wo things the Palin pick says about McCain, and four three things it doesn't
Posted by: Bryan Pick
Jim Vandehei and John Harris at Politico have another piece out in the same vein as "5 things Biden pick says about Obama", about McCain's selection of Sarah Palin.
The first two are saying the same thing:
1. He's desperate. [...] Politicians, even "mavericks" like McCain, play it safe when they think they are winning - or see an easy path to winning. They roll the dice only when they know that the risks of conventionality are greater than the risks of boldness.
[...]
2. He's willing to gamble - bigtime. Let's face it: This is not the pick of a self-confident candidate.
Okay, let's hear it: who would have been a better pick? Who would have really been a safer pick, given McCain's narrative and history? Who would have come without baggage, who would have reinforced McCain's message, who could have reached both to the base and the swing states at the same time?
3. He's worried about the political implications of his age. Like a driver overcorrecting out of a swerve, he chooses someone who is two years younger than the youthful Obama, and 28 years younger than he is. (He turned 72 Friday.) The father-daughter comparison was inevitable when they appeared next to each other.
If he was worried about the political implications of his age, why would he select an obvious contrast to stand by his side? This is like saying Obama is worried about the political implications of his skin color, since he selected Biden for VP.
4. He's not worried about the actuarial implications of the age issue. He thinks he's in fine fettle, and Palin wouldn't be performing the only constitutional duty of a vice president, which is standing by in case a president dies or becomes incapacitated.
Err, the vice president also serves as the President of the Senate these days. But this is otherwise a fair point.
At least, until Vandehei and Harris expand on their point to say:
McCain has made a mockery out of his campaign's longtime contention that Barack Obama is too dangerously inexperienced to be commander in chief.
McCain played a deeper game, is all - not much deeper, but one step ahead of Politico. With this pick, he invited the Democrats to make that argument because the only way to use that against McCain's VP pick is to open their own Presidential candidate up to the same criticism - which only reinforces McCain's existing narrative against Obama. If Palin, after ten years of elected office, two years of governing a state Obama wants to challenge, and shaking up the establishment, is dangerously inexperienced, Obama is definitely not ready to lead on Day One. After all, it's an open question whether Palin will be called to serve as President any time in the next four to eight years if McCain is elected. It's a certainty that Obama will have to be ready on January 20 if he is elected. And every American who isn't already invested in Obama can do that math.
5. He's worried about his conservative base. If he had room to maneuver, there were lots of people McCain could have selected who would have represented a break from Washington politics as usual. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman comes to mind (and it certainly came to McCain's throughout the process). He had no such room. GOP stalwarts were furious over trial balloons about the possibility of choosing a supporter of abortion rights, including the possibility that he would reach out to his friend.
Leaving aside for a minute that it's incongruous to argue that Palin has no national experience and then say that she doesn't represent a break from Washington as usual, this is in part a fair point. As I pointed out in my post yesterday, her background and bearing are definitely playing well with the base (which has increasingly needed shoring-up in the Mountain West and in some parts of the South), but they also bring something to the Rust Belt battleground.
6. At the end of the day, McCain is still McCain. People may find him a refreshing maverick, or an erratic egotist. In either event, he marches to his own beat.
That he does. But I repeat: this was audacity, not recklessness. It completely captured the news cycle and gave his campaign some much-needed initiative, to put Barack Obama on the defensive just as he was coming out of his rock-show convention with his fists up.
Five of the points (I'm being generous by not calling it six) the Politico tried to make were about McCain being "worried" in some fashion or another. But anyone looking at the scrambling response from the Democrats yesterday can see who was worried, who was on the defensive, who was struggling to put together a narrative.
