McCain-Palin: A Really Dumb Choice By Some (Usually) Really Smart People

Every four years we suffer this joke -- the one about some presidential candidate's yet-announced choice of a running mate, which is, to abuse Churchill a bit, little more than an easily guessable riddle wrapped in a largely empty mystery inside a who-gives-a-crap enigma.

And every fours years the media treat these announcements and all their accompanying "suspense" as the Second Coming of a second something or other, events worthy of fevered speculation and total journalistic immersion.

But this time -- yesterday -- it was worth the wait, the hoopla, the overkill, and in retrospect the suspense was stunningly real and I loved the joke of the outcome. Because John McCain's running-mate decision was just about as un-guessably dumb as a running-mate decision can get.

To argue that it was colossally cynical is of course a waste of good argument, because what has the GOP in general done in 40 years or John McCain specifically in four months that wasn't cynical? It's what defines them.

So to observe that McCain's choice of a wholly unqualified, platitude-studded, beauty-queen bürgermeister was in part a naked grab for Hillary Clinton's supporters would be tantamount to boldly observing that meerkats are cute.

No, what really grabbed was the political stupidity behind the pick, since that is decidedly not one of Republicanism's more common characteristics. And its dumbness easily transcended the mere incongruity of dangling an anti-choice, mooseburger-munching, wabbit-hunting, ethically questionable far-right Christian conservative as an alternative for long-time and reasonably progressive Democratic women.

What it did confirm is something I speculated about nearly a month ago but seemed too politically stupid and almost unbelievable at the time to entertain at great length.

The issue at hand was McCain's accelerating pace of attack politics and negative advertising in contravention of everything honorable he had promised in this campaign. It appeared to be a deliberate attempt to alienate from Obama, rather than attract to McCain, the independent middle:

Has the McCain camp decided to depress the independent vote through a dispiriting onslaught of negativity, rather than seek that vote as a positive, pro-McCain force? The question's corollary is, then: Does McCain now believe he can rally enough of the conservative base to be competitive in the forced absence of a large independent turnout?

That, at least, would explain the otherwise inexplicable -- why McCain has persisted in catering to the hard right in an election we all expected to be determined by the soft middle. Such a shift in strategy would also reflect the thinking of McCain's recent hires from the old Rovian crowd, which always was, and probably still is, convinced of the numerical power of its traditional base.

It now appears that was precisely McCain's strategy, in the process of unfolding.

Wanting, I guess, to relive the thrill of his maverick days, to hear the oohs and aahs in response to the most unconventional of leadership, McCain convinced himself he could successfully refight the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections by going back to the conventional well -- the well, that is, of playing nearly exclusively to the conservative base. The non-ideological middle be damned.

The problem, of course -- a really, really big problem -- for McCain this time around is that the conservative base since 2004 has shrunk by about 10 points while the Democratic base has grown by an equivalent amount. As political affiliations and sentiments go, the numbers simply are not there for a conservative presidential candidate to successfully run a conservative campaign -- especially in the catastrophic wake of the ultraconservative George W. Bush.

Clearly, however, McCain & Co. believes it can pull it off. It believes it can, through the execution of the nastiest, most negative campaigning ever, suppress the independent vote and sufficiently reacquire its traditional base through heavy-duty pandering by Sarah Palin.

But also nearly beyond argument is the one that would say, It won't work -- because the critical second factor in the equation above is the one that never works. Which is to say, voters don't vote for vice-presidential candidates. They vote for the top of the ticket. And in 2008, they -- the ones McCain is aiming for with Palin -- don’t particularly like the guy at the top of the ticket and more than a few are still likely to just stay home.

Palin's selection was a bizarre calculus by the McCain campaign. What we're hearing, and what we'll continue to hear from many quarters, is that it was, oh let's just say, "risky." In fact, it was stupid.