John McCain is targeting disaffected Clinton supporters. That was obvious before today’s announcement that he was choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running-mate.
The reviews of the pick have been mixed. Conservatives — who agree with her views on abortion — like her, as do the inside-the-Beltway media types, who view everything through a narrow political lens and, more to the point, are giving McCain points for surprising them.
Matt Yglesias notes this phenomenon here, focusing primarily on conservative response, but even Dahlia Lithwick at Slate buys into the political narrative:
Absolutely agree that this was an inspired, brave and buzz-y choice for veep. Everything the Joe Biden pick was not. I think Team McCain has gamed this age we live in better than the Obama camp, for which they deserve serious credit. Now this is gonna be an election. And here I was getting ready to retire my girl-cleats for the rest of the fall. I couldn’t be more excited.
Buzzy and edgy? Is that the best we can say about her?
I think Steve Brenen at Washington Monthly has a more logical response, calling it the “strangest running-mate decision since Dan Quayle.”
Sarah Palin spent a year working as a commissioner for the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and has been governor for a year and a half. Now, she’ll be the Republicans’ vice presidential candidate, and if things go well for McCain, one heartbeat from the presidency. When it comes to being untested and unknown, Palin is in a league of her own.
Just yesterday, advisers to the McCain campaign conceded to the New York Times that McCain “thinks highly” of Palin, but “her less than two years in office would undercut one of the McCain campaign’s central criticisms of Senator Barack Obama — that he is too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief.” So much for the McCain campaign’s message.
Stepping back, we have the man who would be the oldest president in American history, who happens to have a record of health problems, picking a virtual unknown who’s been a governor for less than two years. Amazing.
There are dangers in making this argument, as Nomi Prins on Alternet — a lefty blog/online magazine — points out. She calls the pick a shrewd one that raises the stakes, because it keeps female Clinton supporters angry over the primary results in play and because the Democrats will have to dance a bit in their criticism of her.
They can’t attack Palin’s experience level since she has more technical executive experience as the number two woman (yes woman) on the GOP ticket, than Obama does. And if they complain too loudly about her being selected just because she’s a woman, they will alienate millions of female voters in swing states who are still annoyed about Hillary’s smacking her head on the glass ceiling after cracking it 18 million times.
Palin, after paying homage to Hillary’s feat, deftly said now they can crack that ceiling once and for all. The ticket puts a whole new gender spin on the election. To millions of Americans, particularly women, who don’t spend every minute of their days watching and analyzing political news — because they are working for a hard-to-achieve living — the GOP just stole their own piece of history, rendering Obama’s safe pick of Biden, not so safe after all.
Obama took a risk in not choosing a woman who captured 18 million votes as his VP, and not explaining why. McCain seized upon that omission by choosing the relatively unknown Palin as a result. Obama must now walk a fine line. He can criticize what Palin has done or believes. But he must recognize her for the historic choice (to take a page out of the GOP’s playbook) that she is (and that he avoided). That could be the only way to capture the millions of female voters across the country, many of which voted for Hillary and haven’t yet decided on Obama.
I think she sums up McCain’s thinking here, though I have to wonder if he undercut his chief argument against Obama, removing the experience issue from the table.
Another thing to keep in mind: Unlike the other three candidates, she has not been vetted publicly, so we have no idea how she will respond under the harsh glare of a presidential campaign. She could turn out to be a strong runningmate or she could turn out to be Dan Quayle (Quayle likely would have torpedoed the candidacy of the first George Bush, had the Democrats not run Michael Dukakis at the top of their ticket).
In the end, I think Hillary Clinton summed it up best earlier this week, reminding her supporters of what her candidacy was about and asking them whether they shared her goals:
I ran for president to renew the promise of America. To rebuild the middle class and sustain the American dream, to provide the opportunity to work hard and have that work rewarded, to save for college, a home and retirement, to afford the gas and groceries and still have a little left over each month.
To promote a clean energy economy that will create millions of green-collar jobs.
To create a health care system that is universal, high quality, and affordable so that parents no longer have to choose between care for themselves or their children or be stuck in dead-end jobs simply to keep their insurance.
To create a world-class education system and make college affordable again.
To fight for an America defined by deep and meaningful equality — from civil rights to labor rights, from women’s rights to gay rights, from ending discrimination to promoting unionization to providing help for the most important job there is: caring for our families. To help every child live up to his or her God-given potential.
To make America once again a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws.
To bring fiscal sanity back to Washington and make our government an instrument of the public good, not of private plunder.
To restore America’s standing in the world, to end the war in Iraq, bring our troops home and honor their service by caring for our veterans.And to join with our allies to confront our shared challenges, from poverty and genocide to terrorism and global warming.
Most of all, I ran to stand up for all those who have been invisible to their government for eight long years.
Those are the reasons I ran for president. Those are the reasons I support Barack Obama. And those are the reasons you should, too.
I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?
I would add this question: What is more important? Putting a woman in the vice-president’s office, or achieving equal pay, protecting a woman’s right to choose and ending the war? Are disaffected Clinton supporters — especially the women — prepared to vote for a ticket featuring two pro-life candidates — especially with at least one of the liberal, pro-choice Supreme Court justices likely to retire in the near future?
Palin may offer an opportunity to break through the glass ceiling, but a McCain/Palin administration is not likely to be any friendlier to women than the Bush/Cheney team has been.
That’s ultimately what should matter to Clinton supporters.
Hank Kalet 