Broken Right Wing – Adeem
Wise Up – Aimee Mann
After the Laughter – And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead
Me, on August 30th, the day after the Sarah Palin announcement: “Sarah Palin? Really?“
I thought it was a terrible choice at the time. It just seemed tremendously implausible that this was really going to appeal to Clinton voters (remember how at one time it was accepted wisdom that Palin was going to win over disaffected Hillary supporters?), and I thought it completely undermined the best line of attack McCain had going. Namely: trust me, I’m experienced and reasonable (and implicitly: you probably can’t trust the black guy with the funny name).
The thing about that approach is that it would have tapped into the things they’ve tried to do with Ayers and all that garbage without having to actually get into the muck as much. If the McCain campaign had strong message discipline on that, they could imply this stuff instead of having to make themselves look like the Looney Tunes brigade by putting it front and center.
I expected that within a few weeks, it was going to be clear that the Palin pick was a bad choice that would ultimately do more harm than good. That said, I never imagined it would turn out as disastrously as this.
Palin’s qualifications to be president rank as voters’ top concern about McCain’s candidacy – ahead of continuing President Bush’s policies, enacting economic policies that only benefit the rich and keeping too high of a troop presence in Iraq.
That’s right. Palin is the primary issue for people with McCain. All of the prominent Republicans who have recently endorsed Obama have cited her as major reason. Schwarzenegger does his best to dance around the issue but admits that she’s not ready. Even McCains BFF Joe Lieberman said “Thank God she’s not going to have to be president from day one.”
More data from the poll cited above: in that study Palin has a favorable/unfavorable ratio of 38/47. When you think about it, that’s really astonishing. This is someone who was unknown by 98% of the country less than two months ago. Now she’s got unfavorables of 47 percent!
Which makes it all the more astonishing to me that people are talking about her like she’s a frontrunner for 2012. That’s insane. People hate her. They think she’s a lunatic and an idiot. I can see her getting traction in the primaries for two reasons only. First, the base still likes her. Second, people might think it’ll get Tina Fey to come back and reprise her impression.
But seriously, the base may like her but they’re not that stupid. They like Huckabee and Jindal and plenty of other folks just fine, too. Surely, they will be able to see through the haze of their love for her and notice that going down that road invites the status of a permanent minority party.
This is all happening in the context of swirling rumors about her going off message. For example, from Politico, there’s this report:
Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain’s camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain’s decline.
“She’s lost confidence in most of the people on the plane,” said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to “go rogue” in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.
“I think she’d like to go more rogue,” he said.
And then there’s this. Marc Ambinder reports about this phenomenon and mentions that the “palling around with terrorists” line was her own off-message invention. In response, Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser shoots back an angry response: “Just read your post. This is on the record. This is cleared by HQ. It is a fact that Barack Obama was palling around with terrorists. It was a fact before Governor Palin said it in a fully vetted speech and it is fact today. It is bullshit to claim or write anything else.”
Yikes. Ladies and gentlemen, this is what it looks like when a campaign is running off the rails.
It’s also funny to try and resolve the question about whether going “rogue” is an intentional strategy or rather the result of simply being unaware of what the message is supposed to be. There have been a host of examples recently. On immigration, she supports a relatively moderate position. Back on the Bush Doctrine she stumbled into supporting the reasonable “preemptive but not preventative strikes” approach. Remember on Pakistan where she failed to process the convoluted McCain approach and just blurted out the reasonable Obama position? And now there’s the fact that she appears to fully align herself with Obama on negotiations and preconditions.
As Yglesias points out: “One of the virtues of Sarah Palin being badly underbriefed about national security issues, is that she has to rely on common sense to bluff her way through questions, and she keeps accidentally straying from conservative dogma.”
The crucial thing going on in all these examples is that she simply doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be saying because she doesn’t really have a position.
All this considered, I’m betting McCain is really wishing he could invoke the time-honored playground tradition of the “takeback” right now. I imagine him waking up in the middle of the night, terrified: I had this horrible dream that I nominated a maniac, loose-cannon, know-nothing for my VP. Thank god is was only a dream…
All that said, I’m not convinced that there really was a way to thread this needle. Sure it would have been less disastrous to nominate Romney or Pawlenty, but McCain is down by a LOT right now. And tempting as it is to put the blame on particular choices, a big part of it is that he’s simply running on a tarnished brand against a very good candidate. If he had executed flawlessly, sure, he could be ahead right now. But that’s true of virtually any race. And it requires ignoring the reality of the past eight years of repeated self-inflicted wounds by the Republicans.
Remember in the summer when everyone on the Left was freaking out because Obama was ahead, but not be nearly as much as he “ought” have been? I tend to think about the recent widening of the margin as simply those underlying factors becoming concrete.
That doesn’t mean I’m complacent. For all the disasters of the McCain camp, they’re still polling within 5-7 points, and while a recovery of that margin may be unlikely, it’s certainly within the realm of possibility. In that context, you have to see the Palin pick as a gigantic anchor on an already difficult task. And if they do manage to eke out a win, it will be very much in spite of her.