Palin, Politics, and Punditry

After my family and I got home from church Wednesday night, we flipped on the TV and watched the Republican National Convention (RNC). I missed Huckabee’s speech, and part of Giuliani’s speech, but that was ok. I wanted to hear Governor Sarah Palin, the VP nominee and Republican governor of Alaska. Like most Americans outside our most northerly state, I had not heard of Sarah Palin (and I consider myself to be fairly well informed). Before I heard her speak, I thought McCain was resorting to extreme pandering to the female/feminist/Hillary vote, and just picking Palin for the veep position simply because she was a woman. I was wrong. And boy, am I glad I was wrong.
 

First of all, let us make no mistake about it: this was politics, pure and simple. But it was a brilliant piece of political maneuvering. Sun Tzu, writer of the definitive book on war strategy and management, The Art of War, says this: “In battle, there are not more than two methods of attack–the direct and the indirect; yet these two in combination give rise to an endless series of maneuvers.” (Art of War, 5:10) This maneuver was shrewd, and was both direct toward Obama, and indirect, toward the rest of the beltway status quo.
 

You see, McCain struggles a bit with perception in the eyes of America. He is perceived as old, which he is; he is perceived as mean and hotheaded, but who isn’t at times? He was perceived as “McSame”, as the one who will continue the incorrectly assumed “failed” war strategies of the Bush administration. He is perceived as soft on some conservative hot-button issues, such as abortion. We now know that Palin is anything but soft on abortion. Then here comes Palin on Wednesday night of the RNC, whose relative obscurity stoked much of America’s curiosity, and then her charisma, charm, and poise knocked everyone, liberals included, for a proverbial loop. She is a woman, a mother of five, the wife of a professional snowmobiler and oil rigger. Oh, she is a governor, too. She was a mayor. She is a corruption buster, a cross-party unifier, and she is the manager, politically speaking, of 20% of America’s domestic oil production. She hunts. She even smoked marijuana once, but she didn’t like it.
 

But why do these things make her so great a choice? It is simply a result of McCain’s expert use of political maneuvers. Does Obama dare speak to Palin’s “inexperience”? He only opens up the door for his own inexperience to be probed. Does he then call her experience as a low population state governor or small town mayor “petty”? What, and then alienate the millions of small town Americans? Does he dare criticize her marijuana experimentation, only to expose himself to his own words about drug use? Oh yes, Obama, you wrote of your own drug use in your 1996 book, “Dreams From My Father”, and I quote: “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though.” Nope, can’t talk about Palin’s one-time drug use. He might say, “She is a Republican, and as such she is against the American worker.” Are you kidding me? Her husband is a union worker, so that won’t wash. Criticize her lack of interest in the Iraq war? Nope, can’t go there, her son is shipping out this week. That’s a pretty vested interest, in my opinion. “I know”, said the liberals, “since we can’t attack her record, let’s attack her family. Bristol is Trig’s mother, not Sarah!” Well, we see how that turned out. Sadly for Bristol, she is the most famous 17 year old, unwed, expectant mother in the world right now. No, Sarah did not drag Bristol into this-the liberal e-rags like DailyKos did that. But Obama took the high road on that issue. Why wouldn’t he? If he didn’t, wouldn’t he be disparaging his own mother’s pre-marital motherhood? Will Obama or Biden knock her stance on abortion? Ok, do that Obama/Biden, and even other conservatives, and look at that woman in the eye and say Trig, who has Down Syndrome, didn’t deserve to live in utero.

 Ah, and then we have the pundits. Pundits are the social commentators who through education or connections are somehow qualified to make observations of the political sort, and disseminate these observations to a thirsty public. The right wing pundits are going nuts over her, and the left-wing-nut pundits are running scared. So even pundits cannot do anything other than drool foolishly or babble incessantly on useless points (such as her family issues and even her hairstyle).

 So, what did John McCain’s choice really do? It empowered the American conservative voter to listen with excitement to a politician and the real issues for the first time in a long while (probably for the first time since Reagan). It forced many liberal voters to listen and actually recognize the soundness of conservativism. In other words, it re-invigorated the American voter, which in my opinion, truly was John McCain’s greatest maneuver of all.