Republican VP pick Palin may harm McCain's ticket

By Dan Henkoff     9/11/08 7:00pm

Because of his age and health history, Senator John McCain, more than any other presidential candidate in recent memory, needed to pick a running mate who could step in to the presidential role (if needed) and still keep voters feeling comfortable. Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin fails miserably in this respect."As for that [vice president] talk all the time, I'll tell you, I still can't answer that question until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the [vice president] does every day?"

Palin seemed dismissive of the job just a month ago, when asked about her status as a dark-horse candidate to be McCain's choice for a running mate. However, in a shocking decision, McCain, who had only met her once previously, chose the inexperienced and unknown Palin to fill the #2 slot on the Republican ticket.

It had seemed as though the McCain running-mate selection process began with a desire to pick his friend and colleague Joseph Lieberman, an "independent Democrat" hated by the left for his embrace of faux-bipartisanship on Iraq and other issues.

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In the end, however, McCain presumably decided that the pro-choice Lieberman would alienate the conservatives who provide the money for Republican campaigns. From there, the focus might have shifted to former Massachusets governor Mitt Romney, but after the narrative of the election started to turn toward the economy and McCain's fumble over not knowing how many houses he owned, the very wealthy Romney would have invited the wrong focus, not to mention the thinly-veiled personal animosity between the two that was visible during the primary campaign and questions over how some voters might view Romney's Mormon faith. However, even after the elimination of those two, it is still hard to tell how one gets to Palin.

This is a woman who, just six years ago, was the mayor of a town of fewer than 10,000 people and who has been the governor of one of our smallest states for less than two years. Does McCain really think that a woman with so little experience in public service and government - let alone the foreign policy "expertise" he touts in comparing himself to Obama - should be helping to craft national policy and possibly end up running what still probably is the most powerful nation in the world? Especially after he and his surrogates have been pounding Obama - who served in the Illinois Senate for seven years before joining the U.S. Senate in 2004 - for his alleged lack of experience? In a campaign whose main slogan du jour is "Country First," I cannot figure out how he thinks putting Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency (as the saying goes) was best for the country.

Beyond all the questions about her lack of knowledge and her inexperience, there are also holes in the political logic behind the choice of Palin.

Maybe Palin was chosen because she is a woman, as her allusions to Senator Hillary Clinton in her first post-announcement speech seemed to point. However, Palin is virulently anti-choice when it comes to abortion, and her positions on the environment and "nuanced" view of creationism are unlikely to win any of the shrinking number of disaffected Hillaryites McCain might have been going for. Palin has also been touted as a "fresh face" and a "reformer" who has taken strong stands against the corruption that many see as one of the current political dynamic's biggest problems. However, she comes from an Alaskan Republican party that is embroiled in corruption scandals involving its two most high-profile members, Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young. Plus, Palin is under investigation for a corruption scandal of her own, "Troopergate," where she is accused of using her power as governor to carry out a vendetta against a state trooper involved in a messy divorce from her sister - even going so far as to fire the Public Safety Commissioner, allegedly for his unwillingness to fire the trooper.

McCain's success as a politician has hinged on his "maverick" appeal: his ability to make centrist choices often enough that voters do not notice his conservative tendencies. In this election, his best shot at beating Obama was to keep playing up that image, while still tacking right enough to make sure that the Republican base voters still went to the polls in November.

Some - like Peter Robinson of National Review - have defended the choice of Palin by saying that McCain needed to placate those conservatives. Others have argued that the running mate does not make that much of a difference with most voters, citing the 1988 election, where George H.W. Bush chose Dan Quayle as his #2 against Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen. There certainly are parallels evident in comparing 1988 to 2008; in both, an older, established Washington figure picked a young, inexperienced unknown to run against a fresh face with a broad coalition who had picked an experienced senator to shore up his chances.

However, Obama and his staff have shown that they are not as politically clueless, disorganized and uncertain as Dukakis and his people were, and Palin is vastly less qualified for the job and possibly more likely to make a mistake on the campaign trail than Quayle. Plus, after eight disastrous years under a Republican president, the political climate this year is much less favorable toward the Republican party and conservative ideology that it was in 1988, when Bush could link himself to the popular Ronald Reagan.

By picking Palin, who is of the Karl Rove school of right-wing Republicans, McCain did potentially critical harm to his chance at doing well in the middle of the ideological spectrum, where almost all American elections are won.

That is not to say that Palin will not bring anything to the ticket. There are some voters who will identify with her background, others who will support the ticket because she is a woman, others for whom she will be appealing because of her social conservatism, and others who will see her as an injection of new energy into the campaign.

However, it is said that the first rule of picking a running mate is to "do no harm." By picking Sarah Palin - a politician with little experience and many potential negatives - John McCain failed at that, and it could do serious damage to any chance he had at winning in the fall.

Dan Henkoff is a Hanszen College junior.

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