John McCain Chooses a Hockey Mom
Today John McCain surprised the pundit panoply by announcing Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Odds on favorite for the Vice Presidential nod was Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty along with a bevy of failed contenders from the Republican primary. McCain’s choice of Palin was such a surprise that the NPR correspondents covering the topic today were audibly astounded, sputtering their surprise that the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (population: 8,471) would even be considered; I think they hoped that John McCain was just joshin’ around and would let the country in on his little joke after a couple hours. Sorry, but McCain only jokes around about his age and bombing Iran.
Who is Sarah Palin and how does she benefit John McCain’s presidential campaign? These questions are intertwined and so I’ll discuss them in tandem.
1) Sarah Palin is a woman. Voters tend to pull the lever for the candidate with whom they most identify and more than half of those voters are women. Palin’s selection is a transparent bid for female voters who supported Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary. The political buzz during the Democratic National Convention centered on the unknown numbers of Hillary fans who had yet to succumb to Obamamania. Sarah Palin gave a shoutout to those undecided voters by honoring Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton during her acceptance speech. Even if you don’t end up voting for her, how can you help but respect a woman who rides snowmobiles, hunts moose, shoots assault rifles, marries a semi-professional snowmobile racer, raises five children, oh and governs Alaska in her spare time?
2) Sarah Palin’s candidacy was designed to upstage Barack Obama. The news cycle is king in politics (read George Stephanopoulos’s All Too Human sometime). Barack Obama gave an excellent speech in Denver Friday night and the Saturday morning news gave him full coverage. But after only 12 hours of headlines, “Barack Obama Gives Historic Acceptance Speech” gave way to “John McCain Surprises With Alaskan Hockey Mom.” The political wonks have enough new material for discussion to carry them into the Republican National Convention next week. If McCain had chosen a safe candidate like Pawlenty or Romney no one would have been surprised and most of the upstage value would have been lost.
The Obama campaign wanted Americans to connect Obama’s speech at the DNC with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech 45 years before. Obama had received the Civil Rights mantle. So the McCain campaign calls the opening bid and ups the ante by presenting Sarah Palin close to the anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Adding insult to injury, Palin ended her speech co-opting Obama’s slogan:
If you want change in Washington, if you hope for a better America, then we’re asking for your vote on the 4th of November.
3) Sarah Palin reinforces John McCain’s maverick image. McCain is famous, or infamous depending on your perspective, for bucking the Republican establishment on everything from immigration to campaign finance reform. Palin has caused great consternation among the incumbent Republican legislators in Alaska. She pushed ethics reform and turned whistle-blower on Republican colleagues. She draws a favorable contrast to Obama who ascended the political ladder under the auspices of the Chicago Democratic political machine.
4) Palin’s selection energizes the conservative base. Many leading conservative lights had backed Mitt Romney in the Republican primary and have nursed sore feelings and misgivings ever since McCain’s victory. But the some of the same Republicans who actively opposed McCain, and even proposed voting for Hillary Clinton instead, have found themselves newly excited by a McCain-Palin ticket. She is a social conservative and an evangelical (she used Biblical phraseology during her speech when talking about “blessings” and having “a servant’s heart.”). Conservatives who had been concerned that McCain would choose a pro-choice Tom Ridge or Joe Lieberman are relieved. Now James Dobson is on board and even Rush Limbaugh exults over having a conservative “babe on the ticket.”
5) Sarah Palin could energize independent voters. She mentioned in her speech that she took on big oil and special interests in Alaska, populist rhetoric that plays well among independents. She is a former union member herself and is married to a current United Steelworker, perhaps another appeal to working class Reagan Democrats.
The buzz about Palin is not all positive. Democrats were quick to pounce on her inexperience. The argument goes like this: “You accuse Barack of being inexperienced because he has only served in the Senate for four years, but then you nominate a candidate who was the mayor of Nowhere, Alaska just two years ago!” I’m sure the McCain campaign is hedging on his surplus of experience to make up for her lack. Still it is worth noting that Palin is the only one of the four campaigners to have any executive experience since McCain, Biden, and Obama are all legislators!
There is also an ongoing investigation of Palin possibly misusing her powers as Governor to fire someone for not firing her brother-in-law. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens, but I’m sure Democratic operatives will make this a talking point on the Sunday morning news shows.
Now that McCain has already made his choice for VP this weekend how will he be able to keep people interested in the upcoming Republican National Convention? On the first night of the convention former Democratic senator Joe Lieberman will mount the platform and warmly endorse John McCain for President. Three nights later John McCain should stand before his supporters and declare an end to partisan politics by announcing that Joe Lieberman will be the next Secretary of State.
Here is a hilarious video blog entry introducing Sarah Palin. I cried.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSBgH_wf5bc
We need to pray for Sarah Palin that she doesn’t end up being the next Dan Quayle. I hope she knows how to spell potato….
Good overview Paul. The whole inexperience argument still makes me very nervous. If Obama’s inexperience were a minor talking point that would be a different matter, but considering it has been McCain’s primary and most effective line of attack thus far, I think the Palin selection does do some damage. It takes some of the teeth out of the inexperience argument, and if nothing else gives Obama an answer to diffuse the attacks…whereas before he had little to no defense.
Overall though I think the pick accomplishes more positives (enumerated by yourself) than the other candidates would have.
By and by we shall see what providence hath wrought.
This is the main reason she was a good pick for McCain’s campaign:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=64876
Once this become well known, many voters simply will not care about much else.
I’ve seen a lot of talk about how Palin is good for McCain’s campaign but not much about how she will be a good VP; does her value end after November 4? And most of the stated reasons that she’s good for the campaign seem cynical. Take your 1) for example. Should we really think that women in general are more likely to vote for someone just because that person is a woman? Were women voters actually to act that way, would it really be worth pandering to? And why should voters care if a VP and her husband are great outdoorsmen? I can’t think of a significant decision made by a VP when I cared about his hobbies (”with the war in Iraq underway, thank goodness he can hunt quail!”).
If 2) is true—that “Sarah Palin’s candidacy was designed to upstage Barack Obama”—then I tremble at what else the Machiavellian behind that will come up with. We’re talking about choosing the second-in-line to the most powerful leader in the world, when that leader would be the oldest man ever to assume the Presidency. The thought that a VP choice might nullify an opponent’s speech or even a broad campaign theme should be nothing more than an afterthought.
What bothers me the most is how unprincipled her choice seems. McCain has said in the past that the main quality of a VP would be her ability to be President in a crisis. He’s made leadership experience a principal part of his campaign. But now he seems to have prostrated himself before pragmatism or maybe identity politics in order to get elected. Why should I have any confidence that he won’t make another such “maverick” move when faced with other important decisions, such as choosing a Supreme Court nominee?
It would take me some time to track down, but a Democratic commentator posed the same question about female voters: are they more likely to vote for a woman? She referenced a poll of likely voters asking them if a candidate’s gender would influence their vote. Two-thirds said no, and so the commentator concluded that women are not more likely to vote for female candidates. She of course ignored the third of voters who gender would influence their decision. Pliable female voters would be worth pandering to if they were a contested demographic, and in this case they are, both because of Hillary angst and because women are represented disproportionately in the ranks of independent voters over whom McCain and Obama are tussling.
I agree about the hobbies, but they feed into an image that influences voter behavior. In my ideal world voters would vote for candidates based on their stances on substantive issues, their personal character, and their political record. Unfortunately that’s not the way the political world works. So if a candidate is “cool,” and plenty of newly energized conservatives find moose hunting kinda cool in a romanticized Frederick Jackson Turner sense, than their hobby ends up mattering a little bit.
True, true. I wish we could select a truly qualified Philosopher King/Queen in the country for VP as well, but there’s a reason why idealists write essays and complain about the state of politics rather than get elected (with an exception as to Ron Paul of course).
I hesitate to go as far as calling his choice of her “unprincipled.” Perhaps he liked what he knew of her and thought she had good leadership abilities even if not much experience. How do we know she will fall apart in a crisis? She faced some pretty major crises in the local Alaskan scene. Was there a proposed VP with more experience in national crises for McCain to pick? Pawlenty? Romney? I don’t think any of the top runners had much experience handling national crises.
You don’t have a guarantee and that’s in part why I preferred Sam Brownback in the primary…he seemed a bit less pragmatic and more philosophically consistent. And his campaign tanked. But the lesser of two weevils and all…
Here’s a link to a well written slate.com article making much the same point you have. http://www.slate.com/id/2199029/
The point about being President in a crisis is not so much the crisis as her lack of qualification to be President at all. Not that she couldn’t pull it off in a pinch, but no one asked to come up with potential presidents would have thought of her, so something else must have been the overriding concern. Are there really so few qualified, electable conservatives?
You’re right; the Slate article does a good job summarizing my concerns: they’re more about what this says about McCain than about Palin’s being able to handle the job of VP. I was always bothered by McCain’s attempts to limit free speech; then his support for the Iraq war and the whole anti-terror bureaucracy. But at least he had taken a principled stand against torture, until that changed. This seems to be more bending of principle for political pragmatism.
I don’t think a candidate needs to be a philosopher-king, but pragmatism should at least be in the service of a principled end, and it should have some limits, don’t you think? Winning the election in two months might be a good reason to decide on a particular campaign commercial, but it’s not much of a reason to nominate someone who will thereby be around for over four years. It’s like getting married just for the honeymoon.
David Brooks has a much more sympathetic view of McCain’s reasons for choosing Palin:
I agree that McCain is philosophically inconsistent and that bothers me, but I expect such behavior from the political class in general. Yet it was the times that McCain denied the pragmatic for the sake of the principle that he earned my admiration. Against self-interest McCain supported immigration reform and the Iraq surge. That is rare in politico circles.
I sympathize with McCain, heck, I like the man! I bet he made the pick because he genuinely believed she would make a good Vice President.
The tone of my post probably stems from my years as a proto-political operative in SC Student Legislature. Everything you do or have done is analyzed in terms of how it helps or hurts…not that principle goes by the wayside, but cost benefit analysis is the name of the game.
Anywho, you don’t like my tone, but I think my content is sound. A number of columnists and news outlets have been talking about the shift towards reform/change in the campaign dialogue. John Dickerson, a liberal contributor to Slate.com changed his mind about McCain’s choice of Palin after hearing her speak at the Convention.