Sarah Palin changes the electoral landscape

Last weekend, when I found out John McCain had picked Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska to be his Vice Presidential running mate, I was fairly surprised. She had received brief mention as a possible long shot pick earlier this summer, along with former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, as a possible female running mate, but I dismissed her chances of being picked. Because of her lack of national experience combined with her brief career as Alaska governor, I thought she would detract from McCain’s message at the time of being the experienced leader as opposed to Barack Obama’s appearance as a flashy newcomer.

However, the more I thought about the pick over the weekend, the more I liked Palin. I personally thought this summer that McCain needed to make his VP selection before Obama made his, otherwise I couldn’t see how McCain would be able to build any momentum for his candidacy coming after what I assumed would be a well-choreographed rolling-out of Obama’s VP pick followed by the DNC extravaganza in Denver. John “Experience” McCain would not be compelling enough to convince voters to choose him unless he could excite Republicans with a solid VP pick before the DNC and then deliver his own well-run convention (I’m glad I appear to have been wrong).

Obama’s selection of Joe Biden as his running-mate sealed Palin’s selection by McCain. Obama’s brief political career and his entire campaign have been based solely on the premise that he can deliver “Belief In Hope You Can Change In” (or something to that effect) and furthermore transform the rancorous partisan atmosphere in Washington to one of bipartisan compromise and progressive idealism. An admirable goal and one that is well-described in Obama’s speeches, if not in his legislative track record (supporting a bill to secure nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union which passed 94-0 does not equal a career of bipartisanship). But instead of choosing a running-mate who would signal a clean break with the dirty Washington politics of the past such as Virginia Governor Tim Kaine or Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, Obama picked the old partisan stalwart (and blowhard) Joe Biden, whose entire professional adult life has been spent in the US Senate. Biden hardly represents “change” nor does he signal any meaningful drive at bipartisanship in the potential Obama administration. He does little to bring any constituency to the Obama camp that wasn’t already there.

What Biden did do was give McCain an opening to choose someone who would really shake up presidential campaign. Biden’s selection meant the presumed frontrunners for the Republican VP slot, Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty, would be seen as just another bland white guy. Joe Lieberman would be too hard to stomach for the Republican base, which already viewed McCain with suspicion after his bipartisan work on campaign finance reform, illegal immigration, and global warming. McCain has spent his entire career in Washington campaigning against entrenched interests and the collusion between lobbyists and politicians from both parties. He made Republicans in government uncomfortable with those efforts during the Clinton years and angered Republicans in power because of those efforts during the Bush years. It is those efforts and his desire for bipartisan reform that have driven his career which should drive his presidential campaign, not his years of experience and patriotism. His efforts at reform are what have given him that experience and are what have proven his patriotism. His campaign needed (and needs) to be about the causes that have driven him, not the resulting effects of experience. If Obama had chosen a woman, McCain could not have done so without being charged with tokenism, pandering, and playing catch-up to a trendsetting Obama campaign. Facing Obama-Biden instead of Obama-Clinton or Obama-Sebelius gave McCain the opportunity to pick a female running-mate who would underscore and reinforce his message.

But who to choose? The three most-experienced female Republican politicians in the United States are probably Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins from Maine and Kay Bailey Hutchison from Texas. Centrists Snowe and Collins would have generated exactly zero enthusiasm from the conservative base of the party and Hutchison, while solidly conservative and highly popular in Texas, is not a fiery political speaker nor does she add much to McCain’s reform message. Someone who does do that, though, is Sarah Palin.

Palin has made her political career by fighting against the political establishment starting in her hometown of Wasilla, then as chairman of the state oil and gas commission, and then by taking on and defeating former senator and sitting Republican Governor Frank Murkowski, a politician who was as deeply entrenched with the Alaskan oil industry as many politicians in Washington are with various lobbying groups and special interests. She identified the problem (inbred collusion and corruption within the Alaskan political establishment) and determined to fight it head on, a stark contrast to Obama’s political career which began by seeking accommodation and approval from the Chicago Democratic machine. Her short career has embodied the same desire for government reform as has McCain’s to a degree very few other politicians could match.

Incidentally, she is a woman who represents a conservative feminism that gets short shrift in the national media. Part of the reason for this is the very loud and rigid liberal feminism which caricaturizes conservative women as either traitors to their gender or as meek and submissive housewives dominated by their male-oppressor husbands. Palin aptly demonstrates the balance of a successful career with a successful family and does so in defiance of liberal feminism’s constant mantra of women-as-victims. Gloria Steinem recently said the only thing Palin shares with Hillary Clinton is a chromosome and I have to say she couldn’t be more correct. Palin began her professional life balancing her career with her family and moved into politics to ensure better opportunities for them and other families like them. The Clintons’ marriage was based in political ambition from the very beginning. Whereas Palin’s political rise has been a steady progression marked by her own accomplishments, Hillary Clinton rode her husband’s coattails to political prominence and the national stage. Clinton may be intellectually committed to the liberal feminist cause but she represents an appallingly weak case by any standard of merit for breaking that glass ceiling. Liberal feminists should be embarrassed if Hillary Clinton is the best they can do. Sarah Palin, who has earned her way from PTA to mayor to governor, all while balancing a family, is a self-made woman whose accomplishments all feminists should be proud of. Her presence on the national stage over the next few years will offer young American women a strong counter-argument to the liberal feminism of the Democratic Party and many college campuses.

So will she help John McCain win the Presidency? I don’t know, but in a campaign that began so heavily tilted against the Republican candidate she has done more than any other possible running-mate to level the playing field.