With two months to go before the US presidential election, Republican candidate John McCain has turned the campaign on its head by picking Sarah Palin as his running mate.

She's young.  She's a woman.  A governor of Alaska, she has no experience of national politics and she's unknown to most Americans.

The Republican party is casting her as a socially conservative hockey-mum: a mother of five - including one child with Down syndrome - a long-standing member of the National Rifle Association, someone who gets up at 3 in the morning to hunt moose…

But there is a whiff of controversy about her: her seventeen-year-old daughter is pregnant and Palin herself is under investigation for allegedly getting a state trooper fired because he was involved in a divorce battle with her sister.

Where does this leave Republicans and the McCain-Palin ticket?

Eric Pape, freelance journalist and regular contributor to Newsweek, answered Cyril Vanier's questions.

To watch the interview, click play the video.