Sep 2, 2008 1:08 pm US/Eastern
Palin Comparison
MIAMI (CBS4.com) ―
Sarah Palin, really?
When news leaked out Friday morning that the Alaskan governor was John McCain's choice of running mate, I was dumbfounded. I heard Palin's name mentioned weeks earlier. Palin was right-wing radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh's choice in the veepstakes; he had been advocating for her for weeks. But still, Sarah Palin?
A governor for less than two years and before that the mayor of a town smaller than Key Biscayne, Palin seemed like a bizarre, dare I even say, a crazy choice. How could McCain, who made experience his number one argument against Barack Obama, pick as his running mate someone who last year said, "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq"?
Nevertheless, I wanted the idea of Palin to sink in a little before I formed any conclusions, perhaps do a little research, and conduct a few personal focus groups. So I headed for Key West.
Okay, I was going to go to Key West anyway for the long weekend. I love Key West during a hurricane, that sense of impending doom churning in the Gulf, gives folks license to lose what little inhibition they may have brought with them. But I digress.
Sitting at the bar inside the Green Parrot, I found Maryann, a woman in her late twenties from Upstate New York who was on vacation with her husband, Nathan, an Army helicopter pilot recently back from Iraq and awaiting deployment to Afghanistan.
As we sat there drinking Friday evening, the night of McCain's selection of Palin, Maryann looked up at the TV screen and saw Palin's picture. She let out a loud hoot.
"That's it," she said, "I'm voting for McCain."
Why?
"Chick on the ticket," she screamed. "Chick on the ticket!"
She told me before McCain's choice she wasn't sure who she was voting for. In a conspiratorial whisper, out of earshot from her husband, she confided she was thinking of voting for Obama. Her husband, she said, is gung ho for McCain. "He's in the military," she said, as if that should explain everything.
But now that McCain had selected a woman, her vote was clear.
Obviously, this was what the Republicans wanted. They believe the Chick-On-The-Ticket vote is up for grabs since Obama didn't select Hillary Clinton to be his running mate.
I ordered another round and asked her what she knew about Palin. Maryann knew she was governor of Alaska and that she had a large family – she liked that.
What about issues?
Maryann shrugged.
I asked if abortion was an important issue to her.
She said she could never vote for a candidate who was opposed to a woman's right to make medical decisions about her own body.
Palin, I explained, not only agreed with McCain in opposing abortion and seeking the overturn of Roe vs. Wade, but she went even further. She opposed a woman's right to seek an abortion even in cases of rape or incest.
By now, Nathan joined the discussion, and said he was fine with that. But Maryann, saw it differently. "No, it's not okay," she said sternly.
Did this change who she would vote for?
"Yeah," she said.
The next day, I was on the computer at my hotel checking on the latest news stories about Palin, when a 30-something-year-old woman from El Paso looked over and asked me what I thought of Palin.
"Interesting choice," I said, trying to remain neutral.
"It's insane," she said. "What is McCain thinking?"
The woman was a big Hillary Clinton supporter and wanted Obama to select her as his VP. She was disappointed when he went with Biden, but the thought that selecting Palin was somehow going to win her over, she said, was insulting. She was voting for Obama – now more than ever.
All weekend long, people were talking the presidential race. An older couple from Miami Beach told me they were voting for McCain even though they thought Palin was an awful choice.
And so it went.
Politically I understand the choice of Palin, sort of.
McCain needed to energize his base and excite the Christian conservatives in his party to vote for him in large numbers. This has always been the Karl Rove recipe for winning elections. Turn out more of your core supporters than the other guy can turn out his core supporters and you win. This is how George Bush won in 2004.
But this is a dangerous year to run a base election strategy if you are a Republican. The party in power today has terrible approval numbers.
Republicans contend they are conceding independents with the choice of Palin. Part of the strategy, they maintain, is that while Palin secures the base, McCain can go more aggressively after those independents. In essence, he will be relaunching himself as the old maverick John McCain that so many people loved.
If you watched the news coverage closely on Palin, one of the Republican talking points was to inject the word maverick as often as possible in the discussion. Palin, they said, is a maverick in the McCain mold; someone who has challenged her party, as McCain has done.
In her rollout by the McCain campaign, Palin even talked about how she opposed the so-called "bridge to nowhere." Of course, what came out subsequently was that she was in favor of the bridge to nowhere when she ran for governor. And while she now derides earmarks, the bits of pork placed into legislation that dole out funds for pet projects, she solicited and received millions of dollars in earmarks for her small town when she was mayor.
They tout her as an ethics reformer, but that message is undercut by the fact that she is under investigation herself for firing the head of the Alaska public safety commission when that commissioner allegedly refused to fire a state trooper who was involved in a messy divorce with Palin's sister. There are also fresh allegations that when she was mayor, she fired city employees who refused to support her bid for re-election.
The revelations over the weekend that Palin's 17-year-old unmarried daughter is five months pregnant, is simply a distraction from the larger questions surrounding McCain's choice and what her selection says about McCain. In many ways, the embarrassing family details help Palin because it casts her in a human and sympathetic light.
The conservatives are galvanizing around Palin amid the stories of her daughter. They say it is further proof of the family's strong pro-life stand.
(Naturally, I can't help but wonder if these same Christian conservatives and right-wing radio talk show hosts would have been as sympathetic and understanding if a 17-year Chelsea Clinton had become pregnant while Bill Clinton was president? Would they have used this as a way of attacking both Bill and Hillary Clinton for being bad parents?)
It is fascinating to me how the selection of Palin is placing a renewed spotlight on abortion. It started with the Saddleback Forum when John McCain stated unequivocally that he believed life began at conception and that he would appoint pro-life judges to the Supreme Court and continues now with Palin herself.
One of the reasons why pro-lifers love her is that they know the story behind her own pregnancy. Her youngest child, Trig, has Down Syndrome, a diagnosis which came to light in the early stages of Palin's pregnancy. Palin had the option of terminating the pregnancy, and chose not to.
Now Palin's teenage child has also decided to carry her child to term.
But amid all of the celebrating by conservatives for the choices made by the Palin women, a simple fact remains, it was their choices.
I applaud Sarah Palin and her daughter for deciding to have their babies, as I think most people do. But there is a big difference between Sarah Palin deciding to have her child, and Sarah Palin and John McCain wanting to make the same choice for every other woman in the country.
It is also fascinating to learn that up until a few days before the announcement of Palin, McCain really wanted to select his good friend Joe Lieberman as his running mate, but was told that it would fracture the party because Lieberman is pro-choice.
If McCain was bullied into taking Palin – a woman he had only met once – in order to placate the pro-life conservatives in his party, it destroys the notion McCain is willing to stand up to the extremists around him. So much for the maverick.
Most polls show the country supports Roe vs. Wade and a woman's right to chose and that is especially true among women. So how the choice of an avid pro-life candidate for VP helps John McCain with these crucial swing voters escapes me.
Unless, of course, the McCain campaign is counting on female voters spending the next 66 days drunk and knowing nothing more than one thing: "Yeahhhh! Chick on the ticket!"
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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