Assessing the Palin Pick

Posted by Bryant Daniels on 08.29.2008

Good move?

The surprise pick of Sarah Palin has made an already long and bizarre campaign season even nuttier. a relative unknown, Palin does what McCain was having a great deal of difficulty doing: energizing and uniting the social conservative base of the Republican party. Palin is a pro-life, fiscally conservative, life-long member of the NRA; all basic traits that appeal to the far right wing of a party that has historically had discomfort with McCain and his independent streak. The not so subtle choice of a woman is also a blatant overture to the disenfranchised Hillary voters who have, if not leaned, flirted with the idea of voting for McCain. Of course for that to work we would have to assume that those women voters are more concerned with having a woman working as either president or vice president than they are about any level of policy, which is a stretch. Aside from Hillary supporters, Palin's presence definitely has the potential to ignite more independent or conservative women in a way that a Romney or Pawlenty couldn't. In terms of actual campaigning Palin will most likely be used to push McCain's energy policies and advance a "drill here, drill now" agenda by offering ANWAR as a perfect solution to the oil shortage. She is a reformer and has ran on a platform of ending state wide corruption, a quality appealing to any American (although as it currently stands, she herself is being investigated regarding a situation with a state trooper and her sister.)

The negative of the pick seem almost as obvious as the positives. Palin immediately takes McCain's greatest weapon against Barack Obama off the table, his lack of experience. Palin has been a governor of a state only since 2006 and prior to that was a mayor of a city with 10,000 people and a city council member. If you then argue that we're picking a president not a vice president, well then why bother with any of this Vice President stuff anyway? Her foreign policy credentials are nil, and will make her debates with Joe Biden must-see television. Palin is untested nationally and unproven, and although her approval rating is high in Alaska, we must realize she's only been on the job for a short period of time. I think it will be difficult to argue that the politics in Alaska are anywhere close to what the national political scene is like.