David Frum: Palin the irresponsible choice?
David Frum, National Post
Published: Friday, August 29, 2008
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John Gress/ReutersWith no foreign policy experience and only two years under her belt as governor of a small state, is Sarah Palin a wise choice for VP?
Through this campaign season, John McCain has faced two ugly problems.
Problem 1: The Republican voter base is shrinking. In percentage terms, fewer Americans now identify as Republicans than at any time since 1980. The "rally the base" strategy of 2004 won't work in 2008. The only way Mr. McCain can win this presidential election is to appeal to independents and the political centre.
Maverick McCain might seem the perfect candidate for that assignment. He has defied Republican orthodoxy on issues from taxes to climate change, and his relationship with George W. Bush has long been famously tense and even hostile.
But that opportunity raises problem number 2:
Mr. McCain is widely distrusted within his own party.
By the time the nomination contests ended, 68% of Democrats expressed satisfaction with Barack Obama as their nominee. Only 52% of Republican expressed satisfaction with John McCain. Mr. McCain has to worry that too much outreach to independents and centrists could provoke and offend his right wing.
The obvious way to solve problem 2 was to pick a running mate who appealed to the right: a Mitt Romney, say. The trouble is that such a choice would alienate those all-important voters in the middle. But the candidates who might appeal to the voters in the middle were usually unacceptable to the right.
It's generally believed that if Mr. McCain had felt free to choose any running mate he wanted, he would have picked either his friend Joe Lieberman or former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. Mr. Ridge was especially attractive because Pennsylvania will be a very important state this year.
Pennsylvania ties with Illinois as the fifth most lucrative lode of electoral votes: 21 out of the 270 needed to win. Pennsylvania has voted Democratic in the past four elections, and should have been a sure Democratic win this time. But this state has proved very inhospitable to Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton crushed him in the April 22 primary.
It was in large part to secure Pennsylvania that Barack Obama chose the Scranton-born and Catholic Joe Biden as his running mate. Mr. Ridge, a veteran, a Catholic of Central European origins, and a popular two-term governor, might have tipped the state to the GOP. But Mr. Ridge is pro-choice, and that fact would have triggered the party mutiny that Mr. McCain fears.
So Mr. McCain found himself playing a game of elimination. Ridge out. Romney out. Lieberman out. Giuliani out. Huckabee - way out.
Sarah Palin was the answer to his problem. The party right likes her fierce pro-life convictions. (She is the mother of five. Her youngest has Down's syndrome.) The right approves of her support for opening more of Alaska to oil drilling and her broad libertarian approach to public policy.
At the same time, she qualifies as a maverick because of her battles with Alaska's notoriously corrupt local Republican organization - and her very unusual background. She was a local basketball champion and a second-place finisher in the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant. Her husband is a commercial fisherman, a member of the Steelworkers union and a champion snowmobiler of part-Eskimo background.
Most significantly of all, Ms. Palin reaches out to those working-class women who supported Hillary Clinton's candidacy - and who may not be reconciled to Barack Obama. In her statement on Friday in Ohio, she thanked Hillary Clinton for putting 18 million cracks in the hardest of all glass ceilings - and then pointedly argued that a vote for Mr. McCain was the surest way to smash that ceiling once and for all.
In politics as in life, however, you cannot have everything.
Ms. Palin's experience in government makes Barack Obama look like George C. Marshall. She served two terms on the city council of Wasilla, Alaska, population 9,000. She served two terms as mayor. In November, 2006, she was elected governor of the state, a job she has held for a little more than 18 months. She has zero foreign policy experience, and no record on national security issues.
All this would matter less, but for this fact: The day that John McCain announced his selection of Sarah Palin was his birthday. His 72nd birthday. Seventy-two is not as old as it used to be, but Mr. McCain had a bout with melanoma seven years ago, and his experience in prison camp has uncertain implications for his future health.
If anything were to happen to a President McCain, the destiny of the free world would be placed in the hands of a woman who until the day before Friday was a small-town mayor.
Mr. McCain's supporters argue that he is more serious about national security than Barack Obama. But the selection of Sarah Palin invites the question: How serious can he be if he would place such a neophyte second in line to the presidency? Barack Obama at least balanced his inexperience with Mr. Biden's experience. What is Mr. McCain doing?
Vice-presidents have historically made surprisingly little difference to the outcome of presidential elections. The elder Bush picked Dan Quayle in 1988 in hopes of wooing younger voters, much as Walter Mondale had chosen Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, in an effort to mobilize women, and George McGovern had hoped that Sargent Shriver would stanch his losses among Catholics in 1972.
None of these gambits worked. Ms. Ferraro did not deliver women, Mr. Quayle did not deliver youth, and Catholics defected to Nixon in 1972.
Where vice-presidents - and especially Republican vice-presidents - make an enormous difference is after the election.
Since the Second World War, 10 men have received the Republican nomination for vice-president. Three of those men - Richard Nixon, Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush - continued on to win the presidential nomination for themselves, and two actually became president. (A fourth nominee, Thomas Dewey's 1948 running mate, Earl Warren, rose to arguably even greater power as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. And you could add a fifth case: Gerald Ford went on to the presidency after being appointed vice-president in 1973.)
Should John McCain lose in November, Sarah Palin has just pole-vaulted into front-runner status for 2012. Should Mr. McCain win, her grip on the next Republican nomination will become a lock.
So this is the future of the Republican party you are looking at: a future in which national security has bumped down the list of priorities behind abortion politics, gender politics, and energy politics. Ms. Palin is a bold pick, and probably a shrewd one. It's not nearly so clear that she is a responsible pick, or a wise one.
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