Do you think that selecting Palin to be his running mate was a good choice or a bad choice by McCain? (strictly from McCain's perspective)

If I were a loyal Republican, I would have been pissed off by this move. If I were a 40-70 year old woman, I would have been pissed off at this move. This was a miscalculated approach by McCain. He selected her for the sole purpose of getting Hilary supporters. That's a slap in the face to Republicans, and offensive to women with a brain.

Horrible move. McCain would be in much better position with a different VP.

Yes.

I thought Joe Biden was a terrible selection.

Wrong thread, Wil.

Also, when you visit the other thread, please explain why, strictly from Obama's perspective, that Biden was a "terrible selection".

Thanks.

Yes.

Please explain why it was a good choice for McCain.

Thanks.

He selected her for the sole purpose of getting Hilary supporters.


That's not true.

That's not true.

My bad. You're right. He selected her because McCain saw the brilliance in her public speaking. You're always right, Wil.

As MoTown said, I think the Palin selection was, quite simply, McCain pandering to women. Problem is, when you pander, you still need to deliver what the group you are pandering to actually wants, and that is not Palin.

Her "negatives" are hovering around 60%, not to mention the numbers on her preparedness or readiness.

And then you have the interviews...

I think he also thought that he needed to find a "maverick" so he could position himself as a change agent and not "more of the same", but he missed the mark with Palin.

And the lack of vetting that occurred is almost unfathomable.

Please explain why it was a good choice for McCain.

Thanks.


She energized the GOP base. She gave the best convention speech of any of the 4 people on the ticket. She kicked Biden's ass in the VP Debate. The media can't get enough of her because of her popularity. She has no baggage in her past or questionable associations like Hussein Obama does. She has more experience than Hussein does. She's a woman, a true conservative unlike McCain, and she can relate to the common middle-class citizen more than McCain, Obama, & Biden can all put together.

She was an A+ pick. And other than maybe Bobby Jindal (who declined to be VP), there was nobody else who would've energized the GOP base like she could.

The mainstream media is so scared about the influence she has on some voters, that they've made her out to be a 'cancer' to the GOP ticket, when in reality, nobody's buying that garbage. Olbermann can't stop talking about her, and if she wasn't such a powerful, insightful, and influential individual, he would've a long time ago.

The more the media trys to break her down, the more it shows how great of a pick she was.

[smilie=jaw-droppin:

She energized the GOP base. She gave the best convention speech of any of the 4 people on the ticket. She kicked Biden's ass in the VP Debate. The media can't get enough of her because of her popularity. She has no baggage in her past or questionable associations like Hussein Obama does. She has more experience than Hussein does. She's a woman, a true conservative unlike McCain, and she can relate to the common middle-class citizen more than McCain, Obama, & Biden can all put together.

She was an A+ pick. And other than maybe Bobby Jindal (who declined to be VP), there was nobody else who would've energized the GOP base like she could.

The mainstream media is so scared about the influence she has on some voters, that they've made her out to be a 'cancer' to the GOP ticket, when in reality, nobody's buying that garbage. Olbermann can't stop talking about her, and if she wasn't such a powerful, insightful, and influential individual, he would've a long time ago.

The more the media trys to break her down, the more it shows how great of a pick she was.

I think you are being dishonest with us and yourself. It's almost delusional.

Just wait and see how many of your heroes throw her under the bus a week from tomorrow. It's already starting.

I think you are being dishonest with us and yourself. It's almost delusional.

Just wait and see how many of your heroes throw her under the bus a week from tomorrow. It's already starting.

Almost? I think Wil has been placed in the GOP Brainwashing Program. I don't know whether to be scared or sad for him...

Insightful? Wow.

I love that someone being investigated for abuse of power and ethics violations "has no baggage".

Can't believe this thread is more active than the Biden one.

Insightful? Wow.

I love that someone being investigated for abuse of power and ethics violations "has no baggage".

Can't believe this thread is more active than the Biden one.
Palin needs more defending than Biden. Either way every time you guys are appalled by Fredo's comments, i blame you all. Why? Because a blind man could see that he'll never have an honest conversation on the subject of politics. There's nothing surprising in his bullshit.


Almost? I think Wil has been placed in the GOP Brainwashing Program. I don't know whether to be scared or sad for him...
Neither, he won't be doing anything of significance in politics outside of internet and side bar chatter. Leave him be with it.

BTW, I voted yes because she fulfilled what he wanted from her. If he loses the election it won't be because of Palin IMO.

McCain needed a shot of Viagra and got it. Most anyone else he'd have picked (with the exception of Huckabee) would've been destroyed against Biden without energizing the base as much (Pawlenty), or would've actively de-energized traditional constituencies (Lieberman, Romney, Ridge, Jindal) and this would've been "ovah" two months ago.

She was mishandled afterwards, but that's as much stupidity on the McCain campaign part than hers. She simply shouldn't have been giving interviews to anyone besides Fox News and People Magazine before the VP debate. She should've told the world that her daughter is pregnant and getting married right at the get-go as justification for not being as accessible.

I think it was a terrible pick. She just simply isn't ready to answer hard questions and she was exposed. She wasn't looking to run for president (at least not yet), so she hadn't explored her policies (or McCain's) for that reason. Republicans talk about her executive experience being more than Obama's, but Obama has been preparing for this run for years. He's been forming his policies and strategies for the White House while Palin was not preparing at all (not her fault).

As a result she was completely mishandled (perhaps she had to be because her lack of knowledge). Considering McCain wrapped up the nomination long before Obama, he had a good amount of time to prepare her if they had made the choice a lot earlier. Instead they waited to steal the news cycle after the Democratic Convention. It gave them a short term boost, but maybe they would have been better off picking Palin a lot earlier and getting her prepped sooner. Then maybe they wouldn't be in such dissaray now and she'd be holding her own.

It's hard for me to answer this without concern trolling. I mean, I want to try to tell you what helps or hurts McCain, but honestly I only want to see his party and the interests they stand for go completely down the drain. So it would be a bit dishonest. Full disclosure. Nobody is free of biases, but you have the right to know what mine are.

However, if I try to take it from a horse-race perspective, I might be able to tell you what I think is going on at least insofar as is pertains to the fact that McCain looks to be tanking.

I think Sarah Palin was chosen to be a distraction, and in that way, she succeeded, for a few weeks. Unfortunately, the focus of this election is not what the GOP would like it to be. They knew people were tired of Republicans and were probably going to look at voting Democratic. But what the Democratic politicians have succeeded in doing is to get people thinking, "maybe I'm not tired of Republicans, maybe I'm tired of Republicanism."

It's no longer enough for John McCain to say "I'm not Bush." He has to say "I don't believe in the same things Bush believes in." For an election where people really are considering ideology, the Palin pick in the long run ends up looking amazingly cynical and disconnected.

Republicans have a lot to complain about (and some of it valid) as it pertains to Obama's celebrity status, but we're not talking about someone who was picked up out of nowhere and dusted off and put in the store window. We're talking about someone who has gotten people involved in and excited about politics because of the things he says. McCain then goes out and picks the most charismatic and eccentric running mate he could, out of nowhere, by all accounts without really having much communication with her. He thinks it's the same thing - "this election must be about personality!"

The problem here is that, in terms of personality, Palin has a great deal more in common with George W. Bush - high charisma, poor student, went from various business ventures to state government, eccentric mode of speaking and mannerisms - the only notable exception seems to be that her family was not as well-connected as his, and therefore does not have the rich friends or Ivy League pedigree GWB has.

McCain saw what he figured was a personality contest, so he picked based entirely on personality. Problem was, he picked someone whose personality was a lot closer to the unpopular sitting President, and all that does is remind people not to vote Republican.

I really think that Palin's political career (at least nationally) will end next week.

I think the GOP and the talking heads are going to destroy/scapegoat her.

They are holding back just until the votes are cast, IMO.

Here's an honest question for you guys:

If they lose next week, do you think that McCain and Palin will ever speak to each other again?

They don't need to scapegoat her because McCain won't run again anyway. I could totally see them blaming McCain (especially since the end of his campaign has been nothing but trying to distance himself from the current party anyway). Why wouldn't they bash him and say he mishandled Palin? They'll chalk her errors up to mishandling and lack of experience (both true) and she'll have a clean slate in 4 years.

It doesn't mean she'd win the nomination, but I could totally see McCain taking all of the fall.

McCain will still have old friends and allegiances to stick up for him, she doesn't have the relationships in place to keep her from being trashed, IMO.

The vp pick has historically been a marginal factor in presidential elections. Basically you hope they net you a few votes in a key state but their main role is to follow your lead and not fuck anything up. By that measure, Palin is Failin.

She energized the base. The conservative, fundamentalist evangelical abortion-as-litmus-test base that wasn't going to vote for Obama under any circumstances. Net gain: zero.

Almost every conservative who has bailed on McCain and every newspaper that flipped endorsements from Bush in 2004 to Obama in 2008 cited the Palin pick as a factor.

Does anyone really believe her demonstrable lack of knowledge about issues plays well with independents?

Now the word is seeping out from campaign staffers that there's a rift between Palin and McCain.

By the "don't fuck it up" standard, she's been a net loss for him.

She energized the base. The conservative, fundamentalist evangelical abortion-as-litmus-test base that wasn't going to vote for Obama under any circumstances. Net gain: zero.

That's the wrong way to look at "energizing the base". Of course those voters weren't going to vote for BO but the worry is that they won't vote at all because they don't like McCain. I'm sure more of them will vote for McCain now that he's got Palin with him. They are coming to her rallies.

The other issue are valid though I don't know if they out weight her major positive for him though.

If we think of the parties and candidates as businesses (which admittedly is a 20/20 hindsight analogy), the Palin pick looks positively predictable and destined to fail. Obama is a rising disruptive force in politics, reaching a blue-ocean base generally ignored for being fickle and unreliable (young people). There are many reasons for this - he's young, charismatic, espouses a message of change and hope - but there is one basic cause: he delivers what the established forces couldn't provide to this ignored group. One usually sees this in third-party and fringe candidates, such as Ron Paul and Ralph Nader, but Obama (and his supporters) combine his message with the most effective low-level campaigning seen in a long time, using text messages, viral videos, and other alternative advertising better than the GOP. When you combine a disruptive product with a blue-ocean focus and an efficient process (and the falling economy doesn't hurt), you've got something nigh-unstoppable on your hands.

What does the established party (and John McCain) see when they look at this phenomenon? Since they already "know" what their base wants, the whole notion that enough people don't want it anymore to oust them makes no sense to them. Their very success clouds their judgment, and they view him through the filter of established principles and known consumers. I don't mean this in a derogatory way toward the GOP or McCain, but in Obama they saw an inexperienced minority who talks about change. Thus, in an attempt to cut the legs out from underneath his campaign, McCain chooses a young, decently attractive woman with even less political experience than Obama as his running mate. It seems to make sense - the "independent" demographic seems to like these qualities this year, and then you add a "plus one" to core customers in her ultra-conservative social values.

It seemed like a winning attempt, and it looked to me in the beginning like McCain just might have pulled it off. However, her superficial similarities to Obama faded over time - the bad interviews, the unconsidered baggage, and her general appearance of incompetence told potential voters that Obama is still by far a more accomplished and trustworthy candidate. Plus, the Obama campaign never went off message, choosing to mostly ignore Palin and stay the course that got it this far. It seems to me like a good decision.

Was Palin a bad pick, then? Yes, since she was an attempt to unnaturally reach out to too many people, and when you reach out to everybody, you tend to reach nobody. Obama had to work hard to increase the value of his brand, and Palin comes off as a poorly-considered imitation.

(On a personal level, Palin was an awful pick. Up until then, I was just leaning toward Obama, but Palin pushed me completely into his camp. She is a clone of Mike Huckabee, my designated "enemy" in the primaries, except with less experience, more baggage and none of his admittedly entertaining sense of humor. If I wanted to vote for him, I would have done so in the primaries.)

Obviously, she's bad at this point.

But was it a good choice on McCain's part?

Consider... McCain sat on his ass for months after winning the primary and didn't build a grassroots army, even as Obama was building a massive one in front of his eyes. He was floundering. He needed a serious kool-aid drinker to shore up the base and get some feet on the street that he didn't have to pay for. He got that with Palin. She kept him ahead in the polls for a couple weeks, and kept 3 EVs from potentially going Obama's way (especially with the Stevens mess). That's more than what most VPs deliver in a campaign.

She's flawed in a number of ways, of course. She'll never get a second chance to make a first impression, and Tina Fey owns her ass from now until doomsday. But, she was seriously mishandled from the very get-go by Team McCain. Is that the fault of the choice, or the execution surrounding it?

Q. If a team of seasoned politicians attempts to exploit a proud ignoramus, and it blows up in their faces, who is to blame?

A. Who gives a shit?

But, she was seriously mishandled from the very get-go by Team McCain. Is that the fault of the choice, or the execution surrounding it?

I have to fault the choice. I don't know how you'd properly handle a candidate whose only strategy for coping with substantive questions is stalling for time with empty word-spray. How could team McCain compensate for a lifetime devoid of intellectual curiosity? She's out of her depth and no amount of smoke and mirrors could hide it.

I have to fault the choice. I don't know how you'd properly handle a candidate whose only strategy for coping with substantive questions is stalling for time with empty word-spray. How could team McCain compensate for a lifetime devoid of intellectual curiosity? She's out of her depth and no amount of smoke and mirrors could hide it.
One Word Answer: Dubya

One Word Answer: Dubya

Exactly. She's W with lipstick in a year when being like W is political suicide. The last thing McCain needed was a pick that even hinted at more of the same.

Dubya was handled to the point that he wasn't a gaffe machine every minute. That was achieved through tight messaging control and Karl Rove acting as his brain. If anyone understood this, it should have been Team McCain. But they simply didn't execute, AFAICT. I'd love to read the books that McCain staffers write after this is over.

Politico says a McCain official, that requested anonymity, calls Palin, "a real whack job".

Bush and Rove had a long history together before running for President though. Hard to get absolute loyalty from someone you've known for 30 minutes before running together.

Perhaps. I just have a hard time envisioning McCain doing as well as he is without Palin bringing the evangelicals and into the mix, without the media's initial fawning over sexy Sarah. I didn't see his other choices doing that.

I really think that Palin's political career (at least nationally) will end next week.

I think the GOP and the talking heads are going to destroy/scapegoat her.

They are holding back just until the votes are cast, IMO.

Maybe they aren't waiting after all?


McCain camp trying to scapegoat Palin

Roger Simon
Thu Oct 30, 5:43 am ET
POLITICO.com

John McCain's campaign is looking for a scapegoat. It is looking for someone to blame if McCain loses on Tuesday.

And it has decided on Sarah Palin.

In recent days, a McCain “adviser” told Dana Bash of CNN: “She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone.”

Imagine not taking advice from the geniuses at the McCain campaign. What could Palin be thinking?

Also, a “top McCain adviser” told Mike Allen of Politico that Palin is “a whack job.”

Maybe she is. But who chose to put this “whack job” on the ticket? Wasn’t it John McCain? And wasn’t it his first presidential-level decision?

And if you are a 72-year-old presidential candidate, wouldn’t you expect that your running mate’s fitness for high office would come under a little extra scrutiny? And, therefore, wouldn’t you make your selection with care? (To say nothing about caring about the future of the nation?)

McCain didn’t seem to care that much. McCain admitted recently on national TV that he “didn’t know her well at all” before he chose Palin.

But why not? Why didn’t he get to know her better before he made his choice?

It’s not like he was rushed. McCain wrapped up the Republican nomination in early March. He didn’t announce his choice for a running mate until late August.

Wasn’t that enough time for McCain to get to know Palin? Wasn’t that enough time for his crackerjack “vetters” to investigate Palin’s strengths and weaknesses, check through records and published accounts, talk to a few people, and learn that she was not only a diva but a whack job diva?

But McCain picked her anyway. He wanted to close the “enthusiasm gap” between himself and Barack Obama. He wanted to inject a little adrenaline into the Republican National Convention. He wanted to goose up the Republican base.

And so he chose Palin. Is she really a diva and a whack job? Could be. There are quite a few in politics. (And a few in journalism, too, though in journalism they are called “columnists.”)

As proof that she is, McCain aides now say Palin is “going rogue” and straying from their script. Wow. What a condemnation. McCain sticks to the script. How well is he doing?

In truth, Palin’s real problem is not her personality or whether she takes orders well. Her real problem is that neither she nor McCain can make a credible case that Palin is ready to assume the presidency should she need to.

And that undercuts McCain’s entire campaign.

This was the deal McCain made with the devil. In exchange for energizing his base by picking Palin, he surrendered his chief selling point: that he was better prepared to run the nation in time of crisis, whether it be economic, an attack by terrorists or, as he has been talking about in recent days, fending off a nuclear war.

“The next president won’t have time to get used to the office,” McCain told a crowd in Miami on Wednesday. “I’ve been tested, my friends, I’ve been tested.”

But has Sarah Palin?

I don’t believe running mates win or lose elections, though some believe they can be a drag on the ticket. Lee Atwater, who was George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager in 1988, told me that Dan Quayle cost the ticket 2 to 3 percentage points. But Bush won the election by 7.8 percentage points.

So, in Atwater’s opinion, Bush survived his bad choice by winning the election on his own.

McCain could do the same thing. But his campaign’s bad decisions have not stopped with Sarah Palin. It has made a series of questionable calls, including making Joe the Plumber the embodiment of the campaign.

Are voters really expected to warmly embrace an (unlicensed) plumber who owes back taxes and complains about the possibility of making a quarter million dollars a year?

And did McCain’s aides really believe so little in John McCain’s own likability that they thought Joe the Plumber would be more likable?

Apparently so. Which is sad.

We in the press make too much of running mates and staff and talking points and all the rest of the hubbub that accompanies a campaign.

In the end, it comes down to two candidates slugging it out.

Either McCain pulls off a victory in the last round or he doesn’t.

And if he doesn’t, he has nobody to blame but himself.

LOL at Will acknowledging that Palin was the best speaker at the Repulsican convention.
You've come a long way, baby.

Well, that article is really drawing conclusions from quotes already made. it doesn't mean McCain is going to scape goat her. It just means a lot of his aids don't like her.

I'm not saying it won't happen...but to suggest it now (as the author did) is ridiculous. If McCain throws her under the bus it won't be until after he loses.

You're right, Chris, it did seem kind of like a "best of" article, I'm speculating that the author had more to say but couldn't substantiate it.

There's a lot of talk about infighting between the McCain and Palin factions.

I'm honestly surprised at the poll results on this thread. Even with Mxy's sympathy "Yes" vote and Tahoe giving into peer pressure, I'd like to know who would've been a better VP pick.

Back in August, Glenn gave me a couple reasons as to why Romney may not have been a great selection.

Who do you Democrats think would've been McCain's best choice for VP?

And no, it's not the fraud piece of shit, "Ron Paul". So let me end that one before it starts.

Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson...?

How about Tim Pawlenty or Sam Brownback...?

Share your thoughts on that, please.

Huckabee might have worked.

fraud piece of shit, "Ron Paul"
We finally agree on anything! I can't tell you how pleased that makes me.

Let me tell you something, Wil: if the Christian right-wingers in the Republican party weren't such bigots about religion, Mitt Romney would be your candidate, and he'd probably be wiping the floor with Obama. I think that the same might be true if Romney were the VP candidate. But once again, the Republican Party extremists cannot stop shooting themselves in the foot by shitting on people who would normally be loyal Republican voters.

My vote isn't a sympathy vote.

I think McCain's choice was nearly the best he could do given how much he'd fucked himself to that point with poor planning. Afterwards, he fucked up her handling due to more poor planning. Reading the teleprompter, she had a big effect on the polls energizing the base, and secured Alaska's 3 EVs when the polls to that point showed Obama within 5 points.

I'm honestly surprised at the poll results on this thread. Even with Mxy's sympathy "Yes" vote and Tahoe giving into peer pressure, I'd like to know who would've been a better VP pick.

Back in August, Glenn gave me a couple reasons as to why Romney may not have been a great selection.

Who do you Democrats think would've been McCain's best choice for VP?

And no, it's not the fraud piece of shit, "Ron Paul". So let me end that one before it starts.

Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson...?

How about Tim Pawlenty or Sam Brownback...?

Share your thoughts on that, please.

I just feel the race is over and I hope BO turns out to be a Clinton rather than a Carter. If i tell one of these Libs to fuck off (again) do I get back into your good graces?

If you really think how bad the environment is for a Repub right now, plus the new face of BO and he's winning by 5pts. Thats not a great sign going forward, imo, for Dems. Repubs can't win every race Wil.

I just hope it's a good prezidnc for however long hes in and then we can elect a conservative.

And as far as my vote goes, she's green. The more I saw of her the less I liked her.

if the Christian right-wingers in the Republican party weren't such bigots about religion, Mitt Romney would be your candidate, and he'd probably be wiping the floor with Obama.

That's the problem with making religion the fulcrum of your politics. Religious beliefs are mostly mutually exclusive.

Who do you Democrats think would've been McCain's best choice for VP?

And no, it's not the fraud piece of shit, "Ron Paul". So let me end that one before it starts.

Mike Huckabee, Fred Thompson...?

How about Tim Pawlenty or Sam Brownback...?

Share your thoughts on that, please.


Honestly Ron Paul might have been the best bet, and here's why... Of all the Repubs out there, I don't know one Dem or Ind that liked any of them except Ron Paul. He could have pulled a decent chunk of Inds and the less hardcore Dems, much more than Palin did. Her purpose was to energize people who weren't going to vote Obama anyway. He was the one R in the primaries that had a decent answer of what he would do before going to war... follow the constitution!! omg what a concept. You can call him a fraud because he is not a shitty career politician, but the fact that he is more of a real person with real thoughts is what could have helped McCain.

All interesting points...

The way I looked at it from a general aspect, was that since McCain isn't a true conservative, he needed somebody that could relate to the Republican party better than he can.

Palin is a true conservative, and really, she's far more popular within the GOP than McCain is. Even a die-hard like Limbaugh says he's voting for "Palin, not McCain".

Now does Palin do anything for independents?? Not really, but that was supposed to be McCain's strength, since he's a "moderate" or "maverick". Whatever, I'm growing at peace with it now. McCain doesn't know how to defend himself and he's waited too long to point out Obama's 'socialist' flaws last minute like he is now.

I think it's a good bet Mitt Romney has a chance at dominating the delegates in '12. Republicans aren't going to insist on moderates like the McCains' and Giulianis' of the world, next time.

At the very least...I hope we can keep the Senate from being veto-proof.

Let me tell you something, Wil: if the Christian right-wingers in the Republican party weren't such bigots about religion, Mitt Romney would be your candidate, and he'd probably be wiping the floor with Obama.
If the Republican Party weren't such religious bigots, things would be so weirdly different that I doubt either Romney nor Obama would be in the game.

I don't know enough about the other Republican choices and their records to make an informed suggestion of who might have been better, but if it really is that hard to come up with someone better than Palin, then the Party is in more trouble than I thought.

Eagleburger (one of the five Sec. of States that McCain has been touting since Powell endorsed Obama) says Palin isn't ready.

I don't know enough about the other Republican choices and their records to make an informed suggestion of who might have been better, but if it really is that hard to come up with someone better than Palin, then the Party is in more trouble than I thought.
At the point that the choice was being made, he had few options, because he was a dumbass in the months leading up to it. He needed Viagra for the base, he got Viagra for the base. Given the Bush ties so many Republicans have, and the fact that those without Bush ties tend to have other stuff seen as toxic by Republicans at a national level, he didn't have a lot of good choices. About the only ones I'd have put ahead of her would've been Huckabee and (perhaps) Barbour -- Southern governors who aren't strongly wedded to Dubya policy.

I've heard several people on a couple news channels say that Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty would've been a fine selection...

Pro's of Pawlenty

- he's young (by political standards, he's only 47)

- he's an evangelical

- his background includes balancing Minnesota's budget, and played a role in the Twins & Minnesota Golden Gophers getting new stadiums...

- he's a true conservative

- he's male, which that alone will draw less criticsm from liberal media (nobody would've cared about his clothes, SNL hoopla, or 'mom' stuff)

- he's very well-liked in Minnesota (as evident by his land-slide victory when he was up for re-election) and he may have been able to turn that state Red, or at the very least, make it competitive...

- along with Palin, Romney, and Bobby Jindal, Pawlenty represents the 'up-and-coming' personatlies of the GOP

IDK, I don't think the Republican party is in as much trouble as Glenn said. I think that trying to pass off McCain as a conservative is what set 'em back for this race.

Romney would've defended himself, and the conservative party in a way McCain is incapable of doing. Romney would've made Michigan a toss up, he'd have wiped the floor on the economy with Obama, and just like Barack, Romney has a 'charismatic' personality that can 'charm' the masses.

Maybe in 2012, I'll get my wish.

Cons of Pawlenty: He's boring as cornflakes, and "Minnesota Nice" would have been unlikely to stir the national base too much. He also has a bridge problem. But I think some of your talking points in his favor are just wrong:


I've heard several people on a couple news channels say that Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty would've been a fine selection...

Pro's of Pawlenty

- he's young (by political standards, he's only 47)

- he's an evangelical

- his background includes balancing Minnesota's budget, and played a role in the Twins & Minnesota Golden Gophers getting new stadiums...

- he's a true conservative
Voted for gay rights amendment, and called for an increase in gas taxes in the past year?


- he's male, which that alone will draw less criticsm from liberal media (nobody would've cared about his clothes, SNL hoopla, or 'mom' stuff)

- he's very well-liked in Minnesota (as evident by his land-slide victory when he was up for re-election) and he may have been able to turn that state Red, or at the very least, make it competitive...
Landslide?!? Pawlenty won by 1% in his re-election, and has never won with >50%. Minnesota is strongly Democratic, but you have two wings of what really should be one party fighting it out, leading to a relatively strong third party (who'd be labelled Western Democrats in places like Montana, not the Independence party) acting as a spoiler at times.


- along with Palin, Romney, and Bobby Jindal, Pawlenty represents the 'up-and-coming' personatlies of the GOP
Pawlenty's biggest strength is having little to do with Bush in a year where having little to do with Bush is a strength. He's nowhere near the rising star that a Mike Pence or Mark Sanford is. It's definitely not Pawlenty's engaging personality, because he doesn't really have one. Pawlenty's the guy that you draft if you're ahead 5-10 points and don't want to rock the boat. That was not the situation McCain was in.


IDK, I don't think the Republican party is in as much trouble as Glenn said. I think that trying to pass off McCain as a conservative is what set 'em back for this race.

Romney would've defended himself, and the conservative party in a way McCain is incapable of doing. Romney would've made Michigan a toss up, he'd have wiped the floor on the economy with Obama, and just like Barack, Romney has a 'charismatic' personality that can 'charm' the masses.

Maybe in 2012, I'll get my wish.
True conservatives don't run to the left of Ted Kennedy on social issues, and have a religion that just kills them with Southern evangelicals. :) As for the economy, Romney's a robber baron. He'd be easily attacked on the economy. "John McCain wants to put the best friend of the financial services industry, a deregulator, in charge of the nation's economy." Hell, back when Romney was running, he said "I think the fundamentals of our economy are sound". I can't imagine that anyone would use that in an ad. <laughs>

Here's the dichotomy between "good choice" and "good execution":

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/11/01/mccains-name-nowhere-to-be-seen-at-palin-rally/

Obviously, Palin can attract people in places McCain can't -- this is holy roller "let's teach creationism" turf. But, just as obviously, the campaign is making official campaign materials with her name on them only. That's bad execution.

From the exit polls, 60% of people said Palin was a factor in their deciding who to vote for, and they broke for McCain-Palin 56-43!

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#val=USP00p6

From the exit polls, 60% of people said Palin was a factor in their deciding who to vote for, and they broke for McCain-Palin 56-43!

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#val=USP00p6

That's kind of shocking. Every Obama supporter I know thought Palin was a factor, for the negative. Though none of them were going to vote McCain anyway, so maybe by the way the question was asked by the pollers it didn't then count as a factor.

November 6, 2008
Internal Battles Divided McCain and Palin Camps

By ELISABETH BUMILLER
The New York Times

PHOENIX — As a top adviser in Senator John McCain’s now-imploded campaign tells the story, it was bad enough that Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska unwittingly scheduled, and then took, a prank telephone call from a Canadian comedian posing as the president of France. Far worse, the adviser said, she failed to inform her ticketmate about her rogue diplomacy.

As a senior adviser in the Palin campaign tells the story, the charge is absurd. The call had been on Ms. Palin’s schedule for three days and she should not have been faulted if the McCain campaign was too clueless to notice.

Whatever the truth, one thing is certain. Ms. Palin, who laughingly told the prankster that she could be president “maybe in eight years,” was the catalyst for a civil war between her campaign and Mr. McCain’s that raged from mid-September up until moments before Mr. McCain’s concession speech on Tuesday night. By then, Ms. Palin was in only infrequent contact with Mr. McCain, top advisers said.

“I think it was a difficult relationship,” said one top McCain campaign official, who, like almost all others interviewed, asked to remain anonymous. “McCain talked to her occasionally.”

But Mr. McCain’s advisers also described him as admiring of Ms. Palin’s political skills. He was aware of the infighting, they said, but it is unclear how much he was inclined or able to stop it.

The tensions and their increasingly public airing provide a revealing coda to the ill-fated McCain-Palin ticket, hinting at the mounting turmoil of a campaign that was described even by many Republicans as incoherent, negative and badly run.

For her part, Ms. Palin told reporters in Arizona on Wednesday morning that “there is absolutely no diva in me.”

Later in the day, she refused to address the strife within the campaigns. “I have absolutely no intention of engaging in any of the negativity because this has been all positive for me,” she said, adding that it was time to savor President-elect Barack Obama’s victory and “not let the pettiness or maybe internal workings of a campaign erode any of the recognition of this historic moment.”

As the ticketmate with a potentially brighter political future, Ms. Palin has more at stake going forward than Mr. McCain, whose aides now have an interest in blaming outside factors for their loss, making Ms. Palin a tempting target. And even as the votes from the election were still being counted, there were new recriminations, with Mr. McCain’s aides suggesting that a Palin aide had leaked damaging information about them to reporters.

The tensions were described in interviews with top aides to the two campaigns who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be seen as disloyal to Mr. McCain’s effort at a difficult time.

Finger-pointing at the end of a losing campaign is traditional and to a large degree predictable, as Mr. McCain himself acknowledged in a prescient interview in July.

“Every book I’ve read about a campaign is that the one that won, it was a perfect and beautifully run campaign with geniuses running it and incredible messaging, et cetera,” Mr. McCain said then. “And always the one that lost, ‘Oh, completely screwed up, too much infighting, bad people, etcetera.’ So if I win, I believe that historians will say, ‘Way to go, he fine-tuned that campaign, and he got the right people in the right place and as the campaign grew, he gave them more responsibility.’ If I lose,” people will say, “ ‘That campaign, always in disarray.’ ”

The disputes between the campaigns centered in large part on the Republican National Committee’s $150,000 wardrobe for Ms. Palin and her family, but also on what McCain advisers considered Ms. Palin’s lack of preparation for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric of CBS News and her refusal to take advice from Mr. McCain’s campaign.

But behind those episodes may be a greater subtext: anger within the McCain camp that Ms. Palin harbored political ambitions beyond 2008.

As late as Tuesday night, a McCain adviser said, Ms. Palin was pushing to deliver her own speech just before Mr. McCain’s concession speech, even though vice-presidential nominees do not traditionally speak on election night. But Ms. Palin met up with Mr. McCain with text in hand. She was told no by Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, and Steve Schmidt, Mr. McCain’s top strategist.

On Wednesday, two top McCain campaign advisers said that the clothing purchases for Ms. Palin and her family were a particular source of outrage for them. As they portrayed it, Ms. Palin had been advised by Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain aide, that she should buy three new suits for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in September and three additional suits for the fall campaign. The budget for the clothes was anticipated to be from $20,000 to $25,000, the officials said.

Instead, in a public relations debacle undermining Ms. Palin’s image as an everywoman “hockey mom,” bills came in to the Republican National Committee for about $150,000, including charges of $75,062 at Neiman Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue. The bills included clothing for Ms. Palin’s family and purchases of shoes, luggage and jewelry, the advisers said.

The advisers described the McCain campaign as incredulous about the shopping spree and said Republican National Committee lawyers were likely to go to Alaska to conduct an inventory and try to account for all that was spent.

Ms. Palin has defended her wardrobe as the idea of the Republican National Committee and said that she would give it back.

“Those clothes, they are not my property,” she said. “Just like the lighting and the staging and everything else that the R.N.C. purchased.”

Advisers in the McCain campaign, in suggesting that Palin advisers had been leaking damaging information about the McCain campaign to the news media, said they were particularly suspicious of Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s top foreign policy aide who had a central role in preparing Ms. Palin for the vice-presidential debate.

As a result, two senior members of the McCain campaign said on Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had been fired from the campaign in its final days. But Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, and Mr. Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, said Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had in fact not been dismissed. Mr. Scheunemann, who picked up the phone in his office at McCain campaign headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, responded that “anybody who says I was fired is either lying or delusional or a whack job.”

Mr. Scheunemann was referring to widely disseminated criticism by Mr. McCain’s advisers in the final days of the campaign that Ms. Palin, as first reported in Politico, was a “whack job.”

Whatever the permutations, the advisers said they strongly believed that Mr. Scheunemann was disclosing, as one put it, “a constant stream of poison” to William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a columnist for The New York Times.

Mr. Kristol, who wrote a column on Oct. 13 calling on Mr. McCain to fire his campaign because it was “close to being out-and-out dysfunctional,” said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the campaign advisers were paranoid. Mr. Kristol has been a strong supporter of Ms. Palin.

“I wasn’t writing poison,” Mr. Kristol said. He added: “Randy Scheunemann is a friend of mine and I think he did a good job. I talked to him, but I talked to a lot of people at the campaign.”

The McCain camp was further upset about Ms. Palin’s interview with Ms. Couric, which was broadcast at a time when Ms. Palin was meeting with foreign leaders at the United Nations and trying to establish some foreign policy credentials. Ms. Palin’s wobbly and tongue-tied performance was mocked in an iconic impersonation on “Saturday Night Live” by Tina Fey.

Ms. Palin, who had prepared for and survived an initial interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News, did not have the time or focus to prepare for Ms. Couric, the McCain advisers said. “She did not say, ‘I will not prepare,’ ” a McCain adviser said. “She just didn’t have a bandwidth to do a mock interview session the way we had prepared before. She was just overloaded.”

One of the last straws for the McCain advisers came just days before the election when news broke that Ms. Palin had taken a call made by Marc-Antoine Audette. Mr. Audette and his fellow comedian Sebastien Trudel are notorious for prank calls to celebrities and heads of state.

Ms. Palin appeared to believe that she was talking to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, even though the prankster had a flamboyant French accent and spoke to her in a more personal way than would be protocol in such a call. At one point, he told Ms. Palin that she would make a good president some day. “Maybe in eight years,” she replied.

A lot of this has been posted already from other (or maybe the same) sources, but this is a nice wrap up.

Did you guys listen to that prank call? The guy that was pretending to be Sarkozy referred to "Nailin' Palin" as her "life story". In case you forgot, that's the porn flick that Larry Flynt is making about Palin, lol.

A lot of this has been posted already from other (or maybe the same) sources, but this is a nice wrap up.

Did you guys listen to that prank call? The guy that was pretending to be Sarkozy referred to "Nailin' Palin" as her "life story". In case you forgot, that's the porn flick that Larry Flynt is making about Palin, lol.

I heard the call. At first I just found it comical. It's easy to get fooled like that. But reading this and seeing she had it on her calendar for 3 days, and was still fooled? That means they had time to do their homework and still got duped. Not good. Suppose she was VP and the fake French President said he was going to invade Spain. You have to check your sources...yikes.

As a senior adviser in the Palin campaign tells the story, the charge is absurd. The call had been on Ms. Palin’s schedule for three days and she should not have been faulted if the McCain campaign was too clueless to notice.

The fact that there was a "Palin campaign" separate from the "McCain campaign" speaks volumes about the sucky level of execution.