Originally posted by god's shoeshine:
smackie, what are thoughts on this
It's high risk-high reward. My guess is that the Republican campaign folks ran the numbers state by state and decided that Senator McCain couldn't win unless he really shook things up. And he did. I was so interested (read: stunned) in the choice that I stayed home this morning to watch the announcement. I don't know if anybody else saw Pat Buchanan as the rumors broke, but he was certain it was a false rumor saying "there's no way he could do that."
Not knowing the political reason why he did it, I'll just go reason by reason why he might have done it:
(1) To Appeal to the Hillary Voters. After the Biden pick, they immediately ran a commercial attacking Senator Obama for not picking Hillary - there's a huge segment out there that is undecided. The sad part is, it's a huge mistake to think that women were voting for Hillary ONLY because she is a woman, and if this is the reason for the pick, I think they walked right into a trap. The majority of women Hillary supporters voted for Hillary because of her stance on issues women find important, and you're not going to attract them with Palin.
(2) Make the campaign look younger and more fresh. It's no doubt that Obama is destroying the McCain camp among younger voters. Picking someone young does not fix that problem - finding new ways to deliver your message to young does that (and without putting yourself at such risk).
(3) The Executive thing. Until today, none of the three candidates had executive experience. McCain touted her "executive experience" in the first 3 minutes of his intro of Palin. But 1.5 years in Alaska is a bit of a stretch when it comes to demonstrating executive experience (and in this case at a very dangerous cost - it weakens the strongest argument The Republican's had going for them - Obama's experience). I don't think the American public was concerned about Executive experience in this race more than they were concerned about Obama's overall experience, and McCain's camp took a lot of bite out of that by picking someone with even less experience.
(4) Energy. This is where I am most intrigued. If McCain makes this election about energy, Palin can be very useful. However - he has to shape the argument about energy security, because Alaska is much of the same old energy policy - oil and natural gas. Alaska is not about renewables, not about getting the US off oil dependence (foreign or domestic), and I don't think the drilling issue is big enough to win a national election. It has to be about energy in terms of national security.
(5) Take the wind out of the sails. The Dems had an amazing four days with Teddy, The Clintons, and then Obama's speech last night. I haven't heard a word about Obama's speech today because Palin is all the buzz. It was such a shocking choice that it effectively killed all the momentum coming out of Denver, but it opened up a lot of cans of worms that may cause distractions in Minnesota.
One other thing I've been thinking of is that it's such a stunning choice that they're baiting the Dems into making a huge mistake some where along the campaign trail. I think even the least astute person would guess that any large mistake is going to come from Joe Biden and this makes the VP debate a huge opportunity for Biden to say something so crazy sexist, that it keeps the Hillary folks away.
I've got to be honest - I think John McCain just did one of two things: he either gave himself his only chance to win or just gave the election away, and after hearing her speak on his 72nd birthday, I'm leaning towards the latter. Obama's first criteria for Biden was "can he be President if need be" and I would start repeating that over and over again.
As much as I'm going to regret saying this, I'm looking forward to Julian and other Hillary supporters take on this choice.
