{"id":104,"date":"2008-08-29T12:06:08","date_gmt":"2008-08-29T12:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/progressiverevival\/2008\/08\/picking-palin-mccains-folly-or.html"},"modified":"2008-08-29T12:06:08","modified_gmt":"2008-08-29T12:06:08","slug":"picking-palin-mccains-folly-or","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2008\/08\/picking-palin-mccains-folly-or.html","title":{"rendered":"Picking Palin: McCain’s Folly, or “crazy like a fox”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

John McCain has certainly revived his maverick label by picking–or plucking from obscurity–freshman Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. (WaPo coverage here<\/a>, and NYT coverage here<\/a>.) Like every candidate, there are pluses and minuses with her.<\/p>\n

On the plus side, Christian conservatives (as God-o-Meter knows and shows<\/a>), are going to be delighted. She is a self-described “hockey mom” who is pro-life and a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. She is a moose-hunting mother of five, her latest–born just last April–has Down syndrome, and she never considered the option of abortion. She has bucked  the scandal-plagued GOP establishment in Alaska, and has shown a mild green streak without really undermining her state’s interests in mining and Big Oil. She is against taxes (except, apparently, when it came to building stuff in her own town), and against gay marriage. Check, check, check. <\/p>\n

She is a sweetheart, a 44-year-old fresh face who is as far outside the Beltway as you can possibly get without being Russian. And she is so attractive the Obama camp will have to be careful not to look like they’re bullying her, or patronizing her. <\/p>\n

And those things are also major downsides in the general election. Will someone like Palin really pull in those supposedly disaffected Hillary supporters? Not likely, not after Bill’s show-stopping speech. <\/p>\n

Moreover, how can the McCain camp work the “inexperienced” wedge against Obama when Sarah Palin will be a heartbeat away from an Oval Office that would be occupied by John McCain, who would be the oldest man ever elected president? She has less than two years as governor, and before that the sum total of her governing experience was as mayor of Wasilla, a town of less than 7,000. <\/p>\n

If Obama has been painted as little more than a good-looking Esquire cover guy, how about Palin, a former beauty queen who was runner-up in 1984 as Miss Alaska? Some will think McCain picked his daughter, others his third wife. (What is it with Republicans and beauty pageants, anyway?) Palin is sharper than Dan Quayle, but still…<\/p>\n

Imagine the Biden-Palin VP debate. Voters want change, but they also want ballast. And they want someone who can step in. Sure, Palin is a wonderful mom. But she is the mother of FIVE, and the last a special needs infant born just FOUR MONTHS ago. She’ll have to have Mary Poppins and a couple Super Nannys with 911 on speed-dial if she hopes to fill the 24\/7 job as Vice-President. <\/p>\n

Her environmental cred may not stretch too far, either. Check out the dissection by the HuffPost’s Chris Kelly<\/a> of her Polar Bear record and her January NYTimes op-ed<\/a> in which she said all was well with the big critters. Now that the polar bears are actually swimming across hundreds of miles of open water <\/a>looking for receding ice floes, you can imagine the video in the camapign ads to come.  <\/p>\n

And while she has a reputation as a whistle-blower on ethics, she is also under investigation for a firing and other machinations related to penalties against her estranged ex-brother-in-law, a state trooper. Add to that the fact that the dominant Republican Party in Alaska is a cesspool of scandals and indictments, and Palin’s odor of sanctity may not endure. <\/p>\n

So what does the choice of Palin say to all those “new” evangelicals? Will her fresh face attract them? Or will she come across as the old religious right in a new guise?  <\/p>\n

Palin could prove to be McCain’s salvation, and a necessary gamble given his own weaknesses. (Funny, McCain’s people were saying the other day that the choice of Biden pointed up Obama’s weaknesses, and did not compensate for them…) But the audacity (nice word) of his choice could also smack of desperation.<\/p>\n

My sense is that the positives balance out the negatives, and McCain can’t afford a “wash” in terms of gains and losses. Palin will reassure the Religious Right, and surely draw in those voters, especially Christian “soccer moms,” who see her as “one of us,” only with a hockey stick. But with all voters growing in their suspicion of the use of religion in politics, as shown by the latest Pew poll<\/a>, Palin’s best weapon may be firing blanks. <\/p>\n

PS: I wasn’t sure, but it’s pronounced PAY-lin. We’ll all know that soon enough. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John McCain has certainly revived his maverick label by picking–or plucking from obscurity–freshman Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. (WaPo coverage here, and NYT coverage here.) Like every candidate, there are pluses and minuses with her. On the plus side, Christian conservatives (as God-o-Meter knows and shows), are going to be delighted. She is a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,32,1,60,13,20,18,9],"tags":[37,84,5,85,83],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abortion","category-christians","category-election-08","category-environment","category-evangelicals","category-homosexuality","category-international-relations","category-religion-in-the-public-square","tag-abortion-2","tag-mccain-vice-president","tag-obama","tag-religious-right","tag-sarah-palin"],"yoast_head":"\nPicking Palin: McCain's Folly, or "crazy like a fox"? - Progressive Revival<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2008\/08\/picking-palin-mccains-folly-or.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Picking Palin: McCain's Folly, or "crazy like a fox"? - Progressive Revival\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"John McCain has certainly revived his maverick label by picking–or plucking from obscurity–freshman Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}