There’s a trend in post-election discussions to minimize the significance of Sarah Palin. Jonathan Martin even goes so far as to say “nobody I know is trying to ‘pin the loss’ on Palin. After all, it was McCain and his top aides who choose her. The post-mortem spin is more geared around the unpopularity of President Bush and economic crisis.”
Really? Clearly, she wasn’t the only reason for McCain’s resounding defeat, but I think her Epic Fail of a candidacy certainly played a significant role. And clearly a decent amount of the blame has to fall back on the McCain folks for actually picking her. It destroyed their strongest message (experience and steadiness), she wasn’t vetted, it was an impulse decision that not surprisingly didn’t turn out well.
All that said, I don’t think it was unreasonable for them to expect that she could hold her own for two short months. And there is simply no way to overstate how much of a disaster those Gibson and Couric interviews were. I don’t think it’s even a slight exaggeration to say that I personally know hundreds of people who could have skated through questions that left her perplexed, fumbling around, and looking like an utter buffoon.
If she had turned out to be moderately competent, it would have been all to easy for them to dispel most of people’s doubts about her. That she looked like a gimmick, and then confirmed it in dramatic fashion essentially eliminated any chance for McCain.
It would have been a tough road regardless, but it became impossible with Sarah the Anchor.
Now, there are two ways of telling this story. One where she was simply unprepared and cracked under the pressure of the high stress campaign. Or another where she really is as terrible of a national candidate as she appeared. If it’s the first, she might very well be able to recuperate her image and make another run at it (though if she tries in 2012 I can only imagine it being a disaster). If it’s the latter, though, for her own sake she should probably just stick to Alaskan politics where apparently the Republicans can get re-elected no matter what they do.