Why John McCain Picked Sarah Palin For Vice President

The questions swirling around the political and punditry classes since Republican certain Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin have been: why…and exactly when? The New York Times provides some answers which should give McCain’s fans and foes plenty of ammunition.

The bottom line: McCain realized he could face a virtual party revolt if he chose his first choice, his friend and political soulmate Connecticut independent Sen. Joe Lieberman. He didn’t want to be seen as pure GOP establishment, sought to regain his 2000 maverick aura and noticed a bunch of angry Hillary Clinton supporters out there just waiting for a new candidate.

So he made a quick choice, choosing someone he had never met before their first chat — and went with his gut.

For weeks, advisers close to the campaign said, Mr. McCain had wanted to name as his running mate his good friend Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democrat turned independent. But by the end of last weekend, the outrage from Christian conservatives over the possibility that Mr. McCain would fill out the Republican ticket with Mr. Lieberman, a supporter of abortion rights, had become too intense to be ignored.

With time running out, and after a long meeting with his inner circle in Phoenix, Mr. McCain finally picked up the phone last Sunday and reached Ms. Palin at the Alaska State Fair. Although the campaign’s polling on Mr. McCain’s potential running mates was inconclusive on the selection of Ms. Palin — virtually no one had heard of her, a McCain adviser said — the governor, who opposes abortion, had glowing reviews from influential social conservatives.

Mr. McCain was comfortable with two others on his short list, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. But neither was the transformative, attention-grabbing choice Mr. McCain felt he needed, top campaign advisers said, to help him pivot from his image as the custodian of the status quo to a change agent like his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama.

Keep in mind that we’ve written posts here during the campaign season about McCain walking a tightrope: trying to somehow keep those who supported him in 2000 because he was a self-professed straight-talking “maverick” who didn’t always agree with his party while trying to win over parts of the Republican Party that opposed and demonized him in 2000. His image makeover for the GOP began with that famous photo of him hugging President George W. Bush. His political gut probably told him he needed to win back many of his 2000 fans if he had a chance to beat Obama, whose well-received speech solidified the Illinois Senator’s change argument.

Another key factor, the Times reports, was “Mr. Obama’s decision to pass over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as his running mate opened the possibility for Republicans to put a woman on the ticket and pick off some of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters.” And here’s what happened next:

At 11 a.m. on Thursday, at the McCain vacation compound near Sedona, Ariz., Mr. McCain invited Ms. Palin to join him on the ticket. He hardly knew her, and she had virtually no foreign policy experience, but Ms. Palin was a “kindred spirit,” a McCain adviser said. Mr. McCain was betting, the adviser said, that she would help him reclaim the mantle of maverick that he had lost this year.

The selection was the culmination of a five-month process, described by Mr. McCain’s inner circle and outside advisers in interviews this past weekend, and offers a glimpse into how Mr. McCain might make high-stakes decisions as president.

At the very least, the process reflects Mr. McCain’s history of making fast, instinctive and sometimes risky decisions. “I make them as quickly as I can, quicker than the other fellow, if I can,” Mr. McCain wrote, with his top adviser Mark Salter, in his 2002 book, “Worth the Fighting For.” “Often my haste is a mistake, but I live with the consequences without complaint.”

This explains some of the dismay that can now be seen in some Republican circles in choosing Palin, who this weekend faced the embarrassing spectacle of Alaska’s two biggest newspapers questioning her fitness…and quotes from some top Republicans in Alaska questioning it as well.

Palin’s pick also seems to have caused blogger Andrew Sullivan, an Obama admirer and one-time admirer of McCain’s, to make a clean break from the national GOP ticket on the grounds that McCain is a loose cannon. He writes:

The Palin pick says much more about McCain than it does about Palin (all it says about her is that she didn’t have the good sense to turn it down). What it says about McCain is that he is more interested in politics than policy, more interested in campaigning than governing, tactical when he should be strategic, and reckless when he should be considered.

He is as big a gamble as president as Palin is as vice-president. This decision was about gut, about politics, about cynicism, and about vanity. It’s Bushism metastasized.