I don’t get it.
Newspapers I generally respect have spent two days having orgasms over President-elect McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. "With Pick, McCain Reclaims His Maverick Image," was the rhapsodic headline in the Washington Post. "Can You Cross Out ‘Hillary and Write ‘Sarah?,’ the New York Times asked in its Week in Review section. This is a "game changer." This shows what an independent maverick McCain is, "bucking" the Beltway establishment.
Instead, McCain’s decision shows he is both cynical and cowed into submission. Cynical, in that he thinks women will vote for him simply because he chose a vice presidential candidate with the same body parts as them. Nevermind where she stands on issues concerning women. She is, for example, opposed to measures demanding equal pay for equal work or child care. She would criminalize abortion even in cases of rape and incest. "Women," also, apparently won’t care about her lack of experience (the media seem eager to equate her thin resume with Barack Obama’s rather heftier accomplishments).
Cowed because Palin is the darling of the extreme right wing of his party: anti-abortion crusader, climate-change denier, fundamentalist evangelical, Bible literalist, pro-creation teaching, etc. A maverick? Hardly. McCain totally caved. Apparently the Democrats successful Denver convention scared the crap out of him, so he had to get the vaunted evangelical, social conservative base behind him. These were once denounced as ‘agents of intolerance’ by the great maverick.
Amid all the media glee over the cute Palin with her five children (one named Track), and the Democrats apparent wariness over dealing with her, consider this: Were she a Democrat, the social conservatives would be quick to condemn her for leaving her motherly duties for a harsh campaign schedule, particularly with a new baby born with Down syndrome. And can you imagine the GOP response if Obama had a 17-year-old unmarried daughter who got pregnant?
There is an interesting parallelism between McCain and Palin. Both are from the exurban West. Both are from states that depend heavily on federal dollars and a single industry (oil in Alaska, housing in Arizona). They don’t do urban issues or complexity in general. They profit from federal dollars while condemning the federal government. So both fit squarely in the mold of today’s "conservatism," which we have seen in action in all the disasters of the past eight years.
Only Frank Rich at the Times seems willing to be a real maverick against the corporate media’s determination to elect McCain. They think women are stupid. They think we’re all stupid. Enough of us may prove them correct.
What I don’t get is that the Republican speeches are starting to sound like a rehashed version of those given by Obama.
Now McCain and friends are talking about bringing change to Washington, and standing up to the entrenched bureaucrats, and all that sort of thing. Palin is like an anti-Obama.
It’s like something out of 1984. The Republican storyline changes every week or two, or even every couple days, or more often.
It’s all about the visuals folks. McCain has just mobilized the always turn-out-in-droves Evangelical voters. Even Palin’s hairstyle for the v.p. pick announcement was calculated. Nothing says “vote for me” Evangelical brothers and sisters like a beehive hairdo.
I’m sorry to say that thinking for yourself, among the extreme right, is not on the average resume. It won’t matter that she isn’t qualified. Never mind that she’ll be a heart beat away from leading the free world. All the sisters will see is someone like themselves and they’ll check the Palin-McCain box on the ballot.
McCain/Rove don’t want to appeal to the average thinking adult. They just want to get close enough to steal the election again.
My thanks to Mr. Talton for posting this. Believe it or not, despite having read several full-length newspaper articles on the McCain/Palin pairing, most of this information (detailing her political positions) was absent.
I suspect that in addition to hoping to attract the residual feminist vote — since if McCain were to drop dead half way through his term, voters for the McCain ticket would get their woman president after all — that McCain wants to inject another factor notably absent from his campaign: youth.
His running mate is an attractive young woman in vigorous health. His campaign has taken a lot of heat on issues related to age and vigor. Now the question of whether McCain is past his prime may be pushed further to the background as the media and voters concentrate on his new running mate.
If I’m not mistaken, McCain’s announcement comes soon after press reports that:
“Deep strains remain. With McCain drawing closer to Obama — even within the margin of error in some polls — an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed that Obama was drawing the support of only half of Clinton voters.
“In the poll, which was released last week, 21 percent of Clinton supporters said they planned to vote for McCain and 27 percent said they were undecided or wanted to vote for someone else. That meant only 52 percent of Clinton’s backers said they would vote for Obama.”
https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26404528/
Interesting that as recently as this, 21 percent of Clinton supporters said they planned to vote for McCain. I wonder if this could be related to the “subterranean” racism spoken of by former president Jimmy Carter and others in a recent article titled “Obama: Six Things He Must Do Before November 4” :
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“It’s amazing [that the presidential race] is still competitive,” said James Thurber, a political scientist at American University. “It’s not only a bad economy but an unpopular party and an unpopular war. But you go to the battleground states, and there are a whole lot of people who are uncomfortable voting for an African American.”
Race has diminished as a political drag in elections, Carter said, but it remains a “subterranean issue.” Carter said Obama’s political calculus will have to account for “white people who have a prejudice against black people but won’t admit it.”
Overcoming that in November could require the highest voter turnout in U.S. history.
https://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-08-28-six-things-obama_N.htm?csp=34
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In his fantasy narrative, John McCain boldly stands up to terrorists and to Putin and to the Chinese and to Ahmadinejad and to Chavez. But in the reality-based world, McCain can’t even stand up to the wingnuts in this own party. The choice of Sarah Palin is vintage McCain. He can’t prevail on the GOP lever-pullers to allow him to select Lieberman or Ridge, so he has one of his tantrums and in a pique he selects Sarah Palin, a true oddball who’s both unknown and laughably unqualified. The true “maverick” move would have been to do what he wanted to do. The right, of course, loves Palin. Meanwhile, the entire population of Alaska is roughly the same as that of Memphis, Tenn. She’s hardly been in the crucible. The media scrutiny and level of accountability in Juneau is downright sleepy compared to most state capitals, or even small cities. This is one badly made decision. Many more to come, my friends.