Sarah Palin: hindrance or help?

Two expert columnists in the Washington Post take differing views on McCain’s choice of running mate

E J Dionne describes the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate that it is a choice of ideology over experience:

‘ST. PAUL, Minn.—By all rights, there should be a revolt at this week’s (now-delayed) Republican convention against John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate—for the same reasons so many Republicans opposed President Bush’s selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.

Palin is, if anything, less qualified for the vice presidency (and the presidency) than Miers was for the court. But there is one big difference: Palin passes all the right-wing litmus tests, which means she is unlikely to suffer Miers’s fate.

McCain, as far as anyone can tell, met Palin only once before considering her for vice president, and once more before settling on her, which is to say he barely knows her. For the purpose of courting disaffected Hillary Clinton voters and satisfying the social conservatives, McCain is willing to place someone he knows mostly from press clippings and, okay, what his staff insists was thorough vetting, in the direct line of succession to the presidency. There is a breathtaking recklessness about this choice.

That only a handful of conservatives have so far expressed doubts about Palin demonstrates that ideology is what drove them during the Miers fight, and drives them still. Miers’s lack of experience was, for many conservatives, a convenient rationale for opposing someone they worried might become another David Souter. Palin’s lack of experience is irrelevant because she is right—actually, quite far right—on the conservatives’ issues.’

David Broder writes that the selection may have punctuated McCain’s record as a maverick:

‘John McCain has flummoxed the leaders of his Republican Party and most of the media by picking Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. It’s a choice no other candidate conceivably could have made—a typical McCain gamble, unpredictable in its consequences.

The crucial question is whether her maverick reformer history—challenging the incumbent Republican governor and the scandal-stained GOP establishment of her home state—will overcome her almost total lack of credentials to be a successor to the president of a wartime country.

By picking Palin, McCain has strengthened his reputation not as an ideologue, not as a partisan, but as a reformer—ready to shake up Washington as his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, once did.’

With hindsight being the most perfect science we will find out in November if McCain’s risk pays off.

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