Palin Comparison

I bet that even McCain was surprised, it was so gosh darn surprising

John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin today is perhaps the most nakedly political decision in a campaign that has been disappointingly rife with them. With Palin, McCain managed to fulfill three objectives:

1. She's a woman, allowing him to both woo disaffected Hillary supports as well as slather his own moribund candidacy with the gloss of commodified change.
2. She has a reputation as a maverick, taking on Alaska's Republican kleptocracy by knocking off Frank Murkowski, the unpopular incumbent governor two years ago
3. She's a certified cultural conservative, especially strong on the issue of abortion: when she discovered during her last pregnancy that her child would be born with Down's syndrome, she carried the pregnancy to term.

Perhaps, on her face, Palin would be a welcome change in Washington, provided that she were not tethered to the increasingly doctrinaire McCain. Yet for a campaign that, when not busy casting aspersions about Barack Obama's character and patriotism, spends most of its time questioning his preparedness, the decision to place someone with virtually no experience a 72 year-old's heartbeat away from the presidency is utterly unconscionable. Beyond that, it is utterly incomprehensible: how can McCain, who has made much of his superior judgment during the campaign, judge someone who, less than two years ago was mayor of a town of less than 10,000 people, and presently governs a state of less than 700,000, someone with absolutely no foreign policy experience whatsoever, fit to govern the United States of America? How could Governor Palin, who is essentially being chosen to await McCain's death or incapacitation (as it's virtually incomprehensible that someone with such a slim resume would have anything of substance to add to McCain's own voluminous "experience"), conceivably be better prepared to assume the office than Senator Obama?

What McCain has done here is precisely what he has done his entire candidacy: he has said one thing and done another. He has criticized Senator Obama for his perceived inexperience, and then, out of sheer political calculation, has nominated as his running mate a politician with far less of it. (It's worth noting that Obama, recognizing his weakness in foreign policy, went out and made the unsexy pick in choosing Joe Biden, the seasoned Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, as his running mate; which choice seems the product of better judgment to you?) Palin may well make a fine vice-president - though in a country already choking to death on Bush Republican dogma, I sincerely doubt it. Yet, in choosing her, McCain is continuing to demonstrate that he has learned well the lessons of political expediency and duplicity. It seems to me that all of that "third Bush term" rhetoric may prove less far-fetched in the long run than utterly prophetic.