So, to be clear, if McCain had picked Tim Pawlenty as his running mate, we wouldn’t be quite this aflutter.
In picking Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, John McCain has changed the landscape of the 2008 election — but for how long? And how much? Is Palin going to be a flash-in-the-pan celebrity, of the variant he claims Obama is? She seems tailor-made for a guest appearance on The View and would be great fodder for a 60 Minutes feature to scoop up some octogenerian CBS viewers, but what then? The Vice Presidential debate certainly got interesting — maybe the most interesting one since ‘92, when Admiral James Stockdale used his fifteen minutes of fame to look into the camera and actually say, “Who am I? What am I doing here?” As some have cheekily observed, the Republicans have arrived squarely in the 1980s with the selection.
Politically, it’s an interesting move. It’s not a simple ploy to grab Clinton suppoters — despite Palin’s mention in her “hi, nation” speech that voters still have a shot of voting a woman into high executive office this year. If McCain really wanted to go after independents and Clintonites willing to abandon party for gender, he would have picked someone more ideologically palatable. Palin is anti-choice, pro-gun, pro-drilling, and even anti-polar bear. Palin complicates things, more than anything else — the rural folk in swing states might like Palin, the conservative base will certainly like Palin, and Palin can claim some change mojo based on the reform platform that propelled her to win the Alaska governorship in 2006 in the first place.
But I predict that Palin will be savaged in the upcoming vetting process — because apparently, McCain never vetted her himself. There’s a savory scandal involving abuse of power delightfully named Wootengate, and an angered former state employee at the height of it who is talking a lot. The decision on whether to press charges may come mere days before the election. There are also comments she’s made in which she is unclear on foreign policy or even what the VP does. There’s a really bizarre allegation that’s just become quasi-reliable (through being posted on Daily Kos) opining that her infant son is actually her teenage daughter’s illegitimate son.
The most staggering thing about her appointment is how little McCain actually knows her. The first time he met her was several months ago at a National Governor’s Conference. The second time he met her, if the VP search stories are to be believed, is the Sunday before the DNC, when McCain — looking to announce his pick right after the DNC concluded — flew her to Sedona to see the red rock formations and ask her to be second-in-command should they pull off victory. And the third time he met her was the morning she was flown from Alaska to Dayton to accept the nomination. Clearly, this is a selection being made with very little regard to what happens beyond Nov. 4. Witness McCain and crew speaking seriously about the courage Palin exhibited while on the Wasilla City Council, for instance, as evidence that she can be A Heartbeat Away, and you’re witnessing a lie they hope will be made true (or at least plausible) through the act of repetition.
The most telling thing about us, in the short term, is the jokes. When completely flummoxed, we try to laugh — either by Twittering “Little Known Facts about Sarah Palin,” which are in the vein of the Chuck Norris Facts and meant to make Palin an enigmatic mystery, albeit without Norris’s redneck panache … or through various GILF and VPILF jokes, which are meant to express appreciation for her beauty but really just make the joketellers seem like sexist jerks.
It’s not like Palin’s not a promising young politician — she’s like Obama in ways, in that she’s got a compelling personal story and positions her politics effectively from a not-business-as-usual perspective. But to jump on the national scene now, in this unexpected way, means the learning about and falling in love process we had over the long primary season with Obama won’t happen with Palin.
She’s here, now, surprise, ready to jump into a campaign that’s already full-speed and already staring at the harshest media glare she may ever faced.
Yep, this is way more fun than McCain-Pawlenty.
