This is a Gaffe?
Puhleeze. Neither can any normal American, i.e., one that is neither a lawyer nor a political junkie. Once again, the MSM is showing the distance between what it considers to be the sine qua non of politics, and what normal people believe matters in an elected leader (i.e., her common sense and judgment). My bet is that this will sway the electorate . . . not one bit.
As for Governor Palin's statement that she believes in a right to privacy but not in Roe, well, that's not logically inconsistent. One can theoretically believe in an implied right to privacy in the Constitution for some purposes (e.g., safeguarding one's own bodily integrity, manifested in the right to purchase birth control and the like) without believing that "privacy" extends so far as to confer the right to kill another unborn human being during certain specified parts of pregnancy. (Indeed, the Roe Court obviously believed there were limits to the application of the privacy right in the abortion context itself; otherwise, it wouldn't have outright prohibited abortion in the last three months of pregnancy).
All the MSM dismay about Governor Palin's supposed ignorance springs, in large part, from the fact that Sarah Palin is, in many way, the antithesis of their darling, Barack Obama. He is a man of talk, she is a woman of action. He can reel off facts and figures with the ease of an Ivy League professor -- it's not his glibness that alarms, it's his instincts and his judgment (the kind that would find moral equivalence between Georgia and Russia, or deem Rev. Wright's virulently anti-American sermons to be A-OK).
Given her experience as a Governor of Alaska, she isn't necessarily going to be prepared to pontificate on all matters great and small, a la Obama. But she has good values, good instincts and solid life experience.
William Buckley once said he'd rather be governed by the first 100 people in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. Similarly, I'd feel more secure being governed by President Sarah Palin (if the unspeakable happened) than President Barack Obama.