Under pressure: Sarah Palin

Minneapolis/St Paul (Minnesota), Sept. 2: With the Republicans struggling here to put their national convention back on track, the party's leadership is finding that their immediate battle is with the media and not so much with the Democratic Party.

With scandals swirling around Sarah Palin, the surprise vice-presidential pick by John McCain, the Republican presidential campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, yesterday condemned as “offensive” the saturation coverage coverage of Palin's unwed teen daughter's pregnancy.

“It used to be that a lot of those smears and the crap on the Internet stayed out of the newsrooms of serious journalists,” Schmidt told the media here even as the Republicans sought to refocus their convention on policy.

With Hurricane Gustav bringing less damage in its wake than expected, President George W. Bush, who scrapped his trip to the convention yesterday, will address the gathering today by satellite from the White House.

But it is doubtful whether that is enough to damp down media curiosity in Palin and awkward questions about her.

Beauty and scandal make for a disastrous combination on the front pages of tabloids and for television. And that combination is now becoming a distraction for McCain's presidential campaign as it enters a new phase in his party's convention week.

Within hours after Palin admitted to her daughter's teen pregnancy under pressure from liberal blogs, her aides announced that she had hired a private lawyer in an ethics investigation against her in Alaska, where she is governor.

The investigation by Alaska's legislature deals with the possibility that Palin, as governor, ordered the dismissal of Alaska's public safety commissioner because he would not get rid her former brother-in-law as a state trooper, a law enforcement job.

The Palin family was angry with the state trooper after he divorced the governor's sister. What makes the investigation difficult for the Republicans to live down is that Alaska’s state legislature is controlled by their own Republican Party.

A more serious allegation that may dog the McCain-Palin campaign in the coming weeks is about Palin's membership for at least two years of the Alaska Independence Party, which seeks to secede from America.

That is a revelation that McCain, who has made America's security his main campaign plank, will find hard to defend Palin against. The Washington Post revealed today that Palin began her public life as a director of an independent political group organised by Alaska's Republican Senator Ted Stevens.

Stevens was indicted in July this year on seven counts of corruption and now faces trial. Palin's association with Stevens runs against the Republican leadership's claim that she crusaded against corruption in her state.

The McCain campaign's lawyer who conducted a background search on Palin and interviewed her for three hours before she was chosen as McCain's running mate, Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr., told the media here today that Palin admitted that her husband, Todd, then aged 22, was arrested in 1986 in Alaska for drunk driving.

Meanwhile, two New York tabloids, The New York Post and The New York Daily News revealed today that the father of Palin's unmarried daughter Bristol, is Levi Johnston, 17, a hockey player at Bristol's high school.

The Post said that on Johnston's MySpace page, which was quickly taken down after the pregnancy revelation, he boasted that “I’m a f - - -in’ redneck” who likes to snowboard and ride dirt bikes.

Among other things, the page said: “I don’t want kids.”

The Democrats have cleverly stayed out of the Palin controversies so far. McCain's rival, Barack Obama, said today: “Let me be as clear as possible. I think people’s families are off-limits, and people’s children are especially off-limits...It has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as governor or her potential performance as a vice-president.”