John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin is crass political pandering of the worst kind. Palin can be proud of her accomplishments to date — running a fishery business, beauty queen, local councilor then mayor of a small town, married, having 5 kids, and 18 months as governor of Alaska — but in no way is she qualified for a Vice President’s most important role: to replace the President should he become incapacitated. Sorry folks, Palin is not better than the host of people McCain passed over — Mitt Romney, Tom Ridge, Joe Lieberman, Rudy Guliani, and so on.
Instead, Palin represents the remainder of an electoral calculus equation. In short, she was the last man woman standing after McCain checked off a series of boxes, each designed to pander to a different slice of the American electorate. The most obvious pander is McCain’s attempt to appeal to women, especially given how close Hillary Clinton came to winning the Democratic nomination. But no less significant, in selecting the strongly pro-life Palin, McCain is pandering to the far right of his party, which has not embraced his candidacy. And, in selecting a working-class “hockey mom” (together with her husband, a blue collar “average Joe” fisherman), McCain is also pandering to the (white) working-class.
What is particularly galling — apart from the fact that McCain’s pandering might actually work — is what Palin represents –especially in pandering to women and the working-class — are entirely skin-deep. That is, McCain is counting on women and working-class folks to simply vote for his ticket simply because of what he and Palin look like and not what they stand for.
And that’s because women and working-class folks are precisely the people who stand to lose under a McCain presidency. McCain has already said he will appoint Conservative judges to the Supreme Court. It is safe to assume that they will, sooner or later, overturn Roe v. Wade, thus taking away a woman’s right to choose — which is fine for pro-lifers, but this is not at all in the interest of most women. Moreover, McCain’s economic policies are not geared towards the working-class. On the contrary, they favor the highest income earners. In both cases, there is little doubt that women and the working-class would be far better off under Barack Obama’s policies.
So why might McCain’s choice of Palin work? Because the age of reality-television (where everyday folks can be stars too!) has fed into our own narsassism, to the point where the majority of Americans now decide how to cast their ballot according to how closely the candidate mirrors themselves (or at best, with whom we’d rather have a beer!). Yes, we’ve entered the realm of mirror politics — if you look like me, you must share my values and understand my concerns, right? Palin — the self-described hockey mom — fits the bill. So does John McCain. They look like the majority of Americans. Barack Obama? Not so much. Hold a mirror up to yourself, that’s who you really want running the country, right? And that’s why McCain’s calculating selection of Palin might be just the edge he needs, even if it represents a new low in American politics.
The choices couldn’t be clearer this fall — Barack Obama has made a bet that Americans are smarter than their politics, while John McCain has bet the exact opposite — that they are really that dumb. It remains to be seen who will win that bet.
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