The Palin/McCain Ticket

I picked up this screen shot from Gil Smart's blog. It's funny to me that a McCain campaign ad is just a big picture of Sarah Palin.
Who is the Republican presidential nominee again? I guess it's a good idea to give your nominee as little media exposure as possible. Especially in your paid media.

It's even more telling that Palin has already been asked about her career plans for after this election. The implication there being that once McCain is defeated Palin is the natural choice for the GOP four years from now. A prospect I find puzzling considering the disaster she has been in this election. She has fired up the base a little more, but lost the conservative intelligentsia. From David Brooks to Kathleen Parker to Peggy Noonan, the elite of the conservative coalition are not going to be happy with her four years from now. I don't understand how she has not been officially dubbed "damaged goods."

I have occassionally found myself wondering how different this campaign would be if McCain had chosen Tim Pawlenty or Charlie Crist or even Joe Lieberman for VP. I don't think it's going too far to say that with Lieberman McCain would have lost the base but maybe won the election. A McCain/Lieberman ticket may have even created a braoder shift in the electorate, puching some out of the Republican tent, bringing others in and creating an entire new right wing movement outside of the GOP. It's fun to speculate.

Gil Smart - McCain's collapse

Gil Smart - Sarah Palin fans the flames

Quote of the week

Sometimes she gets it right, a lot of times she gets it wrong, but Paglia is never boring. In this case she hits the nail on the head.

John McCain's courage under torture during the Vietnam War deserves everyone's gratitude and respect. But as a national candidate, the stumpy, uptight McCain is a lemon. Oy, that weaselly voice and those dated locutions and stilted intonations. Who needs a weird old coot with a short fuse in the White House? This isn't a smart game plan for the war on terror.

-Camille Paglia

Declaring preemptive war on John McCain

A pretty strong argument could be made that John McCain is the GOP’s strongest general election candidate. For some reason, which I can’t fathom, the conservative base really seems to dislike him. Maybe the fact that I (and others like me) don’t have a gut reaction against him in the way I do at the mention of…say…Dick Cheney, is one explanation.

Whatever the reason for the base hating him, he’s their best chance at keeping the White House. The Clintons have to know that there aren’t any red states that go blue for Hillary, against McCain. With that in mind, it seems to me that Team Hillary is launching a preemptive attack to nip the McCain candidacy in the bud.

First, the New York Times did Hillary the double favor of endorsing her while giving McCain the kiss of death. Now we have what amounts to an attack from Bill Clinton. The former president says, "[Hillary] and John McCain are very close…they like and respect each other." If the conservative base needed one more reason to distrust McCain, there it is. Of course, McCain didn’t “like and respect” Hillary enough to say anything when a woman at one of his events referred to Hillary as “the bitch.”

This is why the Clintons win elections. They’re tough and smart. While they pound away at Barack Obama, they kill McCain with kindness. It’s why the Democratic Party, unfortunately, seems to need them. Without Clinton the Democrats would probably have had twenty-eight years out of the White House. Maybe this year we can find a way to win without them.