Who's the hottest interview in St. Paul this week?
Apparently, anybody from Alaska.
Reporters have been desperate for any information, insights and opinions about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who accepted the Republican vice presidential nomination Wednesday night to raucous cheers.
So they have been buttonholing Alaskans on the floor of the Xcel Energy Center and flocking to Alaska delegation meetings at the drab, out-of-the-way Ramada Mall of America in Bloomington, often far outnumbering the state's 29 delegates.
In turn, delegates have been zealously defending their new-found celebrity and regaling reporters with stories about Palin driving her own car, pumping her own gas, reading to preschoolers at the Baptist church and cheering on snowmobile racers. (Her husband, Todd, is a champion snowmobiler).
Delegate Rex Shattuck, a legislative aide, said he has been interviewed more than 25 times this week.
Longtime Alaska Republican activist Cam Carlson complained to The Washington Post that the “news media doesn't have enough to write about.”
“I think Democrats are terribly desperate,” she said. “They're terrified. There's nothing they can uncover. And it's not just Democrats. There are Republicans who don't like her because she beat them. And some of them are in jail now.”
Delegation chairman Chris Nelson denounced the criticism of Palin's light résumé and scrutiny of her family as “Mooseberries. It's what comes out of the back end of a moose.”
Joe knows
Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden complimented his Republican counterpart's acceptance speech – more or less, anyway – and defended her against “sexist” attacks.
“I thought she had a great night,” he said on ABC's “Good Morning America.”
“I thought she had a very skillfully written and very skillfully delivered political speech and I was impressed with her. I was also impressed with what I didn't hear. I didn't hear a word mentioned about the middle class or health care or about how people are going to fill up their gas tanks.”
Biden said he felt a number of the questions raised this week about Palin's family life crossed the line.
“No one has to wonder about there being a sexist bone in my body,” he said. “And the truth is some of the stuff that the press has said about Sarah and others have said about the governor, I think, are outrageous. I think kids are off-limits, flat off-limits.
“I think this stuff about how can she be a governor and vice president and raise three kids, c'mon, whoever those folks are don't know any strong women.”
Biden joked about Palin's barbs directed at Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.
“They're good funny lines,” he said. “I gotta admit, I'm glad they weren't about me, ya know. I mean, I'm sitting there thinking, 'Whoa, look at that zinger.' ”
The Democrat said he expected to meet his match in the vice presidential debate Oct. 2 in St. Louis.
“I think she's gonna be a pretty skillful debater,” he said. “I think it'll be a tough debate for me.”
Felix knows
An even more obscure governor addressed the California delegation meeting yesterday.
Gov. Felix Camacho of Guam said he empathized with Palin because he found out just as he was getting ready for his biggest political campaign in 2002 that his unwed teenage daughter was pregnant.
Palin announced at the start of the convention that her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant and plans to marry her boyfriend.
Camacho said his experience taught him that this “can happen in the best of families” and it was irrelevant to his fitness to hold public office.
“It's part of the fabric of life that things unexpected occur,” Camacho said. “But it shouldn't deter you from seeking to serve.”
“Life isn't easy,” he said. “There are going to be setbacks and storms in life and you just have to ride them out.”
She's a big hit
Palin's acceptance speech was not only a rousing success in the convention hall, but she was a much bigger television ratings success than most other vice presidential nominees.
Palin's speech drew a television audience of 37.2 million people – just shy of the 38.4 million that viewed Barack Obama's acceptance speech on Aug. 28, according to the Nielsen Ratings.
And it's more than the 34.9 million that watched the opening night of the Summer Olympics.
It's also more than the 24 million who viewed Biden's acceptance speech last week in Denver.
The first 'dude'
Palin's husband can be forgiven if his head is spinning just a little.
“Is it just me or do things move quickly around here?” Todd Palin said at a Florida delegation luncheon. The oil field worker and snowmobile racer recalled that not too long ago, “I was at work on the North Slope, working the night shift.”
He joked about the abrupt changes wrought in his life by his wife's rocketlike rise up the political ladder.
“If I had a crystal ball five years ago, I might have asked a few more questions when Sarah decided to join the PTA,” he said.
Convention fact
The first Republican nominating convention was in Philadelphia in 1856. John Fremont was nominated for president.
Compiled from news service reports.
