Palin's still got it.

The BBQ Pit
21

Well, she/her patron did not win after all. And as I’ve fervently voiced hope for above, she may turn out to be a nine days blunder.

And her current position, as governor of a sparsely-populated outlier state, is not exactly the reins of power.

McCain had lots of reasons to choose her. They just weren’t particularly good reasons.

Several times during the campaign, in which he must have constantly felt besieged by running against a much younger, more charismatic, and POPULAR guy, he made abrupt-to-the-point-of-desperate decisions in an effort to “change the game.” Suspending the campaign to pass the bailout bill was one. Picking Palin was another. None of them worked. In retrospect, they could have been predicted not to work, but hindsight’s 20/20. Heck, from his concession speech (which was the only rhetoric I heard out of him that struck me as at all likable, persuasive, or well-thought-out), maybe even he never really expected them to work. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Again in retrospect, after you get scored on when you pull your goalie in the last minutes of the game, you look stupid, but you’re a genius if you manage instead to tie it up, to use a hockey mom metaphor.

At the time he picked her, the contest was well underway and the VP pick was one of the few major cards he had left to play for dramatic effect and to drum up interest. Well, he certainly did make an “interesting” choice, give him that.

Also, his much-parodied “maverickiness” does in fact seem to be at the heart of who he (thinks he) is. Throughout his career, he’s managed successfully to sell this schtick, and I’m sure he thought she was a good symbol/complement of the rugged individualist he sees himself as.

He’s also been amply rewarded in the past for fairly cheap meaningless stunts like dubbing himself the champion of “straight talk” or colluding with Dems on the constitution-attacking “campaign finance reform” law, or breaking with conservatives on amnesty. What he didn’t realize is that the commentators and media who spoke so (relatively) admiringly about him in these circumstances liked and admired him in the same way a plantation owner (to use an unfortunate metaphor) likes and admires Uncle Remus – he’s not bad for one of those people. But, being the Pet Republican doesn’t do much for you in the varsity match, it’s really just intended to set you up as a foil for the rest of “those people.”

Finally, it was a pander – to cultural conservatives and to women – and pandering is sometimes economically rational behavior. I am sure there are some women, and some evangelicals, who voted for him who otherwise would not have. I am not sure how many, or if they would have been rational to do so (other than being pro-life, I can’t really imagine that Palin had any terribly coherent “conservative” policy views at all), but they exist. Just not in sufficient numbers to change the calculus.

22

Begging to be demotivated.

23

If you go to the newspaper site, and look under the article called “If Alaska Never Became a State”, there is a video and some photos of the gala. Part of Palin’s speech can be heard at about a minute into the video, and photos 4 & 6 show her with the weird hair and pants.

24

Doesn’t Le Pen qualify as an example of something even worse? A while ago, he came fairly close to the Presidency and he’s a fucking Nazi.

25

What was she trying to say, out of curiosity? The Seychelles?

26

Yes.

27

I think she said

…but I could be wrong.

28

Hang on, hang on. Is she seriously under the impression that the brouhaha was about the veracity and not the sheer idiocy of her statement? :confused: Or is this just a really bad attempt at spinning something she’d be much better off never mentioning again?

29

Wow. Y’know, the people at that shindig look really, really white.
And I don’t mean that in the “doesn’t get a lot of sun” connotation.

30

Done.

31

Yeah, but [del]Nutsack[/del] Todd Palin is 1/1154[sup]458[/sup]th Inuit or something, so the Palin’s know exactly what its like to be part of an oppressed minority, or something.

32

Because the incredibly stupid are considered a voting bloc to appeal to, not a social problem to fix. Even Obama – you might hear him talking about educating our children better, but not about the mind boggling ignorance of adults.

33

He’s 1/8 Yup’ik.

34

Le Pen would rather be in the “ruthless” category, that I mentioned as not being a novelty. He certainly isn’t an idiot.

Doesn’t mean that, in the absolute, it would be better to elect a populist extremist than an idiot, but I find rather flooring that an idiot would even find himself in the position of being elected, without even mentioning benefiting from a widespread support.

As for the formal question :

He’s going to retire as soon as he’ll be sure his daughter will succeed him.

35

OK. You gave a number of reasons for why he would have chosen someone like Palin. But none of these reasons explain why he had to choose an idiot. I would assume that finding a conservative woman who wasn’t clueless wouldn’t have been that difficult. The bar is really, really low, here. Especially since he didn’t need (or even want) a well known face. I would also assume that he and his advisers thought hard about this choice, and also knew the potential candidates at least well enough to tell who was an idiot and who wasn’t.

36

I guess you’re right. I suppose I’m accustomed to have an extreme-right candidate getting 20% of the votes. I’m not accustomed to a brain-dead person doing the same.

37

They write themselves.

38

Palin had “fundie” cred, not just conservatism support. She was also young and pretty. Not too many other potential candidates out there like that, I would imagine. (She hunted freakin’ moose, that’s way cooler in a lot of people’s books than a granny who totes around a .38 in her pocket, but has never fired it in self defense.) McCain probably thought that her sex appeal would overshadow much of her stupidity, and that if they carefully orchestrated the campaign, people wouldn’t notice what a drooling idiot she was.

He probably thought that he’d (at worst) be seen as being like GHW Bush, a decent guy, who picked a bit of an idiot for his running mate. That might have worked, if McCain was running against a cold fish like Dukkakis was, but Obama’s pretty much the textbook definition of charisma, so Palin’s flaws were exposed in a rather harsh light.

39

Still got what? An insane sense of her own worth? Syphillis?

40

That is a very shaky assumption, based on the accounts that I read. I think he met her exactly once before announcing he’d picked her, and the reports do not in any way unanimously support a rigorous vetting process having taken place.

Sarah Palin is not an “idiot.” The average IQ is about 100. I suspect but can’t prove that SP has an IQ at least that high, maybe higher. I know many college graduates who are around that level. Many, perhaps most, of them, would and could make the gaffes and have the blind spots SP has. I certainly know a number of Ph.D.'s who could readily be tripped up with some very simple foreign policy questions, for instance, who’s the President of Russia. You’d be amazed by how incurious even fairly smart people can be. I do assure you that I know doctors and lawyers who in the course of a year do not read a single book unrelated to work. Not a few of them, either.

I read somewhere that 86% of Americans don’t have passports. Does that make them idiots or provincial hicks? No, once again it makes them average, and in a big country, where not everyone has a lot of money to travel to distant places, and there are plenty of local attractions, the average person (as did Palin) just doesn’t see the need.

So the answer isn’t SP is an idiot or politicians want to appeal to the idiot populace.

The problem is that McCain picked, not an idiot, but a very very ordinary middle aged woman – ordinary in the narrowness of her interests vis a vis any other middle class woman from a small town who spent 20 years focusing on her kids.

The question is: do we want, not an idiot, but a person of only ordinary or slightly above/below education, experience, intelligence, reading for a position of extraordinary authority, importance, responsibility? Obviously, McCain thought, why the Hell not, what could go wrong, mavericks like me don’t have to play by the normal rules where most people view greater-than-ordinary smarts (book smarts, factual knowledge, IQ, academic achievement, job experience) as very very important criteria for candidates for high office.

I think he erred there, badly, in a typically too-clever-by-half, hubristic way. Remember that this is a guy who’s crashed five airplanes. Given the self-unaware aggressiveness with which she took to her role as one to the manor born (you may know that she had plans to give a vice presidential concession speech to enjoy a little more time in the spotlight, before someone gently but firmly informed her that there was no such thing), maybe, at the end of the day, this is what he saw in her: they’re a lot alike in their personalities.