The thinking behind John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin makes sense—on the surface.
No woman has ever been nominated for national office by the G.O.P., so the news will cause a stir, which will help McCain both in the short term—as he tries to deny Barack Obama a meaningful convention bounce—and in the long run, since the 72-year-old McCain has struggled to build excitement and capture headlines.
Plus, Palin is solidly conservative on social issues, so her selection—unlike that of other outside-the-box prospects, like Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge—will sit well with the party base, and perhaps even make the base more motivated. Also, the 44-year-old Palin offers reform credentials that mesh well with McCain’s. She owes her governorship to her willingness to stand up to her state’s stodgy and corrupt Republican establishment.
And then there’s the mischievous aspect: McCain’s campaign believes that there are millions of irate female voters who favored Hillary Clinton earlier this year and who may be in play this fall; adding a woman to his ticket, in theory, makes McCain a viable option for these women.
Palin also figures to make it difficult for Joe Biden to play an aggressive and forceful role in this fall’s vice presidential debate. Biden is a strong debater who can and would tear into the fear-mongering of a Lieberman of Mitt Romney—but against a young woman like Palin, he’ll either have to neuter himself or risk coming off as a bully.
All of this adds up to a seemingly compelling case for putting Palin on the ticket. But there are some serious problems with this selection, too.
The first and most obvious is an ongoing scandal that has made waves in Alaska this summer—and that most observers (apparently mistakenly) assumed had knocked Palin out of VP contention. Even as she assumes her spot on the national stage, an investigation by the Republican-controlled state legislature (at a cost of $100,000 to the taxpayers) is ongoing into whether Governor Palin fired the state’s public safety commissioner because he refused to fire a state trooper who had gone through an ugly divorce with Palin’s sister.
It’s an ugly little story that threatens to tarnish the very clean government image that Palin is supposed to bring to the ticket. More than that, the petty nature of the accusation—the sort of thing that a small-town sheriff might do and that might make page one in a small-town newspaper—could reinforce voters’ knee-jerk assumption that she’s a small-time figure, perhaps in way over her head on the national stage.
Obviously, the McCain campaign is aware of this story and satisfied that it won’t be an issue. But we’ve seen this kind of miscalculating before in a previous VP selection. Back in 1984, Walter Mondale—much like McCain now—decided to put a woman on his ticket to create badly needed excitement and settled on Geraldine Ferraro. His zeal to cause a stir led to a less-than-thorough vetting of Ferraro, and within weeks the Mondale-Ferraro ticket was besieged by questions about the personal finances of Ferraro and her husband. That scandal threw the Mondale campaign off-message for a month and ruined whatever slim chance the Democrats had of unseating Ronald Reagan.
McCain has a much better chance of winning this fall than Mondale did 24 years ago – but any distraction caused by Palin’s trooper scandal could change that.
Palin also stands to make Obama, long derided by McCain and the G.O.P. as dangerously naïve and inexperienced, look like a seasoned statesman. She’s been governor of a tiny (in terms of population) state for a year and a half, and before that served as the mayor of a town with just 8,000 people. Obama served eight years in the state senate of a large and diverse state and has been in the U.S. Senate for three and a half years. Suddenly, this seems significant.
McCain has been selling experience and readiness to lead—and he’s been surprisingly effective at raising doubts about Obama in these areas. But won’t that message now lose some of its bite? Doesn’t the combined experience of an Obama-Biden ticket outweigh that of McCain-Palin?
Palin is also a wild card when it comes to communicating on the national stage. Unlike other VP prospects, she did not spend these past few months auditioning as a talk-show surrogate. She’s certainly attractive and may be a quick, capable and dynamic speaker. But maybe not. How will she handle the relentless scrutiny of the national press—especially when the questions about the trooper scandal start coming? What about questions about foreign policy, national security and all of the other topics she’s never had to deal with in Alaskan politics? McCain can get confused about Sunnis and Shiites and get a pass, because people assume he knows the difference and just misspoke. Not so for Palin. One slip-up will cause a serious headache for McCain—and destroy his claim that he represents experience and Obama doesn’t.
Today, Palin’s pick is a home run for McCain. It was so unexpected and is so unconventional that it will dominate the news. The Obama-Biden bus tour won’t be on many peoples’ minds tomorrow. But the excitement will eventually fade, and then the scrutiny will begin. Palin will benefit from low expectations—a stellar convention speech and/or debate performance will be greeted as a surprise—but there is a very real risk she won’t be able to meet those standards.
