Republican Ticket Fertile

The McCain-Palin ticket for the GOP is certainly fertile. Between them, they have twelve children.

Sarah Palin herself just had her fifth child, a son, Trig, who has Down's Syndrome (a high risk, relatively speaking, given the age of the parents) in April of this year.

Her seventeen year old daughter, Bristol Palin, is due in December, and plans to marry Levi Johnston, the eighteen year old father to be. He is a hockey player and the couple are long time high school sweet hearts and are both from Wasilla, Alaska.

McCain has seven children (the eldest age 49, the youngest age 17), three from his first marriage, and four from his second marriage. He started dating his second wife while married to his first wife, one of multiple affairs he had during his first marriage, and remarried over the objections of his children from his first marriage who did not attend the wedding). He is 72. His current wife is 54.

The Clintons, in contrast, had only one child who is currently childless and single at twenty-eight, and has an established career on Wall Street after having graduated from Stanford University in addition to a Master's Degree from Oxford University.

Obama has two young daughters. Biden had two sons and an infant daughter in his first marriage, which ended in a car crash that killed his wife and daughter, and seriously injured his two sons who are now adults. Biden has a daugther from his second marriage who is also an adult.

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Who is Sarah Palin?

Notably, Palin has rather week ties to the Republican Party. Prior to 1996 (including years spent on city council), she was registered as a member of the Alaska Independence Party, which seeks to discontinue Alaska's status as a U.S. State. Neither her husband, Todd, nor her eldest son Track (who is a nineteen year old infantryman in the U.S. Army), are registered to vote as Republicans. She first ran for partisan office as a Republican in 2002 when she was a candidate for lieutenant governor.

Her tenure in Wasilla city government was controversial, her first bid to be lieutenant governor failed, and in 2004 she resigned after a brief term on the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission and filed a formal ethics complaints against the state Republican Party's chairman, Randy Ruedrich. She is a year and a half into her first term as Governor of Alaska, she is facing an ethics investigation herself.

Palin is pro-life (opposing abortion even in cases of rape and incest), favors abstinence only sex education, thinks creationism should be taught in schools, opposes gay rights, favors oil and natural gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, does not favor putting the polar bear on the endangered species list, favors hunting wolves from helicopters, does not believe that global warming is human-made, is a long-time member of the National Rifle Association, opposes the legalization of marijuana, and has no foreign policy experience although generally supports President Bush's opinions on foreign policy and the Iraq War.

She is very public about her Pentecostal religious faith. She eloped at age twenty-four.