Why was Palin even considered for the Republican party? Was it just cause shes a women and is a good contrast to Obamas race? It seems McCain is backing her
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/29/mccain-on-backing-palin-i_n_180457.html
From what I know shes a crazy nutjob… Are they just trying to get all the female votes or is their another reason?
The woman thing was part of it, but why her instead of any number of actually capable Republican women with “bigger” names?
The religiocrazy. McCain was poison to the evangelical/fundamentalist base of the party, and they were stuck in semi-permanent “Do I hold my nose and vote for him or not?” mode all spring and summer. The only way to get them to line up behind him was to pick someone who was seriously Bible-Church-type Christian, and Huckabee was too populist for the money-men. Palin was a compromise…someone who was a)female (PUMAs line up here), b) religious (Focus On The Family types line up here) and c) acceptable to the money-men (Wall Street line up here).
McCain chose her very, very quickly after meeting her. Personally, I think that he was charmed by her and made a gamble that few of his handlers would have advised had he talked to them about it in depth.
Well, I can see some advantages:
What McCain didnt care about is that she’s a walking, talking disaster. She cant think on her feet and really is a pretty dim bulb overall.
From what I know shes a crazy nutjob…
That’s because youre not a social conservative. Here you have an openly anti-abortion woman who is photogenic and when she has a prepared speech can seem okay. Im sure in McCain’s mind a conservative woman who is also attractive was probably a slam dunk. I think this just shows you how out of touch he truly is. Not to mention it would be rude for him not to endorse her in 2012. Afterall, he created her. Snubbing her would also mean that he made a mistake in picking her in the first place.
I honestly thing the GOP is hurting for star power. Right now they have Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bobby Jindal, and Sarah Palin. Out of that rogues gallery perhaps Palin is the sanest and the most likely to win a vote.
Moved to GD from GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
McCain is declining to say he would back her. This is the second time he’s demurred at saying he would support her as the 2012 nominee.
She was chosen because the McCain campaign was hoping to attract disappointed Hillary voters after Obama won the Democratic nomination. All of the most qualified women in the GOP are pro-choice, though (K.B Hutchinson, K. Whitman, Olympia Snowe, C. Rice, E. Dole, etc.), and since the evangelicals were threatening to riot on the Convention floor if McCain picked a pro-choice running mate, he had to climb down the ladder all the way to Palin to find a pro-life Republican woman with anything resembling credentials. It was a stunt pick. They were trying to straddle a line that was impossible to straddle. The fact that they thought Hillary supporters would switch en masse to vote for Palin just because she was a woman was a horrendous miscalculation.
I don’t know how you drew the conclusion ‘it seems McCain is backing her’ from that article, given that its opening paragraph is, “Sen. John McCain isn’t committing to supporting his vice presidential pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, if she runs for president in 2012. McCain, the GOP’s presidential nominee last year, says he wants to see who the other candidates are and what the situation might be.” In fact that interview gave me the impression he’d prefer not to support her, but he’s not going to cause any friction or commit himself too early by admitting that now.
The reason Palin was considered? There was endless talk about it after she was nominated. The media consensus was that she would ‘reignite the base’ - being an evangelical Christian who strongly opposed abortion, strongly supported gun rights and opposed certain gay rights, she was someone the right-wing party base could warm to more easily than they could to the fairly moderate McCain. Coupled with the fact that she’s young, female, attractive and charismatic with a photogenic family and a down-to-earth background, she seemed a good way of countering Barack Obama’s youth and charisma while also appealing to women and working-class voters. But in the end polls seemed to show that while she succeeded in gaining the support of the Republican base, her right-wing views and her dismal performances in interviews turned off more moderate ‘floating’ voters than they attracted.
That, and it seems he convinced himself (or was convinced) that if he could just defuse Obama’s convention bounce he’d be able to make it. Nope.
Interestingly enough, McCain won’t endorse her, yet he admits that people voted “for” her more than they voted for him.
-Joe
Even after all the mud that was thrown at her during the campaign, Palin remains one of the more popular governors in the U.S., and her approval rating in Alaska is somewhere over 60% - about where Obama’s approval rating is.
Perhaps there’s more to her than the Huffington Post is willing to admit. Not that I would argue with such an unbiased cite…
Well, maybe there is. Is that a premise you would like to support, or simply to make a vague gesture in that general direction while keeping the door of deniability ajar?
I would love to hear the argument that a 60% approval rating in Alaska is generalizable to the rest of the United States.
Nope. There’s actually less to her, not more. An approval rating in a rabidly conservative state is not very meaningful, especially given all the publicity she’s gotten in the last year.
And whining about “mud being thrown at her” is incredibly disingenuous given the facts that a.) it isn’t really true. Palin was protected like a puppy for the most part, most of her media troubles were self-inflicted, and much of it came from fellow Republicans (including some very prominnt and respected ones like Colin Powell) and b.) she hypocritically led the way in throwing slime at Obama and working her imbecile crowds into borderline lynch mobs.
Maeglin beat me to it. Darn it — but I will addd this:
from SamStone
The population of Alaska is a very different animal compared to the demographic of the rest of the USA. Just the social pathologies that exist in that frozen hellhole alone make the rest of the country look like the British upper class.
But lets not dump on Miss Palin. One of my greatest hopes is that the Republican Party nominates her as their Presidential candidate in 2012. Maybe Rush as VP. It would be 1964 all over again and finally the Republican Party would have to face the hard decisions that they refused to face this time.
Palin was
There were no other options to get all four of these. (I still suggest that the lack of high-profile pro-life women in the party is a CLUE.)
However, before the campaign, her approval rating was in the '90s. Cite.. The cite is from the Weekly Standard, so it has to be accurate.
I’m sure there is some pride in Alaska about her national recognition - not from our Alaskan Dopers, I know.
I don’t see any claim that it is. It is worth noting that her very high approval ratings came before her run for the VP, and well into her term as governor. When she was governor as long as Obama has been President, her approval rating was around 90%. (Cite.)
She’s a maverick. like McCain, with her breaks with Don Young and Ted Stevens. In contrast to the slime of Chicago politics out of which our current President emerged, she championed ethics in state government. She cut the Alaska construction budget by the second largest amount in their history, and famously sold the jet, and generally showed her ability to cut the budget in matters large and small (she declined a pay raise as governor). Cite for all of the above.
The automatic and ravening hatred for her and any Republican running for public office on the SDMB may make it impossible for many to actually recognize the several strengths she brought to the campaign, but they are quite real nonetheless.
Regards,
Shodan
However she did an excellent job at charming the National Review wing of the party before the nomination, so there was support for her there. I believe Bill Kristol was a cheerleader. She didn’t come out of nowhere.
A national politician not committing to something that doesn’t matter for another three years is NOT news.
That McCain hasn’t picked his favorite candidate for an election that is going to happen three years and six months from now is a nothing, zero story. Just because she was his running mate doesn’t mean that he has to think that she would be the best candidate in 2012, no more than Obama has some obligation to announce that he wants Joe Biden to run for the White House in 2016.
The claim was, 60% of Alaskans think of her favorably, therefore there must be something “more to her”. There are obviously two problems to that claim.
Alaska is not exactly a random and representative sample of the opinion of the rest of the US. Enough said.
Approval ratings might not be the best way to gauge whether or not the candidate has “substance”. Hell, Murkowski also had an approval rating of 60% in 2003. For that matter, Gray Davis’ approval rating was 60% or higher 14 times. Mitt Romney, whom even detractors might not argue that he is a person of real intelligence and substance, achieved this magical 60% mark a mere 4 times, fewer than half of Jesse Ventura’s number of terms on the Dean’s List.
Fortunately, the clear majority of the American people decided otherwise. For once, the opinion of the SDMB seemed to be closer with that of rank and file Americans.