REPUBLICAN presidential candidate John McCain’s startling choice of Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate has brought echoes of the reaction to Richard Nixon’s 1969 veep pick of Maryland Gov. Spiro T. Agnew — “Spiro T. Who ?” chimed the pundits.
But while Agnew was a crook who was forced from office in the first year of Nixon’s fated second term in the face of charges of extortion, tax fraud, bribery and conspiracy, Sarah Palin is an all-American apple-pie mom with a school boy sweet-heart husband and five kids, whose extremely limited political career has seen her take on corruption within Republican-dominated Alaska. If she was unknown outside her home state, she appears to be hardly familiar to John McCain, who had reportedly only met her once, before she joined him Friday on the platform at a rally in Dayton, Ohio.
But McCain is too experienced a political campaigner to have acted without careful thought. Commentators have failed to pick up the fact that for some time, McCain was not sure if he would be facing Hillary Clinton in the run for the presidency. Palin has, therefore, very probably been on McCain’s radar for some months, as a running mate who could cancel out the Clinton appeal to female voters. In this respect, Palin’s value to the campaign has probably not diminished. Despite Clinton’s highly theatrical endorsement of Obama at the Democrat convention, it seems significant numbers of Clinton supporters, who either wanted a woman in the White House and/or did not want a black man there, are determined to vote the Republican ticket in protest at Obama’s nomination.
There was never a hint that McCain might have turned to either of George W. Bush’s secretaries of state, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, both of whom are deeply tarnished by their involvement in the misbegotten Iraq invasion. McCain wants to distance himself from the blundering Bush years and recast the Republican ticket as caring and listening as the US economy falters, but firm and principled when it comes to foreign affairs. The calculation is clearly that Palin’s youth — she is 44 — will balance McCain’s wealth of years — he turned 72 on Friday. But the stark truth is that were McCain to win the presidency and die in office, the most powerful country in the world would start to be run by an Alaskan housewife. Will voters take this risk or in the next 65 days will Palin be able to convince them that whatever her inexperience, she is guided by the strong principles that every American wants to lie at the heart of government in Washington, but knows all too well do not?
The only certainty is that this is going to be an extremely interesting election that will either see an Afro-American in the Oval Office or a woman sitting along the corridor from it.
