A longtime correspondent, Dave Sikula, writes…
I both agree and disagree with you about Gov. Palin. On the one hand, she's a good choice for McCain because she helps solidify the base. On the other hand, she looked woefully out of her depth to me. Unless she shows more gravitas in the next couple of weeks, she'll resemble nothing so much as a PTA president going up against Putin or Ahmedinajad and be wildly overmatched.
Rumor has it she's a good debater, so she may show something against Biden (though, unlike you, I saw nothing in her performance this morning to indicate that — she seemed less like a governor than a local morning talk show host), but I agree that even PUMAs are going to be insulted at the thought that, if Hillary cracked the glass ceiling, this is the GOP's idea of the woman to break through. And if the Alaska trooper scandal comes to fruition — or if, god forbid, anything happens to McCain — the Republicans are toast.
If the Democrats play this right — and god knows they've shown an inability to do that over the past quarter century — and concentrate on her extremist views and lack of experience, they can marginalize her and defuse the whole female candidate thing.
As I say, she'll be good for McCain's standing in the party, but I didn't see a lot this morning that would draw in independents. Watching the speech this morning, the thing that struck me the most was how much of the media's love for McCain transferred right over to Palin. Absent any investigation of her record, she'll be fine.
Give McCain credit, though; they're not talking about Obama's speech any more.
Yeah, they're talking about how little experience his running mate has. That's going to help him?
Look, it's not exactly a secret I think McCain would be a dreadful president. The only area about him in which I'm undecided is whether he fooled people like me for a long time or whether he's a recent convert to the pernicious agenda he now represents. A friend of mine has spent the last year or so hurling "I told you so"s at me, arguing that all that maverick talk — all that "reaching across the aisle" and "standing up to his own party on principles" was fluff; that he only did that for show, when it didn't matter. It's tough for me to accept. I might still have a hard time voting against the John McCain of 1992 or thereabouts.
I don't think Sarah Palin's going to help him. I think she's going to hurt him and I'm not unhappy about that. Just putting the two tickets side by side, the Obama-Biden parlay looks so much more presidential now, not because Palin's a woman but because she looks like she was picked out of the audience at random. I'm sure she's a nice lady, a good mother, maybe even a fine first-term governor. But the selection of her simultaneously trivializes the valid concerns of the womens' movement and, of greater danger to us, the need to have someone in charge who can, as you say, deal with the Putins and the Ahmedinajads.
McCain just threw away his most powerful argument, which is that Obama was "not ready." Republicans seem to think that the Dems can't attack Palin's lack of experience without highlighting Obama's but it won't work like that. Democrats don't have to say anything. McCain just looks insincere now for having complained that Obama didn't have foreign policy experience, hadn't been overseas enough, etc. If you take the "experience" issue completely off the table, that helps Obama.
What with so much happening — the conventions, Gustav, announcements, etc. — I think the polls are going to be wildly unrepresentative of the electorate for a few weeks. But once things settle down a bit and everyone wraps their brains around the idea that these are the tickets, I think the consensus will be that McCain made the wrong choice.