Picking a running mate is always a dangerous decision for a presidential candidate. The bottom half of the ticket cannot win an election but it can lose an election; the best case scenario is that nothing bad happens. The top of the ticket is where the fireworks are, that’s where people vote for or against someone. The bottom of the ticket is a basic necessity, like home electricity or bladder control it’s simply expected. If you don’t have it it’s catastrophically embarrassing but if you do it doesn’t say much about you other than that you’re not a complete basket case. When selecting a running mate all you really need to do is not fuck it up completely (Stockdale, Quayle, Eagleton) and you should be fine.
I didn’t write a post about Joe Biden because there really is nothing meaningful to say about Joe Biden. The intimate squiggles of his life story and what the pick says about how the race is going are all just background noise. He’s a good vice presidential pick because he’s been in public life long enough that there likely aren’t any serious skeletons in his closet and we know he can handle himself on television. Unfortunately for the Reds, neither of those two things applies to Sarah Palin.
She is an unknown who has never been under the full microscopic analysis of the national media. She hadn’t even taken the stage with John McCain yet before word spread south of the nice little scandal she’s got going on at home, including an ethics investigation of both her and her husband’s actions in relation to whether or not they used the power of her office for personal reasons. The details are utterly irrelevant, the mere existence of the scandal tells us a lot about how McCain and his campaign staff view their chances in November. There are two possibilities, either the McCain brain trust knew about it in advance and didn’t care or they didn’t know and didn’t properly screen her.
If they knew about it and picked her anyway it means that they’re willing to take the risk of the scandal harming them because they think she could potentially draw enough votes to change the outcome of the election. If they didn’t know it means that they were very dissatisfied with their other options and picked her at the last second out of panic and or desperation. In either case it indicates high anxiety about how the presidential race has been going. A running mate can shore up a wobbling home state, but if you’re looking for her to draw nationwide support it indicates a real lack of confidence in the lead man’s ability to do so, and as Alaska isn’t large enough electorally to be of real significance it has to be the latter.
My personal suspicion, and it is only a suspicion, is that they were waiting to see how the Blue convention went before making their choice. In the run up to Denver the campaign chatter was all about whether or not the Clintons would steal the spotlight, deliberately sabotage things, or generally be less than helpful to Barack Obama. There was also genuine uncertainty about how the football stadium setting would play with the public and the pundits.
By Thursday evening they had their answer. The Blue convention went off without a hitch, the Clintons were solidly behind Obama and the stadium speech was one for the ages. If things had gone poorly in Denver, coupled with the recent tightening of the polls, they could’ve taken Romney or one of the other generic Republican clones and been happy. Instead they saw their chances take a huge blow on the field at Mile High (38 million people at a minimum) and concluded that the usual type of pick wasn’t going to do it for them.
If I were rooting for John McCain I think I’d be happy with this pick. It’s a swing for the fences and why not? After four nights of nearly flawless Blue convention they had nothing to lose. When you’re behind you’ve got to play fast and loose to catch up; playing conservative and selecting yet another dull Republican white guy wasn’t going to get it done this time around. Palin was selected because her gender makes her newsworthy and puts the Reds on slightly better footing against the Blues in terms of history-making. The problem is that in order to make their spectacular pick they had to run the risk of it blowing up in their faces.
The Republicans are still the party of corruption in the public eye (give the Democrats a few years in power and I assure you they will regain the title) and Alaska is amongst the most corrupt places around. Two-thirds of the Alaska Congressional delegation is under indictment and while Palin may be the white knight of the last frontier when there’s that much dirt flying around you can get dirty just by being there.
Palin is a good pick in that, assuming nothing really untoward is linked to her, she might be able to help McCain win the election. But the fact that the Reds are willing to take a potentially fatal risk by selecting her shows just how scared of the Blues they really are.
