A pro choice former Dem would have made an interesting ticket with McCain
I was more conservative in 2008. Hearing Palin’s dumb ass on the VP debate was the last time I have that party a shred of credit.
Yep. In 2008 I was an Obama supporter, but I [del]did[/del] DO respect McCain. Palin was a total disaster for their party.
Yep. He normalized the ‘facts don’t matter’ wing of his party. In the long run, it will destroy itself.
This ^
True, politicians have always shown a willingness to exploit voter ignorance, but the selection of Palin was an appeal to people who don’t believe in objective, fact-based truth. That single decision forever took the party down the path of alternative facts, and he’s to blame for it. I think McCain is basically a decent man, but I don’t know if I can ever forgive that decision. He knew better.
That may have been part of a trend, but it was nowhere near the beginning. You could hearken back to Reagan and ‘voodoo economics’ or the numerous and completely unproven allegations against the Clintons, and Obama. Alternative facts have a long history; it just took Kellyanne Mouthpiece to coin the term.
Part of McCain’s maverickness is that he would often make brash, risky decisions. Picking Palin was not so much out of character for him.
Yeah, if you look at what Rush Limbaugh (and others like him) had been spewing for a very long time, it’s difficult to say that Palin was some milestone. More like just another marker along the way of a path that had been trodden for some time.
I forgot that Lieberman endorsed McCain in 2008 at the GOP convention.
I think it was more that she was just so fucking stupid. She didn’t normalize lying, she normalized idiocracy.
I guess we know nobody is going to pick an obscure first term governor from a small state as a running mate again. I wonder if she runs for senate or any other office again. She could possibly win again in Alaska.
The Republicans have “needed” one candidate from the “kook right” on every ticket. Sarah was just kookier that her predecessors.
It is very possible I would have voted for him then.
I loved Obama. I liked how he answered the tough questions and what he was about but thought his national rise was a little fast. This could have made it a real tough choice.
But, picking a running mate is kind of like their first executive decision. May be a clue as to what his cabinet is going to look like.
Hearing Palin picked, I knew nothing about her.
A woman? Interesting.
A governor? That sounds like a good qualification.
Let’s hear her talk. Oh dear god! You have got to be kidding. And everything we learned about her kept making it worse. Seriously, Alaskan voters, what the hell?
Post-truth and unprepared, not stupid.
The email leak showed she wasn’t stupid (they were basically normal statements being made in the emails).
As for unprepared, she could answer questions like what newspapers do you read when she wasn’t in an interview for national office. Unfortunately, McCain and his team decided to take an unprepared politician who had only run a small territory and make her a candidate for Vice President. They did it at the last minute too (in part because Lieberman couldn’t be made into the candidate). So she choked big time. This doesn’t entirely explain her terrible performance, as other candidates have been surprised like this, but I don’t believe it was merely stupidity.
And then there’s “post-truth”. I thought to myself “why doesn’t she use Google before she says anything?” but if you’re stuck in a social media echo chamber you don’t think to use the less-biased Google. It was surprising to me at the time, but echo chambers are frighteningly common. She was deliberately chosen to appeal to the right-wing portion of the post-truth crowd because McCain didn’t appeal to them. Unfortunately that had consequences, and worse, it’s been repeated. Romney’s own campaign fell for it (believing in an echo chamber saying they were winning the election).
She did a half way decent job in the debate vs. Biden. Better than her other TV appearances.
That’s not how I remember it.
My recollection is she had two modes that evening:
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Cluelessly riffing, in the style we came to expect, and
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Making words come out of her mouth that she’d been coached on, but clearly didn’t actually understand
Number 2. She memorized party catch phrases and passed them like bad checks.
I wanted to like her, too. Hearing her speak made that impossible.
She beat the incumbent Alaska governor in the GOP primary in 2006 and prior to that he had been a Senator for 20 years. He must have been a terrible governor , he only got 19% in the primary. She got 51%.
“McCain Regrets Palin”
A line straight from a Captain Obvious commercial.
And then, shockingly, it turned out she couldn’t handle any actual responsibility; the moment the Governor of Alaska job became something harder than just showing up, she took her ball and went home, and tried to portray it as some sort of noble act. I suppose, in a way, it was, but not for the reasons she thought.