ON DEADLINE: Palin faces political obstacle course

Sarah Palin is about to face pressures, risk pitfalls and encounter endless questions about her past and her ideas for the future as she embarks on her vice presidential campaign. It is a political obstacle course that has tripped more seasoned running mates.

At 44, governor of Alaska for two years, Palin will be nominated for vice president at the abbreviated Republican National Convention, presumably on schedule Wednesday night.

She is a rookie in a national political league even veterans find tough to handle. She's getting a crash course, she'll be briefed, handlers and advisers will counsel and surround her. So far, her campaigning has been at the side of Sen. John McCain, the presidential candidate who called her from national obscurity to join his ticket.

After the convention, she'll be campaigning solo. It will not be easy.

Sen. Dan Quayle stumbled through the early phase of his 1988 vice presidential campaign, unprepared for the challenges of a national campaign role although he'd served 12 years in Congress before George H.W. Bush chose him for the ticket.

His first week on the road was dogged by constant questions about the help he got from a family friend to enlist in the Indiana National Guard and avoid the Vietnam war draft. It was a problem issue the Bush camp hadn't foreseen and couldn't fend away. He was a surprise choice and he seemed as surprised as anyone by it. He got no advance preparation, was simply thrust into a role he had not expected.

Last spring, McCain said he was determined to avoid that kind of problem when he chose a vice presidential nominee. He said Quayle had not been briefed and prepared for some of the questions he would face.

But it is hard to see how Palin could be briefed and prepared to head into a campaign far different from her one statewide contest in Alaska. McCain first met her in February at a governors' conference. His campaign had her flown secretly to Flagstaff, Ariz., where she met with top McCain advisers last Wednesday. On Thursday, she met with McCain in Sedona and he offered her the nomination. It was publicly announced on Friday at a rally in Dayton, Ohio.

Not much time for a cram course in running for vice president.

"She's exactly who this country needs to help me fight the same old Washington politics ..." McCain said.

She's young, conservative, an opponent of abortion rights and a woman, in a campaign in which the Republicans are trying to gain support among women who supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in her losing contest with Democratic nominee Barack Obama. Palin has a reputation as a skilled campaigner and a tough one. But she's not running for governor of a sparsely populated state, she's running for national office, with the unrelenting attention that goes with that. It will be more intense on her than it might have been on a more traditional nominee, simply because the nation knows so little about her.

"Spiro Agnew is not a household word," Spiro Agnew said after Richard M. Nixon unexpectedly named him to the 1968 Republican ticket. He became one, quickly, after gaffes and hard-line politicking. Agnew, two years into his first term as governor of Maryland, quickly discovered that he couldn't joke that a reporter he knew at the state house was "the fat Jap." Or call the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, "soft on communism" without stirring a backlash.

That is not to suggest that Palin will prove as awkward as the early Quayle, or as heavy handed and gaffe prone as Agnew. But it is to say that what passes muster in state politics won't get by in a national campaign.

And that problems and inconsistencies that have been minor problems will be magnified in the new arena Palin is entering. In Dayton, she claimed to have proved her reformer credentials in Alaska by scrapping the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, a span that was to have been built from Ketchikan to an island of 50 residents and an airport with $398 million in funds earmarked by Congress. She said she "championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress," a process of getting money for pet projects which McCain opposes. Not it turns out that she was for that bridge project as a candidate in 2006 before changing her mind as governor in 2007.

Not only that, she said in 2006 that she wanted to go ahead "while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist," which doesn't sound like a reformer bent on quashing earmarked appropriations.

There's a legislative investigation in Alaska to determine if she acted improperly by dismissing the state public safety commissioner after he refused to fire her former brother-in-law as a state trooper. He was involved in bitter divorce proceedings with her sister.

She denied any connection and said she welcomed the investigation. "Hold me accountable," she said. As a candidate for vice president, she can count on that.

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EDITOR'S NOTE - Walter R. Mears has reported on national politics for The Associated Press since 1960.