I thought that I might have written my last post, but I could not resist registering a comment on the sniping by some unnamed McCain campaign officials regarding Sarah Palin.
Personally, I always thought that Governor Palin was a terrible choice to be John McCain’s vice-president. I make no judgment on whether or not Palin is a good governor of Alaska, but it quickly became apparent that she was hopelessly out of her depth as a candidate for national office. From what I know about her political philosophy, she is (in my opinion) on the wrong side of most policy issues, but that is not my concern. I am not a Republican, and that party hardly needs my advice on which candidates it should select for high public office. My concern regarding Ms. Palin is that she displays an incredible ignorance, and complete lack of curiosity, about the world outside her home state.
I give her the benefit of the doubt by assuming that her alleged ignorance about whether Africa is a continent or country is false. I also assume that the $150,000 wardrobe embarrassment is entirely the fault of others. It still leaves plenty of examples, demonstrated directly by Ms. Palin as opposed to being attributed to her, showing that she is unfit for the job she was seeking. In response to fairly easy questions, she could not name one news magazine or newspaper that she reads, except for pathetically claiming that she reads “all of them.” She could not name one Supreme Court case, other than Roe vs. Wade, where she could comment on the Court’s ruling. She also used the word “maverick” so many times, to describe both Senator McCain and herself, that I got the impression that she believed there was some magic in that word. If was as if her debate strategy was: “Remember to use the word ‘maverick’ any time you can’t think of anything else to say.”
So, John McCain’s personal selection for vice-president turned out to be somebody who could excite the social conservatives in the Republican Party base, but who also turned off many moderate Republicans and conservative intellectuals. Whose fault is that? John McCain, of course. There were plenty of well-qualified Republicans available to McCain, but he rejected all of them, either due to personal dislike (Mitt Romney, for example), or a sense that his personal preference would not be acceptable to the social conservatives (such as Tom Ridge). If he wanted a woman for his running mate, calculating that this would attract many former Hillary Clinton supporters, he could have chosen either of the U.S. Senators from Maine, but again, either Senator Collins or Senator Snowe might be judged to be too moderate for the Republican base. I think that another factor in McCain’s thinking is that he likes to spring surprises, and he certainly did that with his choice of Sarah Palin for V-P. He hardly knew Palin, having met her twice briefly before offering her the V-P candidacy.
As it turned out, the selection of Palin did not work out very well. Palin’s defenders (such as MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough) argue that Palin at least gave McCain a temporary boost in the polls, that no other V-P candidate would have even done that, and that there was no way that any Republican ticket was going to win this year. The first point is true, and the other two are speculative. If the Republicans are going to learn from this election defeat, however, they should face certain realities.
Their presidential candidate selected a running mate who he hardly knew. Contrary to his slogan about putting “country first,” he made the cynical calculation that his running mate would help him get elected (by motivating social conservatives and attracting unhappy Clinton supporters). McCain did not consider that Palin would help him govern after they took office, and he obviously could not have regarded her as an ideal choice to become president in the event that McCain could not complete his term.
Immediately following the election, some unnamed McCain campaign officials trashed Palin to the media, and they really went over the top in doing so. I do not like Sarah Palin, and I believe she is shockingly ignorant regarding matters a candidate for national office should know about, but I cannot believe that Palin’s ignorance goes to the level of not knowing that Africa is a continent. As for the allegation that she does not know which three countries participate in the North American Free Trade Agreement, I think that is possible, but I cannot accept the claim of an anonymous source.
I cannot help wondering if McCain himself quietly approved the leaking of this information to the press. I presume that McCain’s selection of Palin was done in consultation with one or more of these campaign aides who are now feeding trash talk about her to journalists. If the Palin selection was a disaster, McCain and any campaign aide who had a role in choosing her should bear the responsibility.
This episode reminds me of a few years ago, when the company where I work was trying to deal with a small businessman who was both crooked and incompetent. As he was getting caught up in his own lies, he gave us the “I am surrounded by idiots” argument. The reason why things were going wrong, and promises repeatedly broken, was that his employees were hopelessly inept. He is blaming the people he hired, and continues to employ, in spite of their supposed incompetence. I guess that is a lot easier than accepting any responsibility for the actions of his subordinates. Fans of John Cleese might also think of the Basil Fawlty character. Restaurant patron (after receiving the wrong order): “I told your waiter…” Fawlty: “Yes, well, he is hopeless, isn’t he? You might just as well have told the cat!”
In retrospect, Sarah Palin probably should have declined McCain’s offer, and if she was interested in national office, she could have spent the next two or three years quietly becoming better informed about national and international issues, preparing to run in 2012 or 2016. However, when the offer is made, it must be hard to turn it down. As things stand now, Palin is a laughingstock, and it will be a tall order for her to gain credibility for a future presidential run. As for McCain, if he wants to know who is really to blame for the problems with the McCain-Palin ticket, he should look in the mirror.
