McCain and the women

Amidst all the speculation surrounding Mitt Romney, Bobby Jindal and Tim Pawlenty, could John McCain be secretly considering taking a woman as his Vice Presidential pick? While top tier black candidates are as common as unicorns in the GOP, there are a number of successful, high profile women who could fill the bill. The Politico’s David Kuhn ruminates on some of the female frontrunners today.

While the vice presidential slot may be John McCain’s best means of wooing those Hillary Rodham Clinton supporters who remain loath to embrace Barack Obama, the Republican party is a thin source of politically viable women, leaving McCain with few top-tier options.

One obvious choice is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She’s as near to Cheney on policy as she is far from him symbolically. Rice, however, has consistently denied interest. While such denials are par for the course for prospective veeps, if Rice is indeed out of the mix, that would leave McCain with three other likely female running mates to consider:

Kuhn puts forward Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Frankly, the entire premise of the article strikes me as journalism with too much time on its hands. The question we need to ask is, does McCain really need to name a woman as his running mate and would it buy him any political advantage? The short answer appears to be no. There are plenty of Republican women out there and they’re already going to vote for McCain, regardless of the genital set held by his running mate. That leaves “Hillary’s Women.”

In just the short period since Hillary’s June 7 endorsement of Obama the numbers have swung dramatically in Barack’s direction and the trends seem to indicate that trajectory continuing. Yes, there will be a handfull of dead-enders out there, but McCain’s veep pick isn’t going to do much there anyway. These are non-issue oriented voters who are fixated on the cult of Hillary’s personality and gender, (an ironic point, given they made the same accusation of Obama’s supporters) and no olive branch is going to assuage them. Their smallish numbers will likely produce a lot of media noise and smoke, but little in the way of fire, and they are already well on track to either vote for McCain or stay home in November.

Hutchison offers nothing to McCain but Texas, which he should already have locked up. (There were a few outlier polls showing Obama threatening there, but it’s hard to imagine him losing the Lone Star state. If he does, he may as well stop campaigning now.) Fiorina has never held elected office and would take a lot of air out of the McCain team’s argument about Obama’s lack of experience. Palin isn’t a terrible choice, but she’s almost entirely unknown and, like Hutchison, comes from a state which McCain should already win handily.

None of these choices look like big gains for John McCain. He is looking at a very sketchy electoral college map in November, and he needs a smart pick that will shore up a weak geographic area and pull numbers in wavering demographics. The three suggested picks from this article provide none of that.