New Superhero: McCain the Reckless!

McCain's pregnant pause

By LISA VAN DUSEN | 9/4/08

The Republican Party has been busily spending its convention week trying to shrink George W. Bush, in the rear-view mirror, to half his normal size while at the same time inflating Sarah Palin to something approaching national stature.

The Alaska governor was picked as John McCain's vice-presidential nominee for her gender, her plucky frontier carny narrative (she can change a diaper, shoot a bear and skin a moose with her teeth ... all at the same time!) and her all-American, pageant-pedigree glamour.

Her story, which includes the first-ever born again, anti-abortion, pro-gun, scorched earth campaign for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, is emerging in the leftie blogosphere as the right-wing Manchurian Candidate nightmare equivalent of the liberal Manchurian Candidate nightmare circulated by the raging right about Barack Obama early on.

If John McCain can be thankful for anything this week it's that chatter-wise, Palin has stomped all over Bush in her black go-go boots, though the upstaging comes at a price. As a word-association prompt, Sarah Palin continues to evoke a single buzzword: "Seriously?!"

McCain's short-term Palin problem is about how it's never good to have your agenda overtaken by talk of teenage pregnancies and Lucy-and-Ethel baby switching stories, shady car washes and abuse of gubernatorial power.

HIS PROBLEM

McCain's long-term Palin problem isn't about Sarah Palin, it's about John McCain.

Because this was such a -- for lack of a more subtle but equally accurate term -- crazy choice, the assumption last week was that Palin must have been vetted to within an inch of her life.

(Saying she has more experience than Barack Obama is no less crazy: University of Idaho vs. Columbia and Harvard Law Review; occasional local sportscaster in Alaska vs. community organizer on the South Side of Chicago; Mayor of Wasilla vs. four-term Illinois State Senator; thwarted burner of Wasilla library books vs. author of two bestsellers; 20 months as CEO of a state whose biggest problem is how to spend all that oil money vs. three years in the U.S. Senate and 19 months as CEO of arguably the most successful presidential campaign operation in U.S. history; staring down the junkyard dog Murkowski machine vs. staring down the Godzilla Clinton machine).

But Palin wasn't vetted until the last minute, which means, for the purposes of this job, she wasn't vetted at all. McCain made his most important pre-presidential choice on impulse and from weakness, which is precisely what it looked like: Hail Mary Barbie. That was proven by the subsequent boom-boom-boom of all those the land mines in her background that would have been tripped sooner if the media had thought she was qualified enough to even make the short list.

Meanwhile, his choice of an understudy commander in chief who has been so blankly incurious about the rest of the world as to have lived 42 years without a passport has got to be generating an epidemic of groany jokes in five languages in all the other seven G8 capitals.

McCain spent August convincing Americans of his fitness as commander in chief on foreign policy and national security issues and of his competence as a decision maker. So far, September is making him look reckless, small-time and most of all, not very serious.