palin

A week ago, I wrote about the possibility of a Sarah Palin candidacy in 2012. Since then, Palin and those close to her appear to have brought this closer to reality by distancing themselves from John McCain. That makes sense if she wants to continue her ascent through the Republican ranks, because recriminations are sure to abound if McCain loses in six days' time. In fact, they have already begun. Joining a growing crowd of conservative commentators and intellectuals, moderate Republicans like Tom Ridge, the former Governor of Pennsylvania, have criticised the choice of Sarah Palin as running mate. (Ridge was widely believed to have been one of McCain's preferred VP picks before concerns about his base pushed him to choose someone more conservative.) Meanwhile, those further to the right have suggested that McCain's problem was that he was not conservative or aggressive enough.Palin has at times come close to voicing this latter critique, publicly urging McCain to "take the gloves off" and make Jeremiah Wright more of an issue. She would certainly not be the moderate wing's choice of candidate in 2012. I argued a week ago that moderates' criticism of her cannot fail to do some damage, but that non-moderates have a disproportionate influence in the primaries. Since then, discussion of her chances in 2012 has intensified, as evidenced by this summary in The Week.  I disagree with the dissenting voice quoted there, who suggests that people like me overestimate her political talents. Uneven though her performance has been this time around, she has shown an ability to draw huge crowds and intense support, and before her brand was tainted she enjoyed widespread popularity. Even more telling are her earlier achievements, which include unseating an incumbent governor in Alaska's Republican primaries, a truly impressive feat.This is not to deny that Palin would face significant challenges. Additional conservative critics may yet emerge once the campaign is over and the need for them to bite their tongues ceases. Assuming McCain loses, she is bound to attract some of the blame. Her popularity in Alaska shows signs of decreasing from its (very high) initial base, and events there may yet damage her. She will face formidable opponents, possibly including a better-funded Mike Huckabee and a re-energised Mitt Romney (whose former staffers have been involved in spreading anti-Palin spin to reporters, according to the American Spectator).  And, awkward though it is to say so, her looks - which constitute a significant part of her appeal for some people - will begin to fade as she goes from 44 to 48.

Whether or not she becomes Vice President next year, the prospect of a Palin candidacy in 2012 has to be taken seriously. If McCain wins this election, he would be 76 by the end of his first term, possibly too old to run again. Granted, Reagan was 78 when he left office, but his age proved a political problem, and the actuarial tables for John McCain are worse given his brutal incarceration in North Vietnam and history of skin cancer. If, on the other hand, McCain loses, then there is a chance that he will drag Palin's political career down with him. But she is far more popular with the conservative base than he is, and is already positioning herself to escape blame should the campaign fail by distancing herself from some of McCain's tactics. (Her messages on this front have been somewhat mixed, however. First, she implicitly criticised McCain for not launching more personal attacks on Obama. Then she criticised the campaign's use of robocalls. The day after, she released a robocall of her own.)

Assuming that John McCain does not seek the Republican nomination in four years time and Sarah Palin does, how would she fare? She certainly has ample and pasionate support in the conservative base that votes in the party primaries. However, her star is fading significantly outside that base, with her unfavourability numbers skyrocketing. This souring of attitudes towards her may well fail to seep into the primary electorate, leading them to choose a candidate who may be unelectable. But, as the Democrats' choice of John Kerry four years ago demonstrated, primary voters can be moved by (perceived) electability as well as ideological purity. And there is growing criticism of Palin among elite voices on the right, amplified significantly by Colin Powell's quietly devestating critique of her in his endorsement of Obama. However much these voices may find themselves isolated at the moment, they cannot fail to have some impact.

Update: See this, from the Washington Post's report on the poll they've just carried out with ABC: "McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has become a drag on the GOP ticket: 52 percent of voters said McCain's selection of her makes them doubt the types of decisions he would make as president, a reversal from a Post-ABC poll following the nominating conventions."

The continued salience of the financial market meltdown may mean that the intensity of the media's spotlight will not burn quite as bright, or be as probing, as in previous weeks; nor does the nature of the crime appear sufficiently severe to force John McCain to make a potentially disastrous last-minute change to the Republican presidential ticket. However, there is no doubt that the findings yesterday of the Alaskan legislature into the 'Troopergate' affair hold pronounced political repercussions that will stretch far beyond the boundaries of the Land of the Midnight Sun - and which may ultimately serve as the final death-knell of a presidential campaign that in recent days has looked increasingly frustrated and bereft of ideas.

The damage the Troopergate report has already done to the Republican presidential bid and will prove to do in the days to come is multi-faceted: first, since her unveiling as the Republican vice presidential nominee, one of the central strategies of the McCain camp in assuaging concerns over Palin's obvious inexperience has been to portray her as a Washington outsider who would repeat the same sweeping, take-no-prisoners style of executive reform she achieved during her time as mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska.

That the Republicans have struggled to elaborate how Palin would "bring change to Washington" has proven largely inconsequential: as the success of Barack Obama's campaign illustrated so vividly in the primaries, such a message holds strong resonance with an electorate that has bestowed upon the current Congress the worst right track/wrong track poll ratings in American history. However, now tainted with the charge of impropriety, the McCain-Palin ticket has had the credibility of this proposition seriously undermined, and now faces an uphill struggle in selling the Alaskan native as the implacable and unyielding purifying force that the American bureaucracy badly needs to purge it of its excesses.

Moreover, while the campaign has been eager to highlight some of Palin's accomplishments in executive office (reigning in budgetary deficits, energy legislation) and exaggerate others (foreign policy experience), the most thorough investigation into the inner-workings of a Palin administration has produced a portrait of an executive characterized by Time's Michael Scherer as "shockingly amateurish" in its conduct throughout the affair. It raises serious questions about the Alaskan's ability to effectively manage her own executive, let alone the highest in the land.

A 263-page report released yesterday by the Alaskan legislature has concluded that Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin personally exerted pressure in her capacity as Governor of Alaska to get Trooper Michael Wooten dismissed, while at the same time allowing both her husband and aides to press for his firing, based on his attitude and previous disciplinary problems.

Concluding that Palin's lobbying was a clear violation of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act, the committee's report stated that "such impermissible and repeated contacts create conflicts of interests for subordinate employees who must choose to either please a superior or run the risk of facing that superior's displeasure and the possible consequences of that displeasure."

While the Legislature may choose to subsequently censure Palin for her behaviour, or impose a fine of up to $5,000, the political fallout from the report's findings could prove far more damaging - particularly given the amount of political capital spent by the Republican party in a failed attempt to delay the report's release until after the general election.

Today was a day of traded blows in the US election campaign. Since Saturday, Sarah Palin has been attacking Barack Obama for "palling around with terrorists" - specifically William Ayers, one-time member of the Weathermen, a militant organisation in the sixties. Ayers only managed to bomb a statue, but his fellow Weathermen bombed the Pentagon and later killed two policemen in an armed robbery. Obama was a young child when all this happened, but later met Ayers, who had turned himself in after years on the run, escaped punishment due to tainted evidence, and gained acceptance in Chicago's political community working on educational reform. They served together on the board of an anti-poverty group, and Ayers hosted a campaign event for Obama early in his political career. There is no indication that they had any closer relationship than this, but the connection is damaging to Obama, not least because on 11 September, 2001, the New York Times published an interview in which Ayers said: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

In what it is portraying as a response, the Obama campaign recently launched the website keatingeconomics.com, featuring a documentary which highlights McCain's involvement in the 1989 Savings and Loan scandal. McCain was a member of the so-called "Keating Five": five Senators accused of improperly pressuring regulators to ease their pressure on Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. The Association later collapsed in the midst of a financial crisis uncannily reminiscent of the one we are experiencing today, and Keating went to jail. McCain had received significant campaign contributions from Keating, but the Senate Ethics committee cleared him of any wrongdoing, merely rebuking him for "poor judgement". William Black, one of the regulators with whom McCain met on behalf of Keating, disputes whether that was sufficient in Obama's video.

Who is the more damaging association, Ayers or Keating? McCain's actions were (surely?) worse, but he has long apologised for them, claiming that they motivated him to atone by pushing for Campaign Finance Reform. On the other hand, they have a new relevance in light of recent events, and help Obama to cast him as a friend of deregulation and Wall Street. Meanwhile, it is hard to buy the Obama campaign's claim that he was initially unaware of Ayers' past, given that it was common knowledge in Chicago political circles. People can disagree as to whether Ayers ought to have been shunned (for my part I find his evident acceptance in Chicago society somewhat distasteful). But though this attack did not work for Hillary Clinton in the primaries, it clearly has the potential to damage perceptions of Barack Obama's character, and, given the dire situation the Republicans find themselves in, that may be their best bet.

I know most people have moved on from the silly claim that Sarah Palin can see Russia from her backyard - but in case you're wondering 'wait, can she really?' (the U.S. media still seem to be wondering) - check out this amusing post from American expat Erik Rassmussen who has used a distance calculator and a google map to estimate just how physically impossible it would be:

"To see Russia from Juneau, you’d have to go up 330,715.1 meters. That’s
almost the 350 km altitude of the International Space Station."

Thanks to the blogger volunteers at Voices without Votes for aggregating this blog post, along with hundreds of other's from around the world. The US elections really do look different through the eyes of outsiders.

The international press may be on the fence when it comes to calling last night's winner in the vice presidential debate, but the New York right-wing tabloids have an unsurprisingly clear favorite.

I just spent the morning reading the New York Sun's total endorsement and celebration of Sarah Palin's performance ("Pitbull Sarah Shows her Bite") with the exception of a couple of less fortunate statements, including "How long have I been at this? Like, 5 weeks?" A group of hockey moms the newspaper had assembled to watch the debate, also saw Palin as the winner, although at least one of them still planned to vote for Obama.

New York's Daily News also cheered ("Pitt bull Sarah battles Biden and even takes a few chomps out of him") to an extent that made you wonder if they would have run the same headline no matter how the candidates had actually fared. Even their own online poll of readers is suggesting that Biden, not Palin, won. To their credit, the Daily News, as so many other newspaper and websites also ran a story pointing out which candidates lied about what.

It's pretty tragic that the first thing everyone looks for at the end of each debate is a list of lies and inanccuracies by candidates. Even if a candidate were trying to tell the truth it must be challenging considering the degree to which their own opinions veer on different issues, depending on the public climate. New York Times lists "check points" in the debate (in their awesome interactive video service), FactCheck.org crunch some numbers, and the Democratic Party's McCain "Lie Counter is is currently at "103".

03:30 Biden ends flatly. The debate winds up, families pour onto the stage (Palin's takes longer). Early verdict: it's a draw, with no serious slip-ups (or coups) by either candidate. Vice-presidents are meant to be innocuous, aren't they?

03:28 Post-apocalyptic Palin reverie! Strange monologue about our "sunset years" spent wistfully remembering "those days when we were free". Is this Fight Club? Terminator? Note to Republican advisers: wrong script.

03:26 Palin's never had to compromise on major issues because Alaska is some kind of wonderful bi-partisan idyll. With moose.

03:22 Biden gets real and emotional. Well done. Palin now looks snarky and ever-so plastic.

03:20 "Together, we form a perfect ideal," says Palin about herself and McCain. That's. Kinda. Scary.

While the US Vice Presidential debates have proven a locus for high theatre and some of the more memorable moments on the campaign trail in recent years - from Lloyd Bentsen's infamous admonishment of Dan Quayle for comparing himself to John F. Kennedy to James Stockdale's self-deprecating, "Who am I? Why am I Here?"- their impact on the course of the election itself has, in contrast, proven largely negligible, serving more as fodder for politicos within the media to debate and deconstruct ad nauseam than a soapbox through which to change the hearts and minds of the American electorate. Nothing illustrates this more vividly, perhaps, than the marginal impact Quayle's inept and widely-panned and parodied debate performance would prove to have on George H.W. Bush's relatively assured victory over Michael Dukakis in 1988.

A perfect storm with respect to issues of age, experience and gender, however, has conspired to ensure that tonight's debate in St. Louis between Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and Delaware's Senator Joe Biden will prove the most important of its kind since vice presidential candidates first squared up in 1976, and may ultimately prove the definitive turning point for both parties with little over five weeks left before election day. With America facing the prospect of its commander-in-chief entering office at the age of 72 in the event of a victory for Senator John McCain, the question of "who comes next" in the presidential line of succession has grown in importance amongst prospective voters in this election, placing as a result far greater scrutiny on the readiness of both candidates on the bottom of the tickets to lead than in previous election cycles.

With the spotlight growing ever more brighter, it should come as no surprise therefore that Palin's readiness to lead, rather than foreign policy or economics, has arguably become the all-consuming issue surrounding the McCain camp itself. Palin was the darling of the Republican Party and the new face of social conservatism only a month ago. Now, increased media attention over the meltdown of the world's financial markets, a string of gaffe-filled interviews with Charlie Rose, Sean Hannity and Katie Couric, and the subsequent call from numerous conservative commentators for her removal from the ticket has meant that the "Palin Bounce" briefly enjoyed by the McCain campaign has quickly been eroded by uncertainty over her qualifications.

Tonight has become very much a referendum on Palin herself: finally free from the straightjacket of her media handlers, if she fails to sufficiently replicate the energy, conviction and, most importantly, clarity of her coming-out speech at the Republican National Convention and appease concerns over her recent missteps, this debate may ultimately prove a far more damaging blow to John McCain's Oval Office aspirations than his mishandling last week of the congressional deliberation on the $700 financial bailout package.

Relegated to the fringes of electoral coverage since his unveiling in Denver, Biden now has an important and delicate role to play. Faced with the challenge of debating a female opponent with exceptionally low levels of expectation, Biden must shun his infamously verbose and long-winded style of rhetoric to match Palin's snappy sound bytes while finding an appropriate tone on the night with which to underscore the frailties of his opponent. But he must not come across as domineering, patriarchal, snide or misogynistic - a balancing act that George H.W. Bush found difficult when facing Geraldine Ferraro in 1984.

Failure to do so, given the lingering alienation of female voters within the Democratic Party created as a result of Obama's defeat of Hillary Clinton in the primary season, and the willingness of the McCain-Palin ticket to cry sexism in recent weeks with respect to the media's increasingly critical coverage, will inadvertently place the impetus back into Republican hands, and prove far more costly than any of the other more benign missteps "Joe being Joe" has made so far on the campaign trail.

The email below has been doing the rounds in American cyberspace, and recently arrived in openUSA's inbox. It makes a stark point about the double standards in media coverage of the election. 

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.....

* If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."

* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

* Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.

* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

Sarah Palin may be the new darling of the media, but that attention comes with a price. At some point glowing hagiography dims into scrutiny. Yesterday, the Republican vice-presidential candidate showed why the initial "Palin bump" in support for McCain is not as substantial as it seems. In her first public interview since her nomination, Palin was found out by a surprisingly serious and probing Charles Gibson (this was the same interviewer who brought shame on the fourth estate by making Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton talk about flag lapel pins). She was floundering in her answers, her nervousness thinly veiled by a tightly set jaw and the excessive repetition of the interviewer's name. Amongst a number of cringe-worthy moments, her ignorance of the content of the Bush doctrine (video below) and subsequent evasiveness stand out. Like a frustrated schoolteacher, Gibson cut her short, saying that he was "lost in a blizzard" of Palin's words.

John McCain had a hard act to follow after the thunder of the Democratic National Convention. In the Rockies, Obama scaled the heights of political spectacle, delivering one of the surest and strongest speeches of the campaign year. What could the much more restricted McCain possibly muster in response?

We've now had a few days to dwell on the answer. The choice of Sarah Palin as the presumptive Republican vice presidential candidate breathes new life into a contest that was flagging in the late months of the summer. In selecting Palin as his running mate, McCain anointed a woman he has met only once before; a woman whose anti-choice views are unlikely to win over disgruntled Hillaryites; a woman whose short tenure as the governor of remote Alaska may undermine the edifice of "experience" that surrounds his presidential bid. Yet Palin also adds that element of surprise and adventure altogether absent from the McCain campaign.