McCain’s V.P. pick has electrified the base—for good reason.
In this article from Lisa Schiffren of City Journal we take a look at the Republican VP choice Sarah Palin. There is little doubt that Palin was the dark horse candidate in this contest and was a surprise to many observers. Schiffren looks at how this pick is a bold one by McCain and how it will shake up the political landscape in Washington.
It should be noted that with Palin on the ticket the Republican side now has a claim to experience in a number of areas that the Obama camp cannot match. The McCain side can now boast military, executive, business and legislative experience. The Democrats, on the other hand, can claim only two lawyers with no business or military background. And only long-time Washington insider Biden has any extensive legislative history to speak of. Unfortunately for the Democrats his history of bad policy pronouncements doesn't really work in his favor when measured against real world events. Too many of his predictions have turned out to be mistaken. And at the top of the ticket Obama has no other experience outside of politics and academia to give him balance and very little time in any political position that he has held in any case. Given his political machine background and the Biden VP pick, his argument for hopey changey is looking more and more thin.
Indeed, Obama comes from an insulated political machine in Chicago that, by its nature, would keep him outside the mainstream of political reality in the rest of the country. Time after time Obama has demonstrated by his comments that he has an almost casual contempt for the "bitter clingers" who live in flyover country. He comes from a specifically urban and liberal environment saturated with payoffs, corruption and back-room deals. Of course Chicago has many other redeeming features, but its tightly controlled and corrupt political patronage system is not one of them. Nor does it seem likely that it would prepare a candidate to understand the mostly conservative nature of the rest of the country. Obama's time with the Chicago Annengerg Challenge is proving to be a problem as well given that the project spent millions of public and private dollars with no visible effect on the Chicago education system that it was supposedly intended to help.
As the last few weeks have gone by it has become more and more clear that the Obama team is in trouble and that they are coming to the realization, slow though it has been, that they could actually lose the election in November. The desperation that they are now beginning to show demonstrates that they did not have a plan for their current situation. They thought that they would breeze into the White House on the belief that the country hated Bush and would, therefore, vote for the Democrats without any other persuasion being required. Imagine their surprise when they found out that their suppositions were incorrect.
By putting the relatively unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, on his presidential ticket, John McCain has demonstrated that rarest of all political qualities: willingness to take a real risk on a serious new venture with great potential. It’s a sign of confidence, not desperation.
If the response from the conservative base is any indication, McCain has hit a home run with the Palin selection. A sullen GOP, set to vote reluctantly, if at all, for the “maverick” (some say unprincipled) senator from Arizona, has suddenly become electrified. In the first 36 hours after McCain announced his pick, $7 million in new contributions poured in online. This isn’t because Palin is making history as the first woman on a GOP ticket. It’s because of the type of woman and politician that she is. She’s a normal person, a mother and wife, who entered politics in 1992 by running for city council in Wasilla, Alaska to oppose tax hikes. She became mayor and swept a bunch of cronies out of the bureaucracy. She ran for, and lost, a race for lieutenant governor. She served on the state’s Oil and Gas Commission, where she went after the corrupt state GOP chairman, who had taken money from oil companies. In 2006, she ran for governor and won, after first beating the Republican incumbent for the nomination.
Throughout, she hewed to a few clear principles. She championed fiscal responsibility, cutting pork in the form of capital projects as well as larger symbols of waste, such as the infamous “bridge to nowhere” sponsored by Republican senator Ted Stevens. In a state that has been awash in oil money and political corruption, she also demanded real ethical standards and sent people who didn’t meet them to jail, never hesitating to challenge Republicans who were corrupt or ineffective. And she was pro-development, supporting drilling in ANWR; for that matter, she has dealt extensively with the tricky energy issues that have become central to this year’s election, and she understands them better than anyone else on either ticket.
In summary, Palin worked her way up the political ladder, rising on talent (she’s likable and a good speaker) and incremental achievement. She didn’t marry into power, and no one handed her anything. This is what conservatives say they want in female and minority candidates for high office. Further, she’s a reformer and a Washington outsider in a year when, as Republicans know, their own party is part of the problem. She represents real “change,” to adopt a word of the moment, and for Reaganites who have been waiting for the first post-Reagan conservative generation to rise to power, Palin represents “hope” as well.
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