With less than a week before the votes are counted, an ongoing media narrative is the continued friction — real or otherwise — between Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain and his pick for Veep, Gov. Sarah Palin. Is she sinking or has she sunk his campaign? Or is HE sinking and has he sunk HER campaign?
If you’re a Republican, where you point the finger sometimes depends on where you stand in what is shaping up to be a post-election ideological battle for the soul of the Republican party, even if McCain does pull off a Trumanesque come-from-behind victory. (Question: How many times has Truman rolled over in his grave as the politicians way behind vowed to look just like him on election day?)
The latest context for the ongoing coverage in the new and old media punditry class is this ABC report where, in a quotation clearly extracted by a reporter and not offered spontaneously, Palin says, yes, by golly, she does intend to stay on the national scene if McCain crashes to defeat. No big surprise, really, but she mouthed the words a reporter was trying to get her to say and a new punditry topic was born:
In an interview with ABC News’ Elizabeth Vargas, the Republican vice-presidential nominee was asked about 2012, whether she was discouraged by the daily attacks on the campaign trail, and would instead pack it in and return to her home state of Alaska.
“I think that, if I were to give up and wave a white flag of surrender against some of the political shots that we’ve taken, that would bring this whole … I’m not doing this for naught,” Palin said.
Palin said she believed in the current GOP ticket and that she was “thinking that it’s going to go our way on Tuesday, Nov. 4. I truly believe that the wisdom of the people will be revealed on that day,” she said.
A later report said a McCain official was left “speechless” by Palin’s assertion that if the ticket is defeated she’ll stay on the national scene — but again her comment was not just offered out of the blue. She had been pressed by a reporter. And the reality is: no one except a can of ravioli on a supermarket shelf would assume that if the ticket is defeated she wouldn’t want to look into 2012. The bottom line sin seems to be acknowledging that the McCain ticket could lose.
The Politico’s Roger Simon flatly says McCain’s camp is trying to make Palin a scapegoat:
John McCain’s campaign is looking for a scapegoat. It is looking for someone to blame if McCain loses on Tuesday.
And it has decided on Sarah Palin.
In recent days, a McCain “adviser” told Dana Bash of CNN: “She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone.”
Imagine not taking advice from the geniuses at the McCain campaign. What could Palin be thinking?
Also, a “top McCain adviser” told Mike Allen of Politico that Palin is “a whack job.”
Maybe she is. But who chose to put this “whack job” on the ticket? Wasn’t it John McCain? And wasn’t it his first presidential-level decision?
And if you are a 72-year-old presidential candidate, wouldn’t you expect that your running mate’s fitness for high office would come under a little extra scrutiny? And, therefore, wouldn’t you make your selection with care? (To say nothing about caring about the future of the nation?)
McCain didn’t seem to care that much. McCain admitted recently on national TV that he “didn’t know her well at all” before he chose Palin.
And that’s likely how political scientists and historians will view it if McCain is defeated.
The bottom line is that this was his first presidential decision and most analysts agree that it virtually overnight wiped out the “experience counts” issue that had been giving McCain solid traction heading into the GOP convention once Obama’s convention bounce wore off. In the end, the McCain campaign can complain about her readiness, her bungles, her missed opportunity early interviews, or how she didn’t quite appeal to a wide variety of independent and women voters.
But she was on the ticket because one man exercised that most undemocratic vestige of American democracy — where a presidential candidate, acting like the kings of old, gets to handpick the person who could take over his office if he becomes ill or dies.
If McCain wins and Palin was the reason, he’ll prove to be a political genius.
If he loses and it turns out she helped drag the ticket down, he therefore deserves the “credit” for that, too.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.