted answers of a young woman who was not politicizing her situation, just living in it and trying to describe it to the rest of the world.
[snip]
Gov. Palin opened by claiming to be "proud of [Bristol] wanting to take on an advocacy role and just let other girls know that it's not the most ideal situation but certainly you make the most of it." It was like the elder Palin had put her daughter's words through a meat grinder: What Bristol had said was that she wanted to let other girls know that they should wait 10 years, that their lives would shift beneath their feet.
"Bristol is a strong and bold young woman," Palin said, as Bristol sat quietly -- after her mother entered, she barely spoke further -- "and she is an amazing mom, and this little baby is very lucky to have her as a momma. He's gonna be just fine. We're very proud of Bristol." Palin was missing the point, or part of it, or perhaps making it even louder: Bristol's self-professed desire to prevent teen pregnancy is not just about whether this little baby is going to be just fine, it is about whether his momma is.
But that just wasn't of much concern to Sarah Palin. Noting that, because of her large and helpful family, Bristol "has it perhaps easier, if you will, than other young mothers," Palin pointed out that "many, many, many young parents have been successful in raising their children, and have raised healthy, happy, contributing members of our society. And Bristol and Levi will be parents like that."
Van Susteren needed to ask the elder Palin about how she would interpret her daughter's larger message, and in doing so, she mentioned the word "abstinence." "It sounds naive!" said the Alaska governor, a proponent of abstinence (though not abstinence-only) legislation. "So you get beyond that ideal of abstinence. You get beyond that and then you deal with it. Life happens and you deal with it."
To Sarah Palin and Van Susteren's minds, the real story here was not about cautioning other teens, or preventing teen pregnancies, it was about how to deal with them once they'd -- inevitably, it seems -- happened. In Van Susteren's words, about "how important it is for families to pitch in." The Alaska governor, pausing for a moment of generous reflection, said, "I don't know how other families do it. If they kind of assume that the young parent is going to make it on their own, or assume that government would take care of the young parent and child. That's not government's role. This is a role for families to pitch in and help."
So the bigger message here, as spun by Greta Van Susteren and Sarah Palin, is that abstinence is a naive peg on which to hang our contraceptive hopes, but that when our daughters reproduce before they finish high school, we need to move beyond it -- not to discussions of birth control and abortion, but to the fact that the Palins are an unusually big, helpful, supportive group, and that other less fortunate young mothers should go out and get multigenerational families to help them out because it's not the government's responsibility.
I'm less concerned about young Bristol's ability to rise to the occasion of caring for her child than I am about how she's going to navigate the minefield of her so clearly narcissistic mother. You have to wonder what kind of roiling crap simmers in Sarah Palin's mind as she plays doting grandma to her daughter's perfect baby while she can hardly bear to look at the face of her own Down's Syndrome infant, passing him off whenever possible to her husband, or Bristol, or eight-year-old daughter Piper. Author Lorenzo Benet quotes Sarah Palin in his new book about her, written without Palin herself but with the assistance of her parents, as saying that she hid her last pregnancy because "Not knowing in my own heart if I was going to be ready to embrace a child with special needs – I couldn't talk about it." Given the speculation about Palin's motivations in insisting on flying home to Alaska after her water broke in Texas, one might want to wish she had had the kind of support structure or even worldview where she could talk openly about her fears and concerns. Of course she could have had such support from the pro-choice community, which is, after all, about "choice" -- including the choice to bear a Downs child -- had she not set herself up as a warrior against the very people who might have provided her with some understanding of her ambivalence. But here she is now, in competition with a young daughter and a grandchild whose very existence must taunt this ex-beauty pageant queen every day about the reality that her days as a MILF are rapidly passing by.
Bristol Palin may have been born into this zombie family, but this interview makes clear that she has at least emerged with her innate adolescent horseshit detector intact.
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