Analysis: Palin a fellow maverick, but a risky pick

By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Staff

DENVER -- Like Walter Mondale in 1984, who put the first woman on a major-party ticket, John McCain, in choosing the second one today, is looking for a game-changing moment, a way to persuade voters to look at him in a different light.

Like Mondale, McCain will have a hard time persuading people that he chose the most qualified person to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. Sarah Palin, at 44, has been governor of one of the nation's least-populous states for less than two years.

Unlike Mondale, who ran against incumbent President Ronald Reagan, McCain is facing a candidate whose own experience has been an issue in the campaign, and he can hope that questions about Palin's fitness will only reverberate into questions about Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

And, after 24 years, the country is far more ready for a woman on the national ticket.

But McCain will also confront the suspicion that dogged Mondale -- the sense that this choice was more about him than the person he chose.

The surprise announcement, made after a frenzy of misguided speculation by cable TV, blogs, and newspapers, seemed to have been engineered by the McCain campaign to draw as much attention to the selection process as the selection itself.

McCain, the Republican party's best-known maverick, allowed the names of many expected candidates to raised -- only to be rejected -- to call attention to the fact that he wasn't following the usual political script.

The choice of Palin, who is three years younger than Obama and 28 years younger than McCain, represents a bold political gamble.

She is an obvious bridge to women voters, including the many Democrats who supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries, but her selection also limits McCain's ability to build his fall campaign around the notion that Obama, after three and a half years in the US Senate, is "not ready" to be president.

That claim is at the center of the GOP campaign -- with press releases and emails headed "Not Ready" -- and has gained some traction in recent weeks as McCain has risen in the polls.

But McCain obviously feels his recent rise isn't enough to carry him to the White House, and that a safe, traditional pick -- of which there were many in the GOP roster -- wouldn't give him enough of a bounce.

This week's Democratic convention, at which women's votes were courted aggressively, may have helped to tip the scales for Palin.

In addition, other recent developments -- including all the attention given to McCain's seven homes -- mitigated against other candidates.

Mitt Romney, who was the favorite of 40 percent of GOP convention delegates in a poll released Thursday and complemented McCain in some important ways, is a multi-millionaire who has four homes of his own.

And Romney, who toggled to the left to run for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and then to the right to run for president against McCain, only to shift into one of McCain's strongest supporters, seems to practice politics by the usual rules.

By choosing Palin -- a popular, charismatic governor with a maverick reputation of her own -- McCain is trying to refresh his own claim to Obama's message of change, infusing the race with a precedent-shattering choice of his own.

In the end, the success of the pick will depend on how Palin conducts herself, especially in the Oct. 2 debate with Obama's well-seasoned running mate, Senate Joe Biden.

She will have to establish her own credibility as a future president, without the benefit of the 19 months that Obama has spent on the campaign trail.

John McCain is asking a lot of Sarah Palin.