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POLITICS-US: McCain’s Palin Choice – Bold or Reckless?

Ali Gharib and Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Sep 3 2008 (IPS) - Four days after picking a little known Alaskan governor as his vice presidential candidate, the big question in the minds of voters and media is whether Sen. John McCain is bold or reckless.

McCain’s unexpected selection was depicted by most of his supporters as characteristically “bold”. But even some Republican stalwarts warned that it would feed the Democratic meme that the veteran senator and former Navy fighter pilot was “reckless”.

Indeed, the apparent failure of the McCain campaign to fully vet his vice presidential choice, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, may devolve from a rallying point for the right-wing Republican base into what one prominent neo-conservative commentator called a “near suicidal” pick.

The questions about McCain’s judgment in this instance have now consumed the general election which kicked off in earnest with the Republican National Convention this week in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The focused attention has come from perhaps the most important decision that McCain has made since he became the presumptive Republican nominee in early March – choosing his running mate.

McCain has said that his pick is important given that the 72-year-old cancer survivor would be the oldest person to be elected to a first term as president. “We all know that the highest priority is someone who can take your place,” he said in a February interview.

But the surprise selection of Palin on Aug. 29 seems to bolster the Democratic argument that McCain is impulsive rather than bold. Calling his judgment into question lends a strong talking point to a Democratic attack that has until now relied on instances from the past, such as McCain’s enthusiastic support for the Iraq war even before the 9/11 terrorist attack and his hawkish response to the Russian intervention in Georgia.

Obama and his running mate, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joe Biden, have not directly accused McCain of recklessness, although their repeated suggestions that his “judgment” has been flawed play into this line of attack.

“If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next commander-in-chief, that’s a debate I’m ready to have,” Obama told a crowd of more than 80,000 who heard his historic acceptance of the Democratic presidential nomination in Denver last Thursday evening.

Less than 18 hours later, McCain unveiled his unexpected choice of Palin as a running mate at a joint campaign appearance in Ohio. Before becoming the governor of the fourth least populous state just over a year and half ago, Palin was the mayor of a small town of less than 9,000 people called Wasilla.

Choosing Palin seemed to run contrary to McCain’s own comments about the necessity of a vice president capable of stepping into the role of commander-in-chief at a heartbeat’s notice.

Palin has no experience in foreign policy, precisely the issue on which McCain has staked his presidential bid all along. He talks of ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and what he calls the “transcendent issue of our time” – “the battle against radical Islamic extremism.” McCain says he is particularly qualified to handle these threats, as well as the emergence of autocratic powers like Russia and China.

With Palin second in line, some Republicans are rattled.

“If anything were to happen to President McCain, the destiny of the free world would be placed in the hands of a woman who until recently was a small-town mayor,” noted neo-conservative Republican and former George W. Bush speech writer David Frum.

“[Her] selection …invites the question: How serious can [McCain] be [about national security] if he would place such a neophyte second in line to the presidency? Barack Obama at least balanced his inexperience with Mr. Biden’s experience. What is Mr. McCain doing?”

Another neo-conservative pundit, Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, offered an explanation for why McCain is doing what he is doing, but saw an even more dire outcome as the result of the pick.

“In her rollout today, Palin spoke a lot about change,” Krauthammer wrote on a Post forum Friday. “McCain is now trying to steal ‘change’ from Obama, a contest McCain will lose in an overwhelmingly Democratic year with an overwhelmingly unpopular incumbent Republican administration. At the same time, he’s weakening his strong suit – readiness vs. unreadiness.”

Crediting that line of attack for McCain’s slight recent gains in the polls, Krauthammer went on to write, “To gratuitously undercut the remarkably successful ‘Is he ready to lead’ line of attack seems near suicidal.”

Matters only became worse over the weekend and during the start of the Republican National Convention Monday as a series of embarrassing disclosures about Palin and her family strongly suggested that the McCain campaign had failed to fully vet Palin before her selection.

The process that yielded Palin was apparently an ad hoc affair plagued by Republican infighting. She was not put on the ticket for her credentials, but for political expediency.

Palin, with an unflinching anti-abortion stance, was chosen to energise the right-wing conservative base of the party. But for many conservatives who didn’t fully trust McCain – particularly evangelical Christians – the revelation that her 17-year-old unwed daughter is pregnant may reflect poorly on Palin. The McCain campaign said that it was aware of the pregnancy before the decision.

She is also plagued by firing scandals reminiscent of the Attorney-gate scandal that has bogged down the Bush Justice Department. Bush’s then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was forced to resign around a controversy about politically-motivated firings.

The Alaskan State Senate has launched an investigation into a firing related to a personal problem that Palin had with her ex-brother-in-law state trooper. As with the Bush scandal, Palin has reportedly claimed executive privilege to keep related e-mails secret.

It was also reported extensively on Tuesday that Palin and her husband were both members of the Alaskan Independence Party – a fringe, right-wing political party whose platform calls for a vote to decided whether or not Alaska should secede from the U.S. Palin was a member for two years in the early 1990s. Her husband’s membership lasted into the new millennium.

Many high-ranking Alaskan officials have said that they were not contacted by the campaign as part of a vetting process, leading some to speculate that it was not as rigorous as McCain staffers have indicated.

On Monday morning, even before many of the details about Palin emerged, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne compared McCain’s pick of Palin to Bush’s pick of then-White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, noting that both were deliberately chosen because they were women, but that at the very least, Bush’s cronyism had caused him to be personally familiar with the candidate.

Dionne could not have known how prescient his words would be: “[…] McCain’s choice of Palin will overshadow the convention. The Republicans once hoped to use their gathering to persuade Americans not to trust Obama. But as the speakers here make their case, the media will rightly be doing their job, trying to figure out who Palin is.”

“In picking Biden as his running mate,” Dionne wrote in conclusion, “it’s Obama who made the prudent choice. McCain is asking us to roll the dice.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.