The Palin Pick -- The Devolution of McCain
In one of our many conversations as we crisscrossed the country during his campaign for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, John McCain said to me, "I've always tried to act on what I thought was the best for the country. And that has guided me.... The only thing I can do is assure people that I would act on principle."
I traveled with McCain for weeks that political season, stayed in Arkansas with him, Cindy, and their children, and - for a Vanity Fair cover profile -- filled dozens of notebooks and tapes with observations from and about a potentially heroic politician who seems far removed from the man running for president today.
Three weeks after the 2008 Republican convention, on the cusp (maybe) of the first presidential debate, it is time to confront an awkward but profound question: whether in picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has committed -- by his own professed standards of duty and honor -- a singularly unpatriotic act.
"I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war," he has said throughout this campaign. Yet, in choosing Palin, he has demonstrated -- whatever his words -- it may be permissible to imperil the country, conceivably even to "lose" it, in order to win the presidency. That would seem the deeper meaning of his choice of Palin.
Indeed, no presidential nominee of either party in the last century has seemed so willing to endanger the country's security as McCain in his reckless choice of a running mate. He is 72 years old; has had four melanomas, a particularly voracious form of cancer; refuses to release his complete medical records. Three of our last eleven presidents (and nine of all 43) have come to office unexpectedly in mid-term from the vice presidency: Truman, who within days of FDR's death was confronted with the decision of whether to drop the atom bomb on Japan; Lyndon Johnson, who took the oath in Dallas after JFK's assassination; Gerald Ford, sworn in following the resignation of Richard Nixon. A fourth vice president, George H.W. Bush, briefly exercised the powers of the presidency after the near-assassination of Ronald Reagan.
Given that history, what does John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin -- the cavalier, last-minute process of her selection and careless vetting; and her over-briefed, fact-lite performance since -- reveal about this military man who has attested to us for years that he is guided by his personal code of honor? "Two things I will never do," McCain told me, "are [to] lie to the American people, or put my electoral interests before the national interest" -- an obvious precursor of "I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war."
McCain, I wrote for Vanity Fair, "often speaks of the duty to follow his conscience in politics, rather than polls or party discipline. This, he says, comes from having escaped death and becoming 'more aware of the transience of everything we do.'"
"I've always had a pretty good idea about how to define something as to whether it's right or wrong," he told me. "I don't mean that I'm better or worse than anybody else. I just mean that when I see an issue and think about it and talk to people, I do generally have the ability to know what's the right course of action, even if it may not be what the majority wants. So I have a certain amount of confidence that I don't have to have a majority opinion on my side."
It does not take a near-death experience to know that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be commander in chief, or that -- in choosing her -- McCain has ignored his own oft-avowed code of conduct. "McCain made the most important command decision of his life when he chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee," noted David Ignatius in the Washington Post. "....No promotion board in history would have made such a decision."
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Above all, the John McCain I covered in 1999-2000 was -- he said -- convinced that two factors were undermining the interests of the United States: its cultural wars, causing political gridlock in Washington and civic discontent across the land; and the unbending agenda of the right-wing of the Republican party that, in his view, had been captured by the Christian conservative movement and bore disproportionate responsibility for the poisonous state of American politics. Exhibit One: the scorched-earth campaign that George W. Bush was then waging against McCain's insurgent run for the Republican presidential nomination.
Yet, McCain, is, in fact, running the kind of campaign against Barack Obama that George Bush ran against him in 2000, which he regarded rightly as dishonest, dishonorable and diversionary in terms of the truth about him and about the nation's problems.
The conservative commentator George Will has been especially incisive of late about the "dismaying," "un-presidential temperament" of McCain and the sleazy tenor of his campaign. Karl Rove (!) has responded to the incessant lying of McCain's ads (one claims falsely that Obama has promoted "comprehensive" sex education for five-year-olds -- he had, in fact, endorsed legislation to insure that kindergartners were warned about sexual predators), by saying, yes, the McCain camp's mendacity has "gone one step too far."
Meanwhile, McCain's frequent invocations of the need for bi-partisan statesmanship are interspersed with the angry themes of cultural warfare and of the Republican convention orchestrated by his handlers, the most dominant of them practitioners from the campaigns of George W. Bush: attacks on "tax-and-spend Democrats," on the dependable liberal bogeyman, on "the angry Left," on Constitution-rewriting federal judges (including, incongruously, three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to uphold McCain's singular legislative achievement: the campaign-finance act he authored with Democrat Russ Feingold).
"If hypocrisy were gold, the Capitol would be Fort Knox," McCain once famously said. "Some of those guys," he said, referring to his fellow senators, "have they even had lives? What have they done?" He added, "Aw, jeez, this is exactly the kind of thing that gets me into trouble." Indeed.
McCain's first choices to be his running mate were former Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Senator Joe Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut, and former vice presidential nominee of his former party. Neither passed the ideological litmus test of the Republican-Right -- "The Base" -- because each holds pro-choice views. Certainly both are qualified to step into the presidency in terms of national security credentials -- regardless of whether one agrees with their particular politics -- in the event of the death of the president. McCain's "Hail Mary" pick -- Palin -- was hastily decided on the next-to-last day of the Democratic convention, by which time it was evident that Obama's convention was winning over independent voters; all that remained was the final night and the opportunity for Obama to deliver a speech that would further work to his advantage, and debilitate the McCain campaign. Only by exciting "The Base" could McCain remain competitive and win, it was calculated.
The distance from McCain's ads and assertions about his presidential opponent and Democrats generally, and his decision to run a "persona-based" campaign, as opposed to being specific on the issues, is of a piece with his choice of Palin to be his running mate. As another conservative commentator sometimes critical of McCain -- Peggy Noonan -- has noted, the "narrative" of a life [McCain's, Palin's], takes over from existential political fact in the type of campaign run by McCain and his handlers. We have heard an awful lot in the past few weeks, especially from Sarah Palin, about John McCain "The Maverick," just as we did in the convention narrative. But what McCain has actually been doing in this campaign, rather than actually being The Maverick, is conveying the appearance of iconoclasm, and playing to the crowd. (Hence, perhaps, "suspending" his campaign -- and trying to postpone the first presidential debate while his poll numbers are sinking -- to deal with the financial crisis?) At this point, the maverick claim seems no more genuine than Sarah Palin's charade foreign-policy tour of Manhattan with no witnesses -- reporters -- permitted to observe the proceedings.
The issue of Palin's relative ignorance about international affairs and the larger world beyond America's shores (compared to previous vice presidential nominees), her attendant arrogance in seeming to revel in it, and McCain's decision to subject the country to it in choosing a possible president -- is the biggest question in this election, or perhaps ought to be. It goes to the core of who the John McCain of this campaign is.
Another conservative commentator, David Brooks, wrote last week: "Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she'd be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness."
The more we learn, the more we realize the vetting process was -- given the rush of the circumstances -- hopelessly inadequate: McCain didn't know many aspects of Palin's record or her reputation (none of which is to say she wouldn't be a congenial fit as, say, Secretary of Interior in a McCain administration). McCain's first choices for a running mate -- Ridge and Lieberman -- were light years ahead of Palin in the vice presidential-qualification department. But they didn't meet the ideological test, exactly the ideological litmus test that McCain has attacked his whole political career and told us he would never succumb to.
John McCain is a serious man, as anyone who has spent time with him knows. But he has not run the kind of serious campaign he once promised.
Not for the first time, as many of his fellow Republicans (as opposed to friendly reporters and sympathetic Democrats) had long maintained, McCain's more reckless inclinations and lesser impulses prevailed. A great political movement that would transcend rabid partisanship and hard ideology does not seem in the cards.
And if he wins the election, Sarah Palin -- who in her first post-convention discussion of foreign policy indicated a willingness to go to war with Russia over Georgia -- stands a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Ultimately it is the choice of Palin, made in the moment when action speaks loudest, that may undermine a quarter-century of assertions by John McCain about the preeminence of duty, honor and country in his political schema.
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I think that Maureen Down puts in best, referring to Palin as “the first pure Rovian Republican (i.e., Karl Rove), grown totally in the petri dish of cultural crusaderis
This choice is so anti everything that McCain once stood for that, when factored against the flip-flops on the state of the economy, the sudden suspension of his campaign and the intellectually dishonest whack-a-mole strategy of keeping Palin away from the press, should say to past supporters of McCain that THAT GUY IS NO MORE. Vote ideologically if you must but at least be honest about it.
Btw, for some more fodder on the experience topic, check out:
Why Experience Matters: On Palin, Putin and Prudence
http://the
Some scary parallels to Palin and the rise of Putin.
Check it out if interested.
Sarah Palin is no less experienced and no more of an air head than Dan Quayle was in 1988, or than George W. Bush was when he secured the Republican party nomination in 2000. (Palin arguably has more experience -- she served as a mayor before becoming Governor; Bush, in contrast, ran an oil company into the ground and worked as a ballpark shill before becoming governor of another "frontier" state.) What the neocons apparently see in Palin is (a) someone that could be groomed to grow into the job over the next 4 years, and (b) someone who can be led by the nose if she ever assumes the highest office. (Isn't it ironic to hear neocons deride Obama as inexperienced and elitist?)
"Sarah Palin is no less experienced and no more of an air head than Dan Quayle was in 1988, or than George W. Bush was when he secured the Republican party nomination in 2000. (Palin arguably has more experience"
Those guys really worked out well for the nation. It's amazing that you cite the worst president ever.
You are correct. It is simply her overt transparency that bothers people. The resounding lack of knowledge, sophistication, understanding and depth that has run rampant in our government since Reagan is the puppet theater we have grown used to, contrasted by a pitiful few of the caliber of Clinton, Feingold and Obama. What is the power behind these lightweights Republicans? I say it's a corporatism or if you prefer a modern form of fascism dictated by greed and hubris that propels these nobrainers to power by promising them invincibility and fortune. Little do they understand while coming up just how expendable they are.
A reckless choice. And thankfully the aura is fading. How small she seems when we discuss the implications of global financial meltdowns or we see the insanity personified with that kook from Iran Imadinnerjacket.
What we don't need is another religious ideologue who thinks making a quick decision makes up for lack of understanding of the issues. Who thinks being tough is equal to being right.
It is frightening that this nation would rather put a close minded person with limited education and experience into the White House as opposed to a an accomplished, intelligent, supremely informed person. This is the presidency we are talking about not a fraternity where the most popular person becomes leader. No wonder people around the world look at us with disdain. Can any of us imagine President Palin? McCain sold his soul when he allowed the neocons who have groomed Palin for a year, forced this pick on him, with the promise that she can bring him the Oval Office. McCain is already showing signs of excessive stress and fatigue. Has anyone noticed how his left eye is doing all sorts of weird things? As for the debate, he was hoping to punt because of his being tired. It's frightening.
Speak on it!!! It's interesting to see how far McSame has fallen from the image he posed on himself a few years ago.
Sarah Palin is an incoherent babbler of nonsense. She is a true farce thrust upon the citizens. I am scared to death to think she may, if the situation presented itself, be the leader of the United States of America.
But the most amazing aspect of this whole thing is that people love her!
I'm sorry for disagreeing, but it's not "people" who love her, in a general sense, but the conservative base. This love has been augmented by the press which is fnally growing tired of her glib, vapid performance. The conservative base loves anybody that walks the party line and adds to the potential of winning in Nov. Hell, they would vote fore Larry the cable guy if were carrying the flag.
The people who love Sarah Palin are the same people that wanted to have a beer with Bush and put him in the White House. Twice.
Looking around at the chaos we are in, from crashing banks to threat of war on 3 fronts (so far) voting for Sarah Palin would be like recovering from first one then two broken legs, have the doctor tell me that I might walk again after all, and then turn around and invite her to take a sledge hammer to both my kneecaps. And my spine.
Obama-Biden '08
The only people that love her seem to be the republicans, although there are some who are grudging about this and may decide not to vote after all for the McCain/Palin ticket.
Don’t worry Sarah Palin will save the nation’s economy!
McCain said to the Wall Street Journal, in November 2005: "I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated."
In December 2007, McCain similarly said: "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should.”
In December 2007 McCain again made a similar statement, while also saying that he'd like to appoint a vice presidential running mate who is "intimately familiar" with economics, Sarah Palin?
Is this the financial genius he was talking about?
The Chicago Tribune Interview 12/07: McCain said, "The issue of economics is something that I've really never understood as well as I should. I understand the basics, the fundamentals, the vision, all that kind of stuff,'' he said. "But I would like to have someone I'm close to that really is a good strong economist. As long as Alan Greenspan is around I would certainly use him for advice and counsel...
GOD HELP US ALL!!!!!
I agree with Bernstein but would like to add that I believe part of the issue has to do with McCain's sense of entitlement--he was derailed (in the most despicable way) by Bush in 2000 and then what was "his" was taken away from him in 2004. This time, by God, he is going to claim it! Hence the end justifies the means.
Sounds familiar?
Remember, Palin was being romanced in June or July when a cruise of NeoCon Reps went to Juneau, and had tea with her.
They are planning on having Palin be president. She will be the empty front woman for the NeoCon movement (fundamentalist christian movement - the Family). She will never be president in anything but name. And they are planning on her being president. Why else chose her???
Instead of gabbing on and on about Palin, it is time to start asking ourselves, seriously, why Palin??
Generally speaking, the Neocons aren't fundamentalist Christians (though they share many common goals, like waging war on Islamic people).
"Palinism": phrases strung together randomly to make absolutely no sense whatsoever. I suspect the meaning of the real word "palindrome" may change, to a sentence that makes no sense whether read forwards or backwards.
See also:
http://dai
Love the definition. Well done!
Hi Carl, OT: Is that a wig?
Is anyone else reminded of Florida's Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, as portrayed by Laura Dern in the movie Recount, when they think of Sarah Palin? I can just see the Rovian handlers convincing her of a course of action or encouraging the memorization of a talking point.
This post by Bernstein is unbelievable. By that I mean, I could not put it down. Thank you so much!!
Before the Palin pick we all heard that McCain had a long personal interview with her.
I have some dumb questions I would love to ask McCain:
1. Did you ask her questions similar to the ones the three noted press people did?
2. Did you like her answers to your questions?
3. Were her answers similar to her press answers?
4. If so, what did you think of THEM?
5. Was that conversation with her a crucial event in YOUR decision to pick her?
6. To you, did she sound like a person ready to be the president if a tragedy happened?
7. Was your decision only yours, or did you take advice from the team?
8. How priceless would a video/audio tape of that conversation be?
My last question, although I have so many more, is:
9. Sen. John McCain, WHY, WHY, AND WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?
If McCain's pick of Palin marks his devolution, then the Democratic Party's nomination of Obama marks its devolution.
They, Palin and Obama, are equally qualified, or unqualified, to be president.
At least on the top of the GOP ticket is somebody without question qualified to be president. Which is why McCain will likely win, despite being a Republican in what should be a Democratic Party year, despite being heaviliy outspent, and despite all the cheerleading from the feckless America haters on the left blogoshere and lame lefties - some old and tired, some young and naive - in the mainstream meida.
Cheers
Your foolish rant doesn't change reality.
Obama is well educated, thoughtful and articulate. Those qualities are not in evidence in your rant.
I agree that he is inexperienced but he is wise enough to know that and wise enough to turn to people who are experienced enough to advise him.
McCain wants to be president so bad that he selected an inarticulate and uninformed woman whose story would appeal to women across the country. Too bad that she is not capable of stringing two articulate sentences together. She is ignorant of world affairs but seems convinced that she knows what she's talking about.
How sad that you are incapapble or unwilling to see that McCain hasn't chosen for the good of the country but for himself.
As for how qualified McCain is, his flip-flopping and temperament raise too many questions about that.
Obama may not have much leadership experience in an elected capacity but you don't get to where he is without hard work and an extraordinary ability to inspire and motivate people. JFK had his family's political experience to help him get elected. Obama has none of that advantage, yet look at where he is at such a young age. He has the ability to bring people together to get the job done. That's what a great leader does. Do you think that Palin has anywhere near that kind of leadership ability?
Apples and oranges, dude. Apples and oranges.
Pure nonsense, Kevin, P=pure nonsense. Not even a nice try!
Hey listen, the difference between Obama and Palin is, he can articulate on any given issue which she definitely is incapable of. I have q question for you. Did you watch the three interviews, 2 with Charlie Gibson and one with Katie Couric? My son who is a senior in high school would have answered those questions without blinking and blabbering. So, stop blaming everything on the lefties and put on your thinking cap and analyse. Probably you are weak at that.
Palin is McCain's way of making certain his doctors take their job seriously.
If, like me, you are fascinated with how Sarah Palin is being processed by pop culture, you should definitely check out this music track that uses snippets of Palin's speech to the Wasilla Assembly of God, backed by hip hop beats.
The free mp3 "Redheaded Sasquatch For Jesus" can be found at http://www
It's really quite entertaining, using Sarah's voice alongside moose sound effects.
Palin-tastic!!! If you like drum n bass or woozy braps, download today!
One can be truly biased if one did not , by now, realize that this McCain is a three-dollar-bill and phony as hell. I have been in this country for 40 years now and never have I seen a Presidential candidate as dishonest as this McCain, not enven Nixon was that bad. People who would vote for him and his flaky VP candidate would truly deserve them. It would frankly be based on either racial prejudice, ignorance, or sheer stupidity, or maybe all of the above!
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