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I missed today's activity because I was traveling, but I saw the Palin rollout on TV.
It appears to be the politics equivalent of a hockey team, behind in the final minute, pulling their goalie to have more offensive players. A Hail Mary, a desperate but perhaps necessary gamble. The usual result is you lose by even more because of the other team scoring on an empty net. Desperate gambles sometimes work in sports, but hardly ever.
It's not just Palin's resume. The overall impression she made was of someone with not gravitas whatsoever, a perky housewife, the high school cheerleader running for student council. Her voice was a cross between a "Fargo" stereotype of a Minnesota housewife or Catherine O'Hara's portrayal of Joey Heatherton on SCTV (for you oldsters).
This wasn't helped by the content of the rollout either. She ate up much of the time talking about her husband's snow machine racing (woohoo), her kids, PTA etc. like she was running for a local school board. She has zero foreign policy experience, but they could have come up with SOMETHING much better for her to say, even in 6 hours time, you'd think, in support of her candidacy to be the POSSIBLE PRESIDENT OF THE FUCKING UNITED STATES. It really has made me think that this decision was made just hours before the rollout. Perhaps a panicky McCain changed his mind on Romney or Pawlenty after the Dem convention and decided to go Hail Mary. Perhaps one or more of the previous choices demurred not wanting to go down with the ship, leaving McCain in the lurch at the 11th hour.
The "18 million cracks" shout out removed any possible doubt that the primary purpose of the pick was to attempt to poach Hillary voters, women, and keep the PUMA bullshit alive.
The most concrete benefit to McCain will be to lock up Alaska's 3 electoral votes.
It will help McCain with the fundies, due to the pro-life, carried a Down's baby, "walk the walk" factor.
It will poach a few bitter Clinton holdouts. After the convention, I suspect anyone who would vote for McCain based on him picking a pro-life fundie woman would likely have done so anyway, either out of hateful spite against Obama, or because they were basically a Republican anyway, and would use whatever reason handy to justify doing so. Those votes were likely unreachable anyway. I think, and certainly hope, that these numbers won't come anywhere near even the small percentages he might need to tip any states.
It seems the whole engine driving the McCain campaign is to drive the TV narrative for the next 48 hours or so. This move, because it's such a LOL shocker, will largely succeed in taking Obama's triumphal speech off the news. But the damage it does to McCain's credibility among a lot of Republican voters is far worse. Love Biden or hate his flaws, he's a very plausible and solid pick. Obama did a great job with his first important executive decision. McCain went for the comedy option.
I've heard significant buzz from Republicans, including some of the people I was sitting around the airport watching CNN with today, basically saying :wtf: Many clearly see it as a desperate flail.
Even the lame-ass cable media is somewhat doing their jobs. After the first few hours of simply reading the McCain campaign press releases, even on CNN I heard Republican surrogates like smarmy-ass Lindsey Graham get grilled by Wolf Blitzer (!) about what foreign policy credentials Palin had to assume CINC duties, which they had no answer for. It is being portrayed as a desperate gamble. The term Hail Mary is being used. It is being compared to the Ferraro pick, in my opinion, rather appropriately.
Either the Republicans are starting to give up seriously contesting this race and don't want to damage any of their real prospects, or it's just a crazy desperate shot in the dark, or both.
Even with several years more experience, Palin just doesn't come across as presidential material to me. Not remotely.
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