{"id":379,"date":"2008-08-29T11:33:05","date_gmt":"2008-08-29T16:33:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=379"},"modified":"2010-07-19T01:45:09","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T06:45:09","slug":"mccain-makes-a-bold-move","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=379","title":{"rendered":"McCain makes a bold move"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Picking Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee was a clever and gutsy thing for John McCain to do.  I think he has just wrong-footed the Democrats on several levels.<\/p>\n<p>First, this choice looks bold and change-making in exactly the way Obama&#8217;s choice of Biden did not.  Instead of a tired old pol with a history of scandal and gaffe (not to mention the bad hairplugs), McCain chose a fresh-faced frontier girl married to an <s>Inuit<\/s> Yup&#8217;ik Indian.  And one with a history of whistleblowing on corrupt Republicans.<\/p>\n<p>Second, this tells us something about McCain&#8217;s relationship to the Republican base: either he figures the more reactionary end of the red-meat Right has no place else to go, or he thinks they don&#8217;t actually care what shape a President&#8217;s gonads are any more, or the color of the person the President sleeps with.<\/p>\n<p>Third, it puts the PUMAs further in play.  The most obvious message here is that McCain wants all those disgruntled Hillary-voting older women out there voting for him.  Just going on her tough-babe bio, I think Palin has a pretty good chance of drawing them, too, especially if she&#8217;s any good as a stump speaker.<\/p>\n<p>Fourth, McCain just put a helluva spoke in Hillary Clinton&#8217;s wheels if she&#8217;s got ambitions for 2012.  I&#8217;ll see your fake working-class-woman persona and raise you with the real deal, he says.  There&#8217;s no way a Wellesley and Yale Law grad can win an authenticity competition with a woman who shoots moose and pilots her own float plane.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a pass-the-popcorn moment for sure.  How many politicians can both play the &#8220;diversity&#8221; card and brandish a lifetime membership in the NRA?  And just to put the cherry on top for Republicans, this move might upstage all the hope-and-change posturing at the DNC.<\/p>\n<p>All in all, a very clever choice &#8212; and not in isolation.  The McCain campaign is starting to punch seriously just as Obama&#8217;s seems to be losing momentum; the choice of Biden was a  hard stall, and their attempt to suppress an issues ad tying Obama to terrorist Bill Ayers via lawsuit threats isn&#8217;t winning them any friends.  Couple these with the dead-heat poll numbers at a moment when on historical patterns Obama ought to have a huge lead, and I see trouble for the Democrats.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve begun to wonder in the last week if the epitaph on Obama&#8217;s political grave will read &#8220;He peaked too early.&#8221;  I&#8217;m thinking that looks increasingly likely now.<\/p>\n<p>Update: Heh. And there&#8217;s already a <a href=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_qwNGaeCRkvY\/SLgIcjWvoMI\/AAAAAAAAAnk\/H1bG2FKHQYA\/s1600-h\/hot.jpg\">picture circulating<\/a> of Palin aiming a a scope-sighted M-4 like she knows how.  In Iraq.  That&#8217;s gonna cause heartburn in <em>all<\/em> the right places.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Picking Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee was a clever and gutsy thing for John McCain to do. I think he has just wrong-footed the Democrats on several levels. First, this choice looks bold and change-making in exactly the way Obama&#8217;s choice of Biden did not. Instead of a tired old pol with a history&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=379\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">McCain makes a bold move<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2340,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions\/2340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}