Did attraction had anything to do with it?

This is a very interesting Op-Ed piece where Kathleen Parker speculates that McCain may have selected Palin because he was subliminally attracted to her. I wonder ...

CNN grilling a McCain surrogate

This is an amusing interview. It is absolutely clear that he has no idea why Palin is qualified. He doesn't have anything beyond the talking points.



Keep watching over the next few weeks. As a blogger I read recently explained, the tactic will be as follows:

1. What, it couldn't be true! She's too good. It's not worth dignifying.
   
2. It's not true.
   
3. Why are you trying to prove it's true? It's media bias.
   
4. You can't prove it's true.
   
5. It's shameful that you have uncovered this evidence.
6. It's not really relevant.

Changing the paradigm ...

This is one of the most insightful pieces of analysis on McCain's ploy and why it might work. Essentially, it argues that McCain is trying to change the conversation from who is the most qualified and has the better answers to who has the right values. Ultimately, the article argues it is through cultural narratives, metaphors, and frames that we understand and express our ideals. Sarah Palin upends Obama and Biden's appeal to family values and blue collar ideals, by putting a truly woman of the people. It also puts a person with truly Western conservative ideals, putting Obama's Western strategy at risk.

There is early evidence at Rassmussen report that Palin is generating the type of enthusiasm and lift for McCain that he must have hoped for. The question is, will this survive an intense scrutiny of Palin.

It'll be interesting to see how Obama and Co. respond.

More updates on Sarah Palin ...

Hmmm ... now it turns out that Sarah Palin's 17 year old daughter, a senior in high school, is pregnant. Sarah Palin says Bristol, her daughter, is planning to marry the father of the child. The salacious aspects of this story aside, it's fascinating that Sarah Palin has decided to run for VP at a time when she has a newborn baby with Down's syndrome and a pregnant teenage daughter. Obama threatened that he will fire anyone on his staff exploiting this story. He says its a purely personal matter.

There is another interesting rumor that earlier this year Sarah Palin had traveled to Texas to speak at an energy conference when she was seven months pregnant when her water broke. Rather than cancel her speech and go to a hospital, she decided to give her speech and take a flight back to her home town in Wasilla (a 14 hour delay). Interesting level of concern about her son. Here's a very funny decision map of what she did.

On Sarah Palin's qualifications, she's supposed to be a big tax cutter, and has fought pork. As an example her introductory claim was that she had said, "Thanks, but no thanks!" to the bridge to nowhere. Really? As an Alaskan newspaper reports, that the facts are somewhat different. Ms. Palin basically supported the bridge wholeheartedly all through her election campaign and even thereafter, and only backed down after the money had already been cut by Congress. It's a bit like saying, "You can't fire me! I quit!" Very different from her claim!

This is even more interesting. According to Citizens Against Government Waste, the aggregate earmarks for Alaska in 2008 (i.e. under Sarah Palin's watch) was ~$379MM, about $100MM more than any other state in the US. Also, as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, she hired the firm of Hoffman Silver Gilman & Blasco to help secure spending projects for her town and from 2000 through 2002, Wasilla received more than $5.5 million in federal cash for transportation and social service projects.

On her clean image, the current troopergate is not the first controversy she has faced. She was almost recalled when she was mayor for firing her police chief and library director for not supporting her in the elections. Sort of akin to the Justice department scandal. Also, she was part of 527 group associated with the indicted Senator Ted Stevens, someone she was publicly supporting until recently.

Oh, and there might be some even more explosive material. It seems that Governor Palin was once a member of the Alaskan Independence Party (AIP), a party reportedly dedicated to the secession of Alaska. Here's a video of the head of the AIP boasting about it (around 6 minutes into the video). Here she is again saying relatively nice things to the AIP in an address after becoming Governor. Makes you wonder about her comments about putting Alaska first :) At least, that's what the GOP would have said had she been a DNC candidate. Luckily she is from the patriotic party, so the question will probably never arise.

The GOP candidates ...

Governor Sarah Palin is a surprising VP pick in more ways than one. However, her relative inexperience could lull people into underestimating her, which could be a mistake.

She has negotiated the extraordinarily corrupt Alaskan system for many years (first as mayor of a town with about 4000 to 8000 people, then, for the last two years as Governor of the state), which is commendable, and at the very least, suggests she's an extremely astute politician (perhaps the fact that she has relatively little to lose helped).

She has clearly brought good luck to the campaign, with Hurricane Gustav providing the excuse to get Bush and Cheney off the GOP convention agenda, which must be a huge a relief to McCain and distressing to Obama.

She is a pretty good speaker. An example of her effectiveness is this speech she gave after her gubernatorial election.

After taking office, she was responsible for signing the deal with TransCanada for a gas pipeline. The deal is interesting, because of some of its terms. For instance, it offers a $500MM subsidy to TransCanada. There is also some debate about whether building a pipeline to Alberta, CA was consistent with putting "Country First". This is likely to be spun by both sides. The GOP will sure tout her independence from Big Oil and her executive experience. The Democrats will point out she just shipped US jobs abroad and gave a handout to the oil companies (giving subsidies like this to oil companies is pretty normal, but seems extraordinary in a year when so many people are likely to be in foreclosure).

On the other hand, she apparently got her passport only a year ago. Has not really traveled around the country.

She has several right wing views that directly contradict McCain's. She believes creationism and is pro teaching of 'intelligent design' in school. She believes that all forms of stem cell research should be banned. She believes that global warming is not man made.

She takes an extreme view that abortion should not be offered to rape victims, and should only be offered if the mother's life is in danger. This is from an Anchorage Daily News article on the Alaska gubernatorial debate:

The candidates were pressed on their stances on abortion and were even asked what they would do if their own daughters were raped and became pregnant.

Palin said she would support abortion only if the mother's life was in danger. When it came to her daughter, she said, "I would choose life."

Sum total, if her daughter is raped, Sarah Palin intends to make her bear the rapist's child.

And this is from the Juneau Empire:

Palin, however, isn't interested in talking about her views.

"She would not seek out this issue. She feels like there are several other issues that are paramount to the future of the state," said Curtis Smith, spokesman for the Palin campaign.

Smith said Palin is opposed to abortion, but believes an exception should be made if the health of the mother is in danger.

That's the only exception Palin would make, though, Smith said.

"She doesn't make exception for rape and incest, only for health of the mother," he said.

There is slight nuance here. A health exception could include something that would consider the quality of health of the mother. A life exception is only if the mother's life is in danger. Palin herself advocated the latter. So, if a pregnancy would only, say threaten the mother's ability to bear more children, I assume her answer would be it should not be terminated.

By the way, she also opposes all forms of birth control, including hormonal treatment, condoning only traditional Bible approved approaches. She has advocated criminalizing abortion and banning birth control.

Many conservatives are echoing a view that Geraldine Ferraro expresses, that smart people can learn the issues on the job. However, consider the contrast between the reaction to the two candidates. In Obama's case, he was considered inexperienced despite literally pages of opinions expressed by him on virtually every major national issue dating back, in some cases, more than a decade. In Sarah Palin's case, there is almost nothing on most issues of note, apart from social issues and a few issues that affect Alaskan's. The most astonishingly creative explanation for her experience on foreign policy was Michael Barone who notes, "Alaska is the only state with a border with Russia. And it is the only state with territory, in the Aleutian Islands, occupied by the enemy in World War II."

As a campaign ploy, this is brilliant. It means that she can morph into whatever position McCain wants to occupy. As a former beauty queen pageant, she should have the poise to carry it off. However, it reminds me of the movie The Dead Zone. In the movie, Christopher Walken's character has a premonition about an up and coming star politician (Martin Sheen) who he realizes would plunge the world into a needless nuclear war. In this case, similarly, the US is faced with selecting a VP whose views on most subjects are completely unknown. In fact, in most of these cases, she has probably never thought about the issues at all, and will rely on her advisers. It will be a complete roll of the dice.

It was interesting to note Geraldine Ferraro's unwillingness to endorse Obama was telling of the resentment some Hillary supporters feel. In her case, she is still smarting for having been called a racist. However, the analysis she repeats in the interview, while factually correct, ignores a larger reality. Obama does get 90&+ of the Black vote (although, he got substantially less at the beginning of his campaign and it increased to nearly 100% by the end). However, not even ALL the black votes alone would have won him the election, when Hillary was receiving more votes than any other candidate in history. In fact, Obama led Hillary among every demographic under 45. Its only in the over 45 population that Hillary made it up, by winning both the majority of women and the majority of white working class men. The big divide in the election was age, not race.

It is this fact that McCain may be attempting to address by selecting an even younger and attractive running mate. It may, after all, be what helped Palin to win the position over her more qualified female conservative counterparts.

Meanwhile, McCain is busy reinventing himself. This site is liberal and so biased. However, a look at the sources suggests that even adjusting for the bias, McCain has clearly flip flopped on virtually everything imaginable. He has been very maverick is cavalierly moving from moderate positions to a completely right wing one. As Michael Kinsley so eloquently points out in connection with the experience issue, all this raises the question which John McCain should we believe? Either way, as Michael Kinsley puts it, one of them is, what's the word I'm looking for ... ahh, lying!