Harvard College Democrats

McCain picks Sarah Palin

Posted 8/29/08 by Eva Lam

The VP pick: Sarah Palin, a first-term governor of Alaska.

I’m interested in your thoughts, but here are a couple of mine.

There are a number of advantages to the pick, but a lot of them seem short-term. From a media perspective, this certainly caught both the press and the Obama campaign – Palin flew under the radar and the campaign, as far as I can tell, hasn’t yet issued a reaction. The pick was surprising enough that it will push aside a lot of the coverage of Obama’s speech at the convention last night. Picking a woman, and a governor who came to office partly on her promises that she would clean up Alaska’s notoriously scandal-ridden political system, gives a much-needed shot in the arm to McCain’s maverick reputation, given that the Democrats have spent the past four days assailing Big Mac as a continuation of the Bush administration. Picking a candidate who’s relatively unknown offers the McCain campaign the chance to control the narrative about Palin, while the Obama campaign is still looking for a response.

But I think most of these advantages will fade out well before the election. No matter how well the GOP constructs the narrative surrounding Palin, I don’t think there’s anything in her record that even suggests foreign policy experience – meaning that McCain’s key argument that Obama lacks the experience to be commander-in-chief applies doubly to Palin. I don’t think McCain and Palin have ever really worked together, unless I’m missing something, which means that aside from enemies, nobody really knows yet if they have anything in common. If the chemistry works out, it could help balance out McCain’s image, but if it doesn’t, she could just make him look old and awkward – a crapshoot there. And although women may be excited in the short term, it would be a gross underestimation of Hillary Clinton’s supporters to assume that identity politics alone could pull them over to the Republican side. While there was tremendous enthusiasm among quite a few women (and not a few men!) about the possibility of electing the first female president, that enthusiasm was rooted in the fact that Hillary had a strong record on women’s issues. That enthusiasm, among the vast majority of Hillary supporters that I know, was hardly so shallow as to be transferable to the next woman who comes along. Instead McCain is dealing with a political unknown who undercuts the biggest argument he can make against Barack Obama.

Oh, and apparently her learning curve would be pretty steep.

Your thoughts?