Before Speech, Running Mate Gets Some Coaching

Upon arriving in Minneapolis, John McCain is greeted by the Palin family. The GOP presidential candidate embraces Bristol Palin. Levi Johnston, Bristol's fiancee, watches on the left. (Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)

In an effort to prevent any damaging mistakes, the McCain campaign is orchestrating Palin's public introduction carefully. Except for an interview with People magazine the afternoon her selection was announced, she has not taken a single question from a reporter, and it remains unclear when she will speak to the national news media.

McCain and his allies are hoping to present his running mate as a like-minded reformer who will pursue the same approach to governing. Campaigning with her over the past few days, McCain presented her time and again as a fighter.

"A lot of candidates talk about reform, changing the failed policies of the past, but often they find after they're elected they leave things as they are," McCain said. "Not Governor Sarah Palin -- not Sarah Palin."

In her own remarks on the trail, Palin has worked to burnish her leadership credentials, repeatedly referring to her time in the governor's office. After listing McCain's national security attributes at one point, she declared, "As the mother of one of those troops and as the commander of Alaska's National Guard, that's the kind of man I want as our commander in chief." At another point, she heralded his willingness to cut wasteful spending, noting that she had done it herself: "Senator McCain promises to use the power of the veto in defense of the public interest, and as a chief executive, I can assure him: It works."

Still, Palin will take the stage Wednesday night amid a series of questions about her political résumé that have, at a minimum, created distractions from the convention message the McCain campaign has sought to present.

On Tuesday, the McCain campaign angrily countered reports that Palin was a member of the Alaska Independence Party, producing records showing that she has been a registered Republican since the early 1980s. Later in the day, media reports revealed that her husband was registered as a member of the party until 2002.

Alaskans continued to question her position on the "Bridge to Nowhere," a nearly $400 million span connecting the small town of Ketchikan with a remote island to make transportation to its airport easier. Palin seemed to indicate that she supported the bridge while campaigning for governor in that region in 2006, but last fall she ended the project because cost overruns far exceeded the initial $223 million that was allocated.

While McCain's backers are comfortable that Palin's record meshes neatly with his when it comes to challenging the status quo -- Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said the governor "has shown guts and toughness on a central theme in this campaign in a way that will resonate with the American public" -- they are working on how to bolster her foreign policy bona fides.

Palin has rarely traveled overseas: Last summer, as governor, she journeyed to Canada on one trip and to Germany, Iraq and Kuwait on another, and Comella said she might have traveled to Mexico once on a personal trip.

"Obviously the governor of Alaska spends very little time on foreign policy," Davis said, though he added that if something were to happen to McCain, "I think she's got the judgment to do the things as commander in chief that John McCain would think are the right things to do."

Graham, who lobbied hard for McCain to choose their mutual friend Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) as his running mate, said Palin would be able to handle foreign relations in McCain's absence as long as she relied on his staff.

"She can do fine in foreign policy because of the infrastructure we have around us. She's smart, and she will learn over time," he said, adding that when it comes to selecting a vice president, "there is no perfect person. If we could have found someone who's an expert in everything, we would have picked 'em, right?"

Staff writers Paul Kane and Debbi Wilgoren contributed to this report.