The Republicans have intruded on my sleep patterns, and I bitterly resent it.
A week ago, I was driving back home from a long work trip in the Southwest. I went to sleep in a small hotel deep in the Mojave desert at two in the morning, after driving close to 1,000 miles that day. Three hours later, I woke up, my head crammed full of angry thoughts about the Sarah Palin-for-V.P. choice that had dominated my radio listening the previous day. Since then, I haven't been able to stop thinking about what the Palin choice says about the state of American politics. I wake up literally fuming.
I'm a political animal; I know the names, at least, of most of the big, and even mid-level, players in American politics. After all, writing about politics is how I earn my living. But, until a few days ago, I'd never heard of Alaska's governor Palin. I thought it was me; maybe through some glaring omission I'd missed a huge star of the political scene. But it turns out most of the commentators were equally clueless. Turns out McCain himself wasn't really much more in the know; according to numerous reports, he met her once, at most twice, before selecting her, with only the most perfunctory of vetting proceedings beforehand.
A friend of mine called the veep decision an "impulse purchase," a decision made almost entirely on a whim.
That's truly astounding. A 72 year old man with a history of melanoma is running for the White House; the actuarial odds are pretty good he'll die in office; and, despite his most credible claim to the office being that he has "experience" to navigate a dangerous world, he selects a nationally unknown vice presidential candidate whom he doesn't know from Adam and who has literally no national or international political experience whatsoever. God only knows what sorts of "impulse diplomacy" or "impulse wars" McCain would launch the country into should he win the White House.
Now why would he go shopping for a veep in such a bizarre manner?
To start with there's the least offensive rationale, the "stick-it-to-Mitt-Romney," line of thinking. If Obama can ignore Clinton after she wins 18 million primary votes, why can't McCain publicly humiliate his primary rival too? There's something to that line of reasoning. After all, Romney really is quite repellant, as he demonstrated all-too-eagerly at the GOP convention this week. So, I won't go after McCain too hard for that.
But then we move on to the vastly more offensive side of the equation. If it wasn't going to be Romney, why not play that old children's game, eenie-meenie-miney-mo-choose-any-conservative-politician-with-a-vagina-as-my-running-mate.
Does that sound crude? It's meant to. This, after all, is one of the most astounding acts of tokenism in U.S. political history. If McCain really wanted a qualified candidate, who happened to be a woman, he could have gone for any number of GOP senators, congresswomen, cabinet secretaries, or even big-city administrators. Condoleeza Rice, say, or Christine Todd Whitman. Instead, he went for a political neophyte, a person who was mayor of a town of 6,000 for a few years, and governor of a state with fewer than half a million people for 18 months. For Christ's sake, even a po-dunk city like Sacramento, where I live, has as about as many people in it as Alaska. Perhaps he could have approached my home-town mayor, Heather Fargo (albeit, she's a Democrat) and offered her the job?
But, that ignores Palin's real qualification. In addition to being a woman, she's a Christian Conservative. Not a middle-of-the-roader with a few conservative beliefs on abortion and family values, no, she's a true down-the-line-believer -- of both the religious and the conservative variety. Palin doesn't believe in a right to an abortion even in the case of rape or incest; she's a supporter of teaching creationism in schools; she is skeptical about global warming arguments; she is a dyed in the wool National Rifle Association supporter; she supports banning books the religious right disapproves of from libraries. That all makes her so much more palatable to the GOP hard-right than the other two serving female Republican governors; Linda Lingle of Hawaii and Jodi Rell, of Connecticut, both of whom are pro-choice, neither of whom are affiliated with fundamentalist churches.
And here's where things get really squirrelly. McCain's trying to woo disaffected Clinton Democrats, who presumably are generally pro-choice, pro-union, pro-environment, by presenting them with a woman with a brand of Cro Magnum politics that makes George Bush look almost moderate. He has to do it this way, because if he tried to woo these voters with someone who even remotely shared their political philosophy, he'd alienate the millions of conservative Christians who form the base of the modern-day Republican Party.
It's an utterly idiotic circle he's trying to square, one that can only work on the assumption vast numbers of women voters in this country are stupid enough to vote for genitalia over policies.
The comparison here is with two Supreme Court justices. Thurgood Marshall was a tremendously talented jurist utterly qualified for the Supreme Court. The fact that he was black made him that much more aware of the obstacles and legal hindrances faced by African Americans in America, and that much better able to use his Supreme Court position to enact positive change. When George Bush Senior needed to replace him on the Supreme Court, he cast around for another black man; and in an act of supreme tokenism chose Clarence Thomas, a conservative man with no real qualifications for a seat on court. But at least Bush could say he'd elevated a black man to the Supreme Court. The results, judicially, have been disastrous for civil rights in the country.
It's the same now with Palin. Like Clinton or not (and readers of my Guardian Comments is Free pieces will know I didn't support her primary campaign) she is a tremendously qualified, and talented, politician. The fact that she was a woman may have made her more cognizant of women's issues, but it was by no means her sole qualification for the job of president. Palin, by contrast, well... her main qualification for McCain's purposes is, overwhelmingly, that she's a woman. This is token politics at its dumbest, crassest, most gimmicky and most dangerous.
Republican flaks have been trying to say, over the past week, that Palin is more qualified than Obama. Frankly, that's nonsense. Obama's politics were forged in a big city (a city with far more people than the total population of Alaska and far more intractable social problems); he has Washington, D.C. experience; and he has been tested over the longest, closest, primary campaign in history. He's had eighteen months to school himself on the big issues and to surround himself with top advisers. Palin, by contrast, will barely have sixty days to get up to speed. And then, if she and McCain win, she'll literally be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Which brings me on to my last alternative as to why McCain might have chosen Palin. Maybe he's hoping the sheer bizarreness of the choice is enough to scare off the grim reaper for a few more years, to keep that heartbeat-scenario from materializing.
"You can't take me," the wanna-be-oldest-president-in-history tells the dark, scythe-carrying figure. "Look who I've appointed to take my place. The stakes are too high. She's got no experience. She's a foreign policy novice. You can't put the fate of the world in the hands of this lady. There are too many nuclear weapons, there's too much damage that can be done. Let me stay just a little longer..."