When I woke up this morning and checked the internets just a little after 8 am PST and found that John McCain had chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate, this was the first image that came to mind:
Easy to underestimate, hard to ignore.
A canny rural "sweetheart" from a tiny snow outpost meant to set the presidential bar as low as it can go, so the quirky, charming protagonist can meanwhile beat the odds in the end.
Sarah Palin is Marge Gunderson, and you can bet the GOP thinks so too.
Of course, we all know it's a cynical, short-sighted pick meant to suck the oxygen out of the room, change the conversation, and keep the chattering classes gawking and squawking for a bit. There's no case for Palin as POTUS on the merits, but it may compel on ideology and biography for a party that is primarily concerned with superficial optics and tactical distractions.
But strategically, I think the GOP is trying to:
(1) shore up evangelical support;
(2) peel off some low-information female voters with Palin's bio as a hard-working mother, essentially a sympathy vote;
(3) diminish the "historic" nature of Obama's candidacy; and
(4) appeal to some independents by emphasizing the narrative of McCain's "maverick," "out-of-the-box" thinking.
I think the GOP is also thinking that if they set the bar very, very low, Palin will only exceed expectations. By all accounts, Palin is bright and can speak well for herself, and if it worked with Bush in 2000, why not try it again?
You can bet that Marge Gunderson is a model that the GOP will embrace. It's a model that'll charm the pants off you as it steals your wallet. But consider that Marge Gunderson is also a complete fiction, and even as a fictional character, the quirky reformer and gadfly who represented Brainerd, Minnesota still represented a constituency twice the size of Palin's Wasila Alaskan outpost.
Which brings us to Realityville.
Realityville is not Brainerd or Wasila. It ain't even Fargo. In Realityville, the case for Palin on its face, beyond political tactics and electioneering, is very thin, and this is certainly a risky "hail mary" pick for John McCain, and no less Americans as a whole.
Sarah Palin is a creationist, anti-choice mayor of a town of just over 5000 people, who became governor of a state with a population less than one-twelfth the size of the Chicago metro area just a year and a half ago. She has no foreign affairs experience, no major domestic experience, no urban portfolio, no infrastructure portfolio, not even the agricultural portfolio that one would expect from a rural governor. She's married into the oil industry, and she's already embroiled in a personal ethics and corruption scandal in a state where the GOP is absolutely reeling from corruption scandals, and which is likely to lose both its Republican senator and Republican House member this fall as a result.
She's heaped considerable praise on Obama's energy plan. She's three years younger than Obama, makes him look more presidential and more experienced by comparison, and makes John McCain look like an old man who has a thing for ex-beauty queens. This is his third beauty pageant pick in his lifetime (both wives, and now Palin). From one vantage, it makes a mockery of strong women, considering that he passed over far more qualified and experienced choices like Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Condoleeza Rice in the process.
This is the sort of VP pick that seems over-thought and under-thought all at once, but well-thought not at all. In any reasonable world, it should make Obama-Biden seem like the most balanced, talented, credible, and serious presidential ticket in decades.
But "reasonable" is an epithet rarely worn by the contemporary GOP. Unless it's a fake badge on a fake sheriff who arrives straight from the central casting department at Crawford Studios.