2008 in Review - Sarah Palin (Sept)

Everybody had an opinion about Sarah Palin.  Most of mine were opinions about the opinionators.

It’s been a week since John McCain decided to tap Sarah Palin as his Vice-Presidential nominee.  Predictably, because it has become the rule in our partisan political world, the conservatives are ecstatic about the choice and anyone who questions Palin’s experience, credentials or political history is unpatriotic, sexist, or elitist.  Equally predictably, liberal commentators are scandalized by the choice and anyone who supports Palin is hopelessly partisan, two-faced or intellectually limited.  

Both partisan sides are wrong and right, as usual.  We should at least agree on some facts, which are beyond dispute.

First of all, John McCain did not pick Sarah Palin because she’s a woman.  Gender helped, sure, but it wasn’t the reason.  He picked her because he liked her best out of the candidates he was allowed to choose from.  He may have preferred Tom Ridge or Joe Lieberman, but the Republican Party isn’t ready for him to stray that far off the reservation.

Look at McCain’s choices - his primary opponents and the handful of young, and therefore relatively inexperienced, faces.  A ticket of two aging white guys won’t counter the powerful message of ‘change’ that has been the mantra of 2008, so it was the new faces that always had the lead.  Tim Pawlenty and Bobby Jindal are both in the same position as Palin, recently elected governors of states that don’t carry much media cachet.  

Palin, then, has several pluses -- she’s female in the year when Hilary Clinton made it clear that gender would no longer be a bar; she has impeccable conservative credentials on social issues in a year when mainstream Republicans aren’t sold on McCain’s fealty to social conservative causes; and she has a reputation for challenging the entrenched interests, in a year when much of the discussion has been over how to shake up politics as usual.  Viewed from this lens, then, Sarah Palin is not such a disaster as a v-p candidate.  

And it’s easy to see why McCain liked her best.  In addition to having a great family story and being a Washington outsider, she’s quick with a quip and connects with people.  And to state the un-PC obvious, she is pretty easy on the eyes too.

Second fact:  McCain jumped way outside the usual process for vetting running mate candidates, essentially trusting his instincts on picking Palin without a thorough look at her whole history.  Other potential candidates were screened thoroughly, and many have spent quality time with McCain during the spring and summer.  Palin, though, for the McCain campaign, came out of left field.

The revelation that the McCain campaign had not vetted Palin is at least as surprising as the choice.  She has been included in lists of possible candidates circulating in the commentariat for a couple of months.  She didn’t show up in columns about McCain’s “short list” at random.  Someone suggested she was worth considering; the surprise is not so much that she wasn’t vetted before she was picked, as much as that nobody thought to do the work long before the deadline. 

The result has been open season on Palin’s entire history, political and personal, and on McCain’s judgment.  Some silly commentators have gone so far as to suggest that McCain is reprising George McGovern’s 1972 selection of Tom Eagleton, (the urge to find historical parallels is too great for some to resist - Iraq is not and never will be Vietnam, but that didn’t stop opponents of the war from reaching for the analogy) and will have the same sticky ending.  That’s nonsense, but the week of muck-raking is a predictable result of springing a surprise on the media.

It is undisputed that McCain wanted to name his running mate on the morning after Obama’s acceptance speech, to run over Obama’s media coverage and minimize the fawning in print and the airwaves which could lead to a bump in the polls.  That deadline loomed large as McCain angled to get one of his preferred candidates approved.  Not everyone in the Republican party, and virtually no one outside, was comfortable with McCain’s decision-making process.  And that’s all we can really apply his choice of Palin to - his decision-making process.  But we should all get used to the idea, because it was vintage McCain and is a precursor to how decisions are apt to be made in a McCain White House.  

Third fact:  the media’s job has been to find out who Sarah Palin is, what kind of person she is, what her history is, and what positions she has taken or appeared to have taken on issues great and small.  As always, how deplorable the media is acting in pursuing these stories is a direct function of whether your own ox is being gored.  But the job of journalists is to find the story and there is no denying that Palin was the story of the week.

Touching again on the prior point, the appearance that the McCain camp was surprised by some of what was revealed by the media only highlights concern that McCain was shooting first and trusting that the answers to the questions asked later would be all right.  We won’t know if he was right for a while longer; but having to address the issue at all was an unnecessary hurdle for McCain to place in front of himself.

And the conservative commentariat needs to quit acting like media scrutiny, and even media muck-raking, is somehow cheaply partisan.  These people spent weeks camped out in front of JonBenet Ramsey’s house.  It’s the story they’re after, and if some scalp comes along with it, that’s what happens.  If she comes through the airing of her laundry in public, then she is that much more likely to be accepted.  McCain understands that.

Fourth fact:  virtually every published response to the choice of Palin came straight from the speaker’s “pre-Palin” pre-disposition to vote Republican.  The initial reactions were (sometimes) tempered with more considered reasons, but the significance of the revelations in the media of Bristol Palin’s baby and the Alaska Senate’s investigation was determined by the pre-disposition; conservatives minimized the reports, liberals gloried in them as exemplars of a disastrous choice.

That pre-disposition largely governs how to answer the political junkie’s question of whether Palin is experienced enough or qualified to be Vice-president.  The question really is: whether Palin is qualified to be President any time soon; three or four or eight years of vice-presidency from now, there will be no dispute about experience or qualification.  To quote Hillary Clinton: is she ready to lead on Day One?  It is hopelessly naive or partisan to claim the answer is yes.

But there should also be universal agreement that the question is bogus, because Palin is qualified to be Vice-President.  She’s over 35 years of age and a natural-born American; if there are any other qualifications, they haven’t been written down.  The main requirements of the job are to preside over the Senate, cast a tie-breaking vote if needed, and do whatever else the President may designate.  There have been men not up the task of being President, but there’s no list of failed Vice-Presidencies (or stellar ones for that matter).

So after a week all we really have is the latest turn on a very long and very winding road to the White House.  Conventional wisdom has taken a beating for at least a year in this election cycle and the nomination of Palin is completely harmonious with that theme.  Conventional wisdom about McCain’s wisdom in choosing Palin is likely to be just as wrong.