McCain wanted Lieberman or Ridge, met with Palin for the first time last week

So says the New York Times.

Thoughts? I’m of the opinion that she was not subjected to extensive vetting, and I wonder about the judgment inherent in making such an important decision with such apparent haste.

Apparently the McCain camp says they did vet her, although they just dispatched a team of roughly a dozen folks to Alaska to see if there’s anything else they need to know about.

Wonder no more, McCain used bad judgement. And it will most likely cost him the election.

Lawmakers in her own state call this a completely silly decision, stating she’s not ready at all!

The McCain campaign swears she was thoroughly vetted, but the evidence doesn’t bear that out. The local paper in Wasilla said the first person who asked for information about her from their archives was a member of Obama’s staff, and Republicans in Alaska who claim they know everything happening up there had no idea.

Yeah, reading that was… surprising. He did not meet her for the first time last week, however - I thought they met in February at a governor’s conference or some other event. It made sense that McCain wanted to shake things up. That he did so while apparently not looking very hard at Palin’s background just doesn’t make sense.

Even so, so far these are not major scandals. It’s not like she was once given ECT for a mental illness. Of course nobody knows exactly how the public will react to all of this since not much was known about her in the first place. This threatens to become really embarrassing for McCain.

Did MCain really discard Pawlenty and Rommey for being too predictable?

or is that the newspaper asumption?

Because it would speak very bad of MCain if his criteria for choosing VP includes whether or not they are a surprise!.

He met with her for the first time last week. My understanding is that while he was introduced to her at the NGA conference in January, it was extremely brief and they didn’t actually, y’know, chat about anything of substance.

In context it’s something the paper got from a source or sources.

This has been the Washington buzz for many weeks, that McCain was looking for a “game changing” VP to shake up the race. I don’t think that’s newspaper assumption, it is pretty much the conventional wisdom here.

The New York Times contradicts this article in the Washington Post:

So… He met with her at the Governor’s conference, then had a 15 minute conversation with her there. Then a six-person team dug into the various aspects of her background, watched all the media clips they could find of her, had an FBI check done, etc. McCain then phoned her and had a ‘lengthy’ call which resulted in him asking her to fly out for a further meeting. Then she flew out and spent hours with McCain and his wife.

Plus, his campaign advisor spoke to her ‘numerous times’.

Considering how many demands are on a candidate’s time, and the number of people that had to be vetted and interviewed, this doesn’t sound like a slapdash, frantic pick to me.

The FBI denies that a check was done, FWIW.

Any particular reason you give more credence to the Post article than to the later-in-time article from the Times?

Well, for one thing, the NY Times has been factually inaccurate in a couple of provable ways. One was that they said that Palin was a member of the Alaska Independence Party - which was not true, was not sourced, and which was disproved when Palin produced her voter registration card showing she’s been a registered Republican since 1982. Another was when the article said that revelations about the daughter’s pregnancy brought the quality of the vetting process into question. Except that Palin had volunteered that information to McCain during the vetting process, and the NY Times knew that.

Finally, I simply don’t trust the reporting of the New York Times any more. They wear their partisanship on their sleeve. This is the newspaper that never reported Al Gore Junior’s arrest for driving while high on pot, going 100 mph on his way to the Democratic convention in 2000, because they felt it wasn’t newsworthy. The same newspaper that did everything it could to avoid printing the story about John Edwards affair, and has refused to investigate deeply into the William Ayers/Rezko connections on Obama’s side - but which has THREE first-page stories in Tuesday’s edition regarding the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s daughter.

The NY Times is firmly in the tank for Barack Obama, and everyone knows it.

Okey doke. I’m assuming you’re also discounting the Times’s Republican sources?

I don’t think there is necessarily any contradiction in the two. Palin easily could have been registered Republican, but been involved enough with the AIP to be considered a member. Besides, it’s difficult to see a NYT agenda when the clerk of the party is the one that said she was a member, and several other news organizations have reported it.

Well, there’s also how IIRC, that there’s no love lost between Palin and a very large part of the Alaska GOP establishment machine, so it’s credible that Alaska Republicans would be a source for unflattering info AND at the same time that it not be the most reliable unflattering info.

Politically, it is not a bad idea to seek to create a “mirror ticket” from that of the Dems. It’s in the details of execution that such moves can founder. Looks to me like Palin was a “new face” that the 'Pubs woudl have been thinking of for the future, and Mac decided to move her turn up ahead.

And if McCain really thought taking up Lieberman as VP was the most desirable, viable option, THAT, and not settling on Palin, makes me question his judgment more.

Nice that she has a voter registration card but the AIP claims her as one of theirs.

Now I don’t know about Alaskan law (and I doubt you do either) - but I can certainly imagine someone officially registering as one thing while joining the membership list of another organization. As treis said. I’d be curious to hear what it was she said to the AIP conference.

As to what McCain knew and when he knew it, well last I heard he wouldn’t say exactly when he found out.

Maybe all the Times papers are lying.

Oh, yes, she was. :mad:

John McCain clinched the Repub. nomination in February. And yet this selection looks more and more like a last-second panic move on his part, after the Dems had such a great convention. Nice leadership qualities, Mac.

Oh well, if the clerk of a fringe party says the governor was a member, it MUST be true. They wouldn’t happen to have any, you know, evidence, would they?

Here’s what McCain’s camp says about the vetting process