While I’m still skeptical of the mentality that Hillary Clinton’s supporters will automatically reject Barack Obama this November, John McCain nevertheless did himself a world of good by selecting Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.
Palin is not perfect, but she is a solidly pro-life conservative Republican—and McCain desperately needed to have a solid conservative on the ticket in order to have even a remote chance of winning against the Obama juggernaut. Palin’s selection ensures that the Reagan vision will have a place in a McCain Administration—something that will ensure conservative turnout on November 4.
Can the McCain-Palin ticket attract enough independents to win? Let’s hope so. McCain and Palin will come across as a solid center-right combo, the perfect mix of youth and experience. Palin can hold her own in a debate: Joe Biden’s bloviating will be no match for her skills.
Palin respects the past, but offers a break from the image of the past—and in an image-obsessed society, that’s quite important. Remember the mainstream-media prattle that followed George W. Bush’s selection of Dick Cheney in 2000? After the media falsely declared that the Cheney selection was borne of a need to provide Bush with “gravitas” (as though he had none on his own), the Fourth Estate labeled Cheney a bridge to the past, another grumpy old white guy Republican. They can’t do that to Palin. All they can do is run the old anti-Clarence Thomas angle from 1991, this time with gender as the substitute for race.
Gloria Steinem and the rest of the first-wave feminist crew will be dragged out to smear Palin as inimical to women’s interests…the usual garbage. Everything the NOW gang did to Phyllis Schlafly thirty years ago, they’ll do to Palin this week.
It won’t matter. Palin is charismatic and charming enough to silence the screamers. In a fight pitting her brain against the feminists’ minds, she’ll turn her shoe sideways and kick all of their behinds.
This is a sensational choice. It’s not my first choice—I wished Mitt Romney had occupied the slot—but it will do. Palin will keep the conservative franchise going—and after eight years of Bush’s ideological incoherence, I was afraid that the franchise would die out.
Palin represents what is best about the Republican Party. Like the late Tony Snow, she can present conservative concepts in an optimistic, life-affirming manner; her ideological enemies will have fits trying to pin a “right-wing scold” image on her.
While she may not prevent women from voting for Obama, she could prevent voters of faith from being seduced by the faux-Messiah. She understands who the real One is—and like Rick Warren, she can express her faith in an inclusive, welcoming way. In an age when younger evangelicals seem to regard their older counterparts as arrogant and mean-spirited, Palin’s sincere Christian humility could make those younger evangelicals think twice about throwing in with the Democrats.
Palin is a beauty—not just in a physical sense, but in a political sense as well. She holds out hope that the Republican Party could actually re-embrace fiscal and social conservatism without coming across to non-Republicans as 1980s throwbacks. In Palin, the GOP finally has a chance to actually bring the Reagan vision into the 21st century.
McCain and Palin represent competence, not cronyism. The ticket is a suitable alternative to the pie-in-the-sky moonbattery of Obama and Biden, as well as the unfocused political vision of the Bush-Cheney years. Two decades ago, George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle promised a kinder, gentler nation. Today, McCain and Palin can promise a better, stronger nation.
On paper, McCain-Palin vs. Obama-Biden shouldn’t even be a contest. In terms of quality, comparing McCain and Palin to Obama and Biden is like comparing the 2008 Celtics to eight-graders in third-period gym class, comparing Frank Sinatra to Justin Guarini, comparing The Silence of the Lambs to Hannibal. Yet elections don’t take place on paper. The terrain is still rough for the Republicans, with inflation, economic uncertainty and Dubya’s unpopularity still hurting the GOP. The raging sea underneath the Republican Party’s ship has calmed somewhat with Palin’s selection. Still, there are many miles to go on these troubled waters before the GOP makes it home.
