Grasping

“A Vice-President cannot help you, he can only hurt you.”

-Richard Nixon

If it really is Sarah Palin, I’m not sure what to think. It’s an interesting pick, to call out America’s Hottest Governor (TM-Wonkette) as your running mate. But I’m not sure what it really accomplishes, for several reasons:

1) She’s from Alaska, which has a smaller population than San Francisco. Sure, it’s three electoral votes in the bag that might have been drifting toward Obama, but if you’re trying to shore up a state, shouldn’t the pick have been from Virginia or Ohio or Florida?

2) You’re basically taking the “age and experience” meme and piling it in a heap and setting it on fire. Sarah Palin has been governor of one of America’s least-populous states for two years, before which she was the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (pop. ~8000). There’s very little to suggest she’s done other than a fine job, but it makes Barack Obama look like a wizened statesman by comparison, and undercuts perhaps the most effective line of attack against Obama.

3) Alaska is not like other states. Zippy income tax; in fact, every citizen gets a check from the government for his or her share of the state’s oil revenue. I don’t know how many otherwise-undecided votes energy policy drives in this election, but if you want to suggest something other than a “drill more, drill harder” approach to energy policy, Alaska may not be the place to look for it.

4) Alaska is very much like a Southern state, in that its politics tends to be insular, nepotistic, and generally corrupt. (See also Stevens, Murkowski.) Palin has gotten her fingers burned on the fringes of this earlier in the year, but not in a terribly serious way, and she certainly doesn’t appear on the surface to be up to her neck in dirty dealings – but because of the nature of the state’s politics, she’s potentially vulnerable to as much guilt-by-association as Biden’s Delaware connections provide for him. This is a chance worth taking in the Rove offense, if you’re trying to depress turnout generally and say “well, I’m corrupt, you’re corrupt, they’re all corrupt, don’t bother showing up”, but that’s a hell of a three-rail bank shot to be taking with only nine weeks to go ’til Election Day.

5) Nobody other than hardcore political junkies could pick her out of a lineup with Tina Fey and three elves. Again, not necessarily a problem, but you really don’t want the first reaction from the rest of the country to be “Who?”

6) At this point, you’re probably thinking “Look here, donkey, they must know something you don’t because they wouldn’t be picking her otherwise.” Well, two things: first, there’s no such thing is something they know that I don’t, because I really am just that good (tip: remember Brian Schwitzer of Montana, who is a FIGJAM of the first order but who is going to be a big deal in a few years). But more importantly, what they think they know may not in fact be valid information.

See, Team McCain is inexplicably convinced that with Hillary Clinton out of the race, the people who voted for her are all ripe for the plucking by the GOP, and they’ll torpedo Obama at the waterline and sail on to victory. But that argument falls apart for two reasons:

* Half those people just saw the Clintons endorsing the hell out of Obama publicly for four days. They are over their first flush of anger and ready to go back to a candidate much closer to their actual beliefs. They are probably not on the table.

* The rest of the folks who would vote for Clinton over McCain, but not Obama over McCain, are concentrated in states that McCain’s going to win in a walk anyway. It doesn’t matter if every white woman in every Wal-Mart in all of West Virginia pulls the lever for McCain, it’s still only got 5 electoral votes. There’s aren’t enough women sufficiently disaffected to vote for McCain in enough states already in play to make a material difference. (I had a professor who once ran for statewide office on the idea that there were enough women in the “works at Wal-Mart” demographic to get her the nomination. She finished third.)

In the grand scheme of things, it’s a head-scratcher of a pick. You could be reaching for the novelty of a “first” on the GOP side, but all it does is point out that the Democrats did it twenty-four years ago, and that they did it out of a sense of desperation. It could be a sop to the party regulars, getting a solid conservative on the ticket, but it’s questionable how well it will play in parts of the country where they were already averse to a black man and now have to consider a woman on the ticket if they go the other way. It could just be an attempt to get youth and vitality on the ticket, and Bobby Jindal’s not available because of the hurricane.

Ah well. What’s done is done. Congratulations to Sarah, and congrats as well to Alaska and Hawaii. Less than fifty years after statehood, they’ve both got a name on the big ticket, and it’s good to remember that “United States” isn’t dependent on “contiguous landmass.”