Winning over governing
UPDATE: I write all of this and then go read Ezra and he’s written what I wish I had written in the first place. Don’t bother reading what I wrote, read him and then pretend like I was going to write that too. The key bit from Ezra:
Today, McCain chose his campaign over his presidency. Over our presidency. In this decision, country did not come first. Polls did. Palin seems like a promising young politician, but McCain increasingly seems like a desperate one.
End Update
The first thing that popped into my head when I heard John McCain had chosen Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running-mate: What a brutally cynical choice. McCain is making a desperate play to win this election, to hell with the responsibility of actually governing the country should he win. Here is Palin’s experience: She was the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, population 5,470. She’s been the Governor of Alaska for two years. That’s it. That’s all of her experience. I guess all of McCain’s attacks about Senator Obama being inexperienced are out the window. Does McCain really think Palin is ready to be one heartbeat away from the Presidency? It is unfathomable that he would think that.
Further, there seems to be no indication, from anything I’ve heard or read, that McCain actually knows Palin all that well. At least if he’d chosen Lieberman the argument could be made that he went with someone he liked and trusted. With Romney or Pawetly McCain would have gotten a VP with real executive experience. But Palin is just a political play, and a bad one at that. You can’t say he’s doing it for the electoral college, Alaska’s only worth 3 votes and was going red anyway. This is purely about trying to appeal to the Republican conservative religious base and, I suppose, in some crazy way hoping that putting a woman on the ticket will get all of Hillary Clinton’s 18 million voters over to McCain’s side. That ain’t happening.
Her selection is being compared to when President Bush picked Dan Quayle as his running-mate but as a former colleague points out, at least Quayle had four years in the House and eight years in the Senate as experience. James Fallows says the pick is more like when Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court. I think Amy Sullivan gets the proper analogy: this is Harriet Miers redux. Palin is not the right choice for anyone who is serious about being President. McCain wasn’t thinking further then winning a news cycle. He’s done that but gained nothing else.
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