Boundaries, and a lack thereof

I've gone back and forth over whether to do a post on the reported break up of Bristol Palin and her boyfriend Levi Johnston. A few days after Palin's mother, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, joined Senator John McCain as his running mate last year, the campaign announced that Bristol was pregnant and intended to marry Johnston, the father. While the personal issues of two teenagers were off the table for me (and for the Obama campaign), this does matter because of Gov. Palin's stated opposition to comprehensive sex-education in public schools. I have no idea what the Palins taught their own children about sex, but the governor has said that programs which teach anything other than abstinence "will not find my support." And those programs don't work, to the point where states are actually turning down federal funding for them. For me, the issue was - I don't want to say "hypocrisy," because that implies some intent on the governor's part. How about "cluelessness"? Oh, well, I didn't vote for her. And anyway, that's been covered by people who are a lot smarter than me.

Here's what I do know. It's disingenuous, maybe a little sleazy, the way this whole story has been handled in the press. It was sleazy for the governor to drag her pregnant teenage daughter out as a selling point, and it's really sleazy for "Good Morning America" to ambush Johnston in his truck to pick over the dirty details of his relationship with Bristol and their infant son. This kid is 19 frakking years old. Bristol is 18. Do you remember what it was like to be that age? I do. And I didn't even have anything like the stresses these two kids are under. Neither of them deserve to see their lives hashed out in the national press.

My question is this - does Gov. Palin not have any people? You know, people in my job, people who can advise her that when she runs for national office the media are going to pick over every aspect of her life, and the lives of everyone in her orbit, like little old ladies at a yard sale? You have two options in this situation: extensive media training (I've been through a small amount, and it kicked my ass), or drilling into everyone's heads that you do not talk to the press under any circumstances. (Well, and a third option: Hey, I'm not up for this, so maybe I shouldn't run for vice president...but we won't go into that.)

Obviously we can't rely on the national media to show some restraint here. So in my opinion it would fall to the governor's "people" to lock down the personal lives of the governor's family. The flip side of that is that Gov. Palin and her "people" can't expect to protect her family and simulanteously use them to prove her conservative bona fides.

In the meantime, my heart goes out to two very young people trying to find the best way out of an impossible situation. Media scrutiny isn't going to make their lives any easier.