Vetting Palin, a Matter of Judgment?

Sept. 2, 2008 — -- John McCain secretly flew Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin from relative obscurity to a televised event in Dayton, Ohio, last week with one thing in mind: He wanted to surprise you.

The surprises, however, continued Monday when it was revealed that Palin's 17-year-old daughter was pregnant, that the governor had hired a lawyer to defend her in an ethics investigation, that she attended meetings of a fringe party calling for Alaskan independence and that her husband had been arrested for drunken driving.

You were surprised, sure. But what about McCain?

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The Arizona senator, just two days away from being the official Republican nominee, says he knew about it -- all of it, all along -- and picked her as his running mate anyway.

"My vetting process was completely thorough and I'm grateful for the results," McCain said today.

Depending on whom you ask, the way in which Palin was vetted and chosen represents either a stroke of maverick genius intended to stir things up, or was instead a last-minute decision representing a major lack in judgment.

McCain wants you to think the former. The revelations about Palin are coming out now because McCain wanted to make a splash with a surprise candidate and the only way to do that was to keep the process secret. The revelations about Palin would have come out sooner had McCain vetted her more publicly, but then the surprise would have been ruined, a former McCain staffer told ABCNews.com.

"Doing the process privately isn't the same as doing it in haste," said Dan Schnur, a former McCain aide who now directs the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California.

"If you take the campaign at their word, they wanted to keep things under wraps by keeping the vetting process to a limited number of people. The Obama camp was going out interviewing community leaders and state legislators, but McCain had a different strategy," he said.

State legislators were certainly kept out of the loop, said John Harris, speaker of the Alaskan House of Representatives and a Republican.