Surprising choice

I’d heard Sarah Palin* put forward as a possible running mate for McCain, but hadn’t heard anything about her or given her much thought (I’d guessed it would be Romney or Lieberman), but as soon as McCain’s pick was announced I realized that he’d almost certainly chosen her in an attempt to woo some of Hillary’s disaffected supporters (some of whom, to be frank, strike me as being batshit-crazy).

Sure, she’s an evangelical Christian who wants creationism taught in schools, and she’s pro-life, but so are Brownback and Huckabee. And she has zero experience of national politics and only a two-year track-record as governor of the third-smallest state in the Union (by population, if you exclude reindeer).

That’s an extraordinarily thin resume for someone who would become president if anything happened to McCain, a 72-year-old man with a history of cancer. McCain thus makes any argument for Obama’s alleged lack of experience more difficult to sustain without appearing hypocritical. This woman would be, as the phrase has it, one heartbeat away from the presidency.

So it would seem she’s been chosen entirely because she’s a woman. Now choosing amongst a field of candidates for VP on the basis of gender is entirely valid — all other things being equal. But here they’re absolutely not equal. There were far more qualified candidates.

This choice strikes me as being the same kind of short-term tactical thinking that got “Brownie” — a man with a resume heavy on arranging show-jumping contests — running a vital government agency into the ground and causing the deaths of many people through his incompetence. It’s the same kind of thinking that almost got Harriet Miers (a woman with a paper-thin resume but a devotion to W) onto the supreme court. In other words this is a choice straight from the George W. Bush playbook.

By the way, now that Miers is in contempt of court and possible implicated in illegal hiring practices in the justice department, it’s interesting to note that Palin has her own legal problems. This makes fascinating reading.

(* Seriously, what’s with the 1968 beehive hairdo?)

Update: McCain has only met her once!

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