Frank Rich Nails It
From the NYTimes:
The latest good luck for the Democrats is that the McCain campaign was just as bamboozled as the press by the false Hillary narrative. McCain was obviously itching to choose his pal Joe Lieberman as his running mate. A onetime Democrat who breaks with the G.O.P. by supporting abortion rights might have rebooted his lost maverick cred more forcefully than Palin, who is cracking this particular glass ceiling nearly a quarter-century after the Democrats got there first. Lieberman might have even been of some use in roiling the Obama-Hillary-Bill juggernaut that will now storm through South Florida.
The main reason McCain knuckled under to the religious right by picking Palin is that he actually believes there’s a large army of embittered Hillary loyalists who will vote for a hard-line conservative simply because she’s a woman. That’s what happens when you listen to the TV news echo chamber. Not only is the whole premise ludicrous, but it is every bit as sexist as the crude joke McCain notoriously told about Janet Reno, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
Given the press’s track record so far, there’s no reason to believe that the bogus scenarios will stop now. The question of why this keeps happening is not easily answered. Ideological bias, unshakeable Clinton addiction and lingering McCain affection may not account for all or even most of it. Journalists are still Americans - even if much of our audience doubts that - and in this time of grave uncertainty about our nation’s future we may simply be as discombobulated as everyone else.
However, I think there is more to this than the blandly cynical trifecta of pandering to the religious right, grabbing the media's attention, and scrambling for that mythical subgroup of "disaffected Hillary supporters" (who, as far as I can tell, are mostly Republicans playing pretend to aggravate Democrats on television and the internet). This further aspect, more than any other, perfectly captures just how non-mavericky this move is. Rather than pick someone who could credibly challenge him or who represented a wholly separate faction of the GOP, McCain literally picked up a protege out from the middle of nowhere to isolate and shape into his own ideological image. While Palin should be admired for her relative lack of connections to the horribly corrupt Alaska Republican party, it also means that she is coming to the national stage with few allies and few people she can fall back on if she were to step out of line. Under McCain's wing (or to use the McCain campaign's phrasing, "at his feet"), she will be insulated from the Roves, Bushes, McConnells, and behind-the-scenes party leaders. Even Governor Tim Pawlenty, who would seem a more reasonable fit for the role of McCain pupil, has some connections to the party machinery. But Palin is just the political equivalent of a mound of clay, an earnest social conservative who has yet to give much thought to the subject of foreign policy. Those indefinite spaces, of course, will be shaped and hardened by McCain's cadre of neoconservative gurus, radical ideologues who long for preemptive war against Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. This, far more than Palin's lack of experience, is absolutely terrifying. If McCain dies, it's not a matter of having Palin in the Oval Office, it's a matter of having Fred Kagan and John Bolton whispering in the ear of a terrified and unprepared president.
The latest good luck for the Democrats is that the McCain campaign was just as bamboozled as the press by the false Hillary narrative. McCain was obviously itching to choose his pal Joe Lieberman as his running mate. A onetime Democrat who breaks with the G.O.P. by supporting abortion rights might have rebooted his lost maverick cred more forcefully than Palin, who is cracking this particular glass ceiling nearly a quarter-century after the Democrats got there first. Lieberman might have even been of some use in roiling the Obama-Hillary-Bill juggernaut that will now storm through South Florida.
The main reason McCain knuckled under to the religious right by picking Palin is that he actually believes there’s a large army of embittered Hillary loyalists who will vote for a hard-line conservative simply because she’s a woman. That’s what happens when you listen to the TV news echo chamber. Not only is the whole premise ludicrous, but it is every bit as sexist as the crude joke McCain notoriously told about Janet Reno, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
Given the press’s track record so far, there’s no reason to believe that the bogus scenarios will stop now. The question of why this keeps happening is not easily answered. Ideological bias, unshakeable Clinton addiction and lingering McCain affection may not account for all or even most of it. Journalists are still Americans - even if much of our audience doubts that - and in this time of grave uncertainty about our nation’s future we may simply be as discombobulated as everyone else.
However, I think there is more to this than the blandly cynical trifecta of pandering to the religious right, grabbing the media's attention, and scrambling for that mythical subgroup of "disaffected Hillary supporters" (who, as far as I can tell, are mostly Republicans playing pretend to aggravate Democrats on television and the internet). This further aspect, more than any other, perfectly captures just how non-mavericky this move is. Rather than pick someone who could credibly challenge him or who represented a wholly separate faction of the GOP, McCain literally picked up a protege out from the middle of nowhere to isolate and shape into his own ideological image. While Palin should be admired for her relative lack of connections to the horribly corrupt Alaska Republican party, it also means that she is coming to the national stage with few allies and few people she can fall back on if she were to step out of line. Under McCain's wing (or to use the McCain campaign's phrasing, "at his feet"), she will be insulated from the Roves, Bushes, McConnells, and behind-the-scenes party leaders. Even Governor Tim Pawlenty, who would seem a more reasonable fit for the role of McCain pupil, has some connections to the party machinery. But Palin is just the political equivalent of a mound of clay, an earnest social conservative who has yet to give much thought to the subject of foreign policy. Those indefinite spaces, of course, will be shaped and hardened by McCain's cadre of neoconservative gurus, radical ideologues who long for preemptive war against Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. This, far more than Palin's lack of experience, is absolutely terrifying. If McCain dies, it's not a matter of having Palin in the Oval Office, it's a matter of having Fred Kagan and John Bolton whispering in the ear of a terrified and unprepared president.