John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate has spurred a lot of thoughts as we move into the season when most Americans tune into the race for the White House; here are a handful of them.
First, the Republicans had better get their convention up and running quick - the first two days of introducing Gov. Palin to the American people haven't gone well.
Second, the VP choice has little if any effect on voters when they pull the lever; the top of the ticket is always the deciding factor. But the person that is selected as running mate, and the process by which they are picked, is one of the first significant choices a presumptive nominee has to make and therefore provides a window into their decision-making process. Contrast Obama's six-week deliberative process led by a committee of senior advisors to McCain's hasty selection of a running mate he had met only once before he offered her the VP role and whom his advisors had not fully vetted. We've spent the last eight years with a president who "listened to his gut" and made hasty and ill-considered decisions without consulting with key advisors - do we really want more of the same?
Third, what does the Palin pick really get McCain? Modern elections are won and lost over the 5-7% of independents (with a lower-case "i", also known as Reagan Democrats) who are largely moderate on social issues and relatively conservative on fiscal matters - the classic suburban soccer mom. Palin's conservative, evangelical social views - pro-life, pro-gun, anti-sex education, advocates teaching creationism in schools - will not sit well with this group. Palin shores up McCain's conservative base, but he was going to get those votes anyway, largely out of protest for how conservatives view Obama's social positions. Mike Murphy, who ran McCain's 2000 presidential campaign and is now an NBC political commentator, said it best on Meet The Press this week: "It's always better for a campaign to have a lot of somewhat unhappy voters than a small number of really happy voters - there are a lot more votes in the other group."
Fourth, it's obvious what the McCain camp loses by picking Palin - the arguments about "experience," "ready to lead," "ready on Day One," heaps of experience in national security to defend America, ready to confront Islamic terrorism, the "transcendent issue of our time," etc. All those are out the window now that he's picked a candidate with zero foreign policy experience. It's laughable to hear the unnatural acts that Republicans have had to resort to in order to bolster her street cred in this area; Cindy McCain took the cake this weekend when she said that "she's been the governor of Alaska and Alaska is the closest point in the United States to Russia, so she's got a lot of experience in dealing with Russians." (Are we worried about an invasion across the Bering Strait?) And McCain's press secretary Tucker Bounds tried to assert that Palin had more foreign policy experience than Obama because as governor of Alaska, she was responsible for equipping, training and deploying Alaska's National Guard to Iraq, where he asserted "they remained under her control" (Campell Brown of CNN corrected him that Gen. Petraeus and the Defense Dept. control National Guard forces overseas).
Experience seemed to be the one argument that McCain had, and he made up ground this summer by hammering on it. Did Obama's selection of Biden so alter their thinking that they felt it was time to give up on it? Their initial efforts with Gov. Palin seem to focus on trying to wrest the "change" mantle from the Obama camp, but that won't work. Change is part of the very fabric of the Obama campaign, and has been from the outset. Witness how Hillary couldn't pivot to claim it as an issue during the primary (I was one of many of who got that one wrong ...); there's no way that a ticket led by a 72-year old longtime senator from the same party as the wildly unpopular current president can make a plausible case for re-branding themselves as a "change" ticket with under two months to go until the election.
Finally, the one I feel will be hurt in all this is Gov. Palin, unfortunately. Watching her first 2-3 campaign appearances since she was picked, it's obvious that she is smart, skilled and a rising talent in the Republican ranks. The best thing for such a politician is to introduce herself to the American public on her terms and by tightly managing her message. This takes time, and lots of it; politicians spend years if not decades establishing their brand so that the public feels comfortable with them. Gov. Palin has all of two months - good luck. The most brilliant pol in the world couldn't cram enough to be ready for the inevitable gaffes and tough questions from the press (especially on foreign affairs, given her party made this a central theme), and to expect someone to be able to handle it with aplomb while under the incredibly harsh glare of a national campaign is asking the impossible.
It took Obama nearly 20 months during a primary covering all 50 states for a large swath of the American public (18+ million votes) to get comfortable with him, and he had to overcome his share of stumbles along the way - Rev. Wright, swipes at Hillary during the debates, etc. I fear Gov. Palin will be taken to task by an eager press who already has the knives out for her, and will be summarily branded a rube from the backwoods who is unfit to lead the country; no pol ever recovers from that sort of "branding" in the public's eye, and her potentially promising career in national politics will be snuffed out before it even has a chance to get off the ground.
Prediction (I've been wrong before, so why not ...): the Palin choice backfires on McCain and it is seen as the factor that turns what is already an Obama lead in every major state into a landslide, a ten percentage point election difference or so.
