Conventional wisdom, as manufactured by the media and codified as water-cooler comedy by John Stewart and Steve Colbert, says that John McCain erred on a magnificent scale in his choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. They say it’s a grossly transparent demographic choice aimed at women feeling disaffected by Clinton’s almost-nomination. Indeed, Palin herself strengthened that perception by referring to Hillary and her supporters during her first speech to a national audience.Of course, the political commentariat once again placed a high-profile female politician in a rhetorical quandary.Just like they keep questioning whether Hillary “really” supports Obama no matter what she says, Palin just can’t win. For bringing up Hillary’s candidacy, she’s criticized as insulting women’s intelligence-i.e. expecting that women will just flock to the next politician with two X chromosomes. Had she not mentioned Hillary, they would have criticized her for not acknowledging a trailblazer who made her own candidacy possible.But nobody made Palin possible. She’s the answer that changes the question, the right winger that came out of left field. The announcement caught everyone off guard and unsure of what to think, so we react as humans tend to when confronted with uncomfortable situations: we laugh.Any impartial assessment has to admit that the timing of the announcement shows once again the McCain campaign’s master manipulation of the cable news cycle. Not only did they keep their V.P. secret much better than the Democrats, but by releasing the information less than twelve hours after Obama’s acceptance speech, they turned the attention back to McCain. Watching T.V. the morning after the DNC, you’d never have guessed history took place the night before.
McCain’s choice of Palin-and I believe McCain chose her-also hints at the return of The Maverick. Since winning the nomination, McCain’s spirit has dwindled. A politician placating to snake handlers like James Dobson replaced the man who once confronted the Christian right, and we missed him.I missed the guy who said “F- you!” to Texas Republican John Cornyn and threatened to beat up intrusive reporters. I also missed the McCain who delivered hands-down the best response to accusations of carpet baggery. Years ago, when grilled by a reporter over why he wanted to run for the Senate out of Arizona when he’d never lived in the state before, McCain responded that the one place in which he’d spent the most consecutive years was a prisoner-of-war camp in Hanoi.McCain knows he can’t win this race on the issues, so he did the politically savvy thing: he went for telegenics (Palin adds youth and attractiveness to the ticket) and reinserted identity politics.With little difference in policy between Barack and Hillary, the never-ending primary saw many of their supporters preoccupied with race and gender. Just when the Democrats spent four days on well-crafted political theater designed to show America all that is behind us, McCain brings us back to gender, but in an unexpected way.The average American struggles to mentally disentangle a woman in politics from abortion rights. To say that Palin is pro-life is like saying George Bush supports the war in Iraq. It’s the one issue of which pundits can not seem to let go.
They kept saying, here’s a woman who’s aggressively anti-abortion, as if she were from Mars instead of Venus. They also kept pointing out she has five children, perhaps because that illustrates her Christian, pro-life politics, or because some liberal high-brows see big families as so thirty years ago, just more people to deplete the Earth’s resources and run carbon footprints everywhere.But the most telling and prescient knock against Palin comes from those who say that a first-term governor with no foreign policy expertise is laughably unqualified to be vice president. Now, the foreign policy is immaterial; that’s what McCain is for.The other interesting aspect of the argument is that Palin has served as governor as long as Democrat Tim Kain of Virginia, whom the media took seriously as a possible running mate for Barack Obama. Why is a male first-term governor a contender, but a female first-term governor a punch line?This question and others will become fodder for right-wing women such as Laura Ingram and Michelle Maulkin, who have claimed for years that feminism, in its various incarnations, shuns conservative women. The tricky conversation as to where religious, “traditional” women fit in the scheme of women’s rights activism and women’s-issue politics provides exactly the kind of identity distraction Obama seeks to avoid and the kind Republicans seem to have embraced.Furthermore, Palin poses a major problem for Joe Biden, who is known for long-winded, gaff-laden speeches. Did anyone catch what Biden said about his wife during his first speech as a V.P. contender?”My wife Jill, who you’ll meet soon, is drop-dead gorgeous,” he said. “She also has her doctorate degree, which is a problem.”Biden later excused it as a joke, but a lot of women weren’t laughing.McCain’s people can’t wait to hear what comes out of Biden’s mouth when he debates Palin. Regardless of how many female politicians shun favorable treatment, the fact is that for a man running against a woman, the rules of engagement change. In this regard Palin challenges Biden, an aggressive and sometimes sarcastic speaker, not to come across as a bully.He can’t dismiss her because, perception wise, that’s dismissing the American working mom. Imagine Biden telling the world that all Palin’s done for the last ten years is drive her kids to hockey practice and cook moose stew. With the election eight weeks away and with Obama yet to sustain a double-digit lead over McCain in the polls, do the Democrats really want to say that a woman whose life mirrors that of the elusive working class voters has no business in the conversation?Yes, Obama and Biden came from modest beginnings, but Palin is still there. She’s Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The tokenism of her candidacy takes some of the shine from her status as the first woman on a Republican ticket, but she brings something else to this season of change.After eight years of Dick Cheney, who came to the Oval Office from a fat-cat salary at Halliburton (to which he’ll probably return), Americans will be attracted to a candidate who lives like they do. Palin is married to a blue-collar fisherman; they share one family car, and their oldest son is heading to Iraq. On issues of ethics and cronyism, she opposed her own party in Alaska and won.Palin presents a complicated challenge to the left; Obama and Bidden would be ill-advised to underestimate her.