McCain's calculated choice
PERHAPS JOHN McCain's choice of Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate will prove to be a masterstroke of political demographics. At the least, the surprise move reveals a willingness to take a major risk. Yet gutsiness isn't everything. In picking a first-term governor with no foreign-policy record, the Republican presidential candidate undermined his own central themes - experience and national security - and exposed the deep fault lines within his campaign.
As the Republican National Convention opens next week in St. Paul, these questions linger: Is John McCain still the fabled truth teller and maverick? Or is the Arizona senator just doing anything and everything to get himself elected president?
In announcing his choice yesterday, the day after Barack Obama's acceptance speech, McCain meant to deny the Democratic nominee any post-convention bounce. And in choosing a female running mate, he clearly hoped to win over supporters of Hillary Clinton. Introducing Palin in Ohio, McCain declared that "she doesn't let anyone tell her to sit down."
But the pick is hard to square with what Republicans have been saying all week: that Obama is too green to be president. Because Obama has bared his soul in a bestselling memoir and his decisions have been under a microscope for the last four years, voters can assess his judgment. Palin, in contrast, has next to no track record. Her ticketmate would be the oldest first-term president ever and has had health troubles in the past.
McCain, meanwhile, is struggling to accommodate Palin within the logic of his campaign, which up to now stressed an existential threat from Islamic fundamentalism. When he talked Palin up as an enemy of special interests - of "those who value their privileges over their responsiblities" - he might have been Obama or Clinton.
And whether McCain's gambit will persuade Clinton supporters is a whole other matter. Palin has an intriguing biography and shows enthusiasm and pluck, and her opposition to abortion rights and her strong embrace of the gun lobby could shore up McCain's standing with the Republican base. But those same two positions also make her a tough sell to Democratic women.
In recent weeks, McCain has tried to knock Obama off his pedestal, to redefine him not as an agent of change but as an empty celebrity or a conventional politician. But McCain is vulnerable to the same treatment - especially after his highly calculated choice of running mate. At his convention next week, McCain will have to show that, in making the compromises needed to become president, he hasn't lost himself. 