Florida GOP delegates supportive of Palin

St. PAUL, Minn. — "She is just like you and just like me," said Margi Helschien, an Republican "honored guest" from Boca Raton. "She has good things in her family and other things we all deal with and that's what makes her just like us."

At the Republican National Convention on Tuesday, Florida delegates and non-voting delegates dubbed "honored guests" defended Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor chosen by Arizona Sen. John McCain to join him on the party's presidential ticket. News surfaced on Monday, the opening day of the GOP convention, that Palin's unmarried 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant.

McCain told reporters in Philadelphia Tuesday that he believes that Palin's background was properly checked out before he picked her to be his vice presidential candidate.

At the convention, Republicans from South Florida stuck up for Palin, a pro-life mother of five children, including a 5-month-old son with Down syndrome.

"It's wonderful how her family is embracing the daughter," said Beth Kigel, an alternate from Lake Worth. "As Republicans, that's what we ask families to do."

But "when we're talking about her family, we should talk about the totality of her family. She has a son about to go to Iraq to defend his country," pointed out Kigel, vice chair of the Republican Party of Palm Beach County.

Praise for Palin was profuse from Sid Dinerstein, a delegate from Palm Beach Gardens and chairman of the Palm Beach County GOP.

"She is the kind of spokeswoman we have been looking for for a generation," said Dinerstein. While earlier national Republican leaders had to "find the connection" with women who balance demanding careers and down-to-earth family problems, he said, "she lives it."

Dinerstein said he wants Broward County's Sharon Day, the statewide chairman of Women for McCain, to arrange a gathering "in South County — Boca or Delray — and bring in 1,000 women. No men."

The women could be early supporters of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential candidacy, he said. Then bring down Palin to address them.

"She would turn 90 percent of them around" to the McCain-Palin ticket, he predicted.

After Clinton lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and then was not picked as the vice presidential candidate, "millions of women said, 'Wait a minute. When is it our turn?'" said Dinerstein. "It's their turn now."

At the Florida delegation breakfast Tuesday, Fox News Pollster Frank Luntz told the state's GOP activists that he has never seen delegates as excited about a vice presidential pick as they are about Palin.

However, "she's got to deliver" her acceptance speech Wednesday night, he said.

"I can't wait to watch when she debates Joe Biden," the Democratic vice presidential candidate and a veteran Delaware senator, said Luntz. "I want her to go 'Joe. Joe. Joe.'"

He told the delegates to "sell her as a mother of five" who has "done it all" — care for her family, manage a "very successful career" and support her husband.

"And she takes no crap from anybody," he said to cheers from the Florida delegates.

John Dowd, a delegate from Palm Beach County, said Bristol Palin's pregnancy is "really not the issue."

"The issue is how (Sarah Palin) will serve the people of the United States as vice president," he said. And he said she "absolutely" would do a good job there.

As for her daughter's pregnancy, "Sarah Palin is a great family person and she's dealing with family issues just like all of us with children deal with family issues," said Dowd. "She is behaving admirably."