The weird turn pro

Pleased t' meetchya Levi. Did you know that I was a POW?

The McCain-Palin campaign is looking less like a run for political office and more like some bizarre reality show hybrid  of Jerry Springer and The Apprentice. Today McCain went out to the airport in St Paul to meet 18 year old Levi Johnston, the self-proclaimed redneck and father of Bristol Palin’s unborn child.

While the Palin pick has gone over deliriously well with right-wing Christian voters (and since there are around 30 million of them this is no small thing) the polls suggest that female voters, undecideds and conservative republicans are appalled (Peggy ‘points of light’ Noonan described McCain’s campaign as ‘over’).

Some of this might change tonight. Governor Palin will deliver her speech: the democrats and the media have set the expectations for Mrs Palin’s public appearances awfully low and as a former broadcaster and a Governor with 80% popularity she is more than likely to deliver the goods. (The flip side is that if she somehow fails to do so the McCain campaign really is over.)

The Economist points out that Palin’s opening speech is less important than her first press conference:

Sarah Palin’s introduction to the world should be thirty minutes answering questions of national and international importance from the press corps. I’d like it to happen soon, to know she hasn’t been put through a crash-course in talking points. The press should not consider her properly introduced until that happens. And if she performs well, the press should consider themselves required to take her seriously.

I think the problem with the Palin nomination (at this point its probably safe to call it a disaster) is not the candidate or even the McCain campaigns failure to properly vet her but the decision to name a surprise candidate in order to steal the media cycle from the Obama speech. Palin seems like a train wreck because all of the scandals that have emerged in the media (one or two of which are serious while the rest are unbelievably petty and trivial) emerged over a 72 hour period.

Imagine if we were back in 2004 and out of nowhere John Kerry announced Barack Obama as his Vice Presidential nominee: in a couple of days the public would hear about Ayers, Rezko, Michelle’s thesis, Reverend Wright and the whole stealth Muslim, birth certificate idiocy. The Illinois Senator would seem like an insanely reckless choice, just as Mrs Palin does now.

If the McCain campaign had spent a couple of weeks carefully leaking the possibility of a Palin candidate then they might not have won the twelve hour Obama speech media cycle but they wouldn’t have had to spend the last three days being torn apart by the national media. For many years Senator McCain has been the most media friendly politician in Washington and enjoyed consistently glowing coverage from his friends in the press so its likely he didn’t know what being in the centre of a hostile media firestorm was like. Now was not a good time to find out.

Meanwhile, evangelical voters are bewildered about all the controversy. Who cares about her experience? Just look at her stand on abortion! After being played for chumps by the Bush Administration two terms in a row the christian right is overjoyed at the prospect of a vice-president who represents their values and will actually, finally do something about the abortion issue. The McCain campaign raised $10 million in two days after nominating Palin – almost all of it from religious organisations.

To be fair, its not that Christian voters don’t value experience in their politicians, but the reality for these folk is that legalised abortion is the modern equivalent of the holocaust. When you put it like that – which is more important, executive experience or stopping the holocaust? – then their emphasis on the abortion issue makes a lot more sense.

The problem for the GOP is that while abortion is a VERY big deal for their religious base the majority of US voters want it to remain legal. The Obama campaign is now running pro-choice ads in swing states across the country attacking McCain and Palin on this issue.

That’s the real problem for the Republicans – for the past month of the campaign they’ve been waging brutal and largely effective attacks against Barack Obama, and now all of a sudden they’re on defense and haemoraghing support in the polls. Instead of fighting back and beating his opponent like a red-headed step child Senator McCain is out at the airport meeting Levi.