It's (Wow) Palin

Here's the rollout video:

McCain/Palin? I can live with that. The more I hear about her, the more I like her. Granted, she was unknown to me before being considered a longshot for the veep spot, but everything I've learned about her is positive.

I think this is a great pick. Most of the folks at NRO agree, most all of the folks at PowerLine disagree. I especially love the fact that this news has completely stolen St. Obama's thunder. He is totally off the radar today, when he thought he would be riding high.

JASmius adds: Let's take a look at the Palin pros and cons, shall we?

First, by digging back five months to the prediction of an obscure blogger who only recently re-discovered that he'd prognosticated Palin before he hung his hat on Huckles:

My hunch?  Sailor will go with an obscure Republican governor with impeccable conservative credentials.  Like Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.  He'd cover a lot of bases with her (so to speak) - she's conservative, has executive experience, certainly wouldn't overshadow him, and has a vagina, which would be a nice identity politics counter-sop to Rodham-Obama or Obama-Rodham.

Talk about unwitting prophecy.  Hot Air or Powerline or Townhall should sign this guy to a big-money contract right away, while he's still obscure and available....

A few months later, this best kept secret in the rightosphere, er, fleshed out Governor Palin's plusses:

If Maverick wanted to be both diabolical AND bold, he would go with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, whose advantages are legion: she's conservative, Christian, a budget-cutting fiscal hawk known for opposition to pork-barrel projects, favors drilling in ANWR, has executive experience, certainly wouldn't overshadow him, and has a vagina.  If the Republican "brand" is as buried as conventional wisdom says it is, what better new face to raise to the top of the party?

1) The high-level executive experience Governor Palin brings to the table - only a year and a half, but a year and a half more than Obama, Biden, OR McCain possess - significantly mitigates the "She's inexperienced" knock.  As if Team Messiah could play that card without His Unholiness being cleaved in two by a lightning bolt.

All the more so when you dig into her recent and meteoric rise in Alaska politics, as Brother Hinderaker did:

So Palin was an upstart in every possible way when she challenged Frank Murkowski, the former Senator and entrenched Republican Governor who, among other things, appointed his daughter Lisa to succeed him in the Senate. Palin was opposed by the entire Republican establishment in Alaska, including Senator Ted Stevens - after whom the Anchorage airport is named - and Congressman Don Young. Notwithstanding the hostility of her party's elder statesmen, Palin defeated Murkowski in the primary. She then faced the popular former Democratic Governor Tony Knowles in the general election. In what would have been considered an extraordinary upset just a few months earlier, Palin trounced Knowles, despite reported efforts by her own party's leaders to defeat her. As Governor, she has enjoyed approval ratings in the 80s. [emphases added]

Does anybody still wonder what this woman's appeal was to Sailor?  Hell, the real head-scratcher in retrospect is why it took him until yesterday evening to give her the call.

More to the point is that this meteoric rise ascended straight into a hurricane-force political headwind.  This woman took on the political establishment of BOTH parties and kicked their asses.  It would seem that her high school basketball nickname - "Sarah Barracuda" - was more than well earned.  She sounds like she was born to lead, and she's also quite obviously sharp and a quick study.  Even better, she's a former journalist, so she knows what to say, what not to say, and when to say or not say it.  Leaving the gender identity factors out of it, does this sound like somebody who will be intimidated or bulldozed by the slimy likes of Slow Joe Biden?

2) Nor can anybody toss any "hypocrisy" charges at her.  She's not only rhetorically pro-life, but has lived it out by giving birth to her Downs Syndrome-afflicted son Trig, born just four months ago.  He may well have been an unplanned fifth child, and in this day and age would have been a prime candidate for ending up in a medical waste dumpster.  God blessed the child greatly by giving him to parents who truly value and respect the sanctity of life.  And on domestic energy exploration, nobody can (quite) call Sarah Palin a "NIMBY," as she has been a consistently strong advocate for drilling in ANWR (unlike Senator McCain, who has ignorantly obstructed it - does this signal that he wants to win bad enough to come around on that as he has drilling the OCR and tapping Mountain West oil shale deposits?).

3) Yes, she's a woman.  It'd be nice if identity politics could be made to vanish and never return to soil the national political psyche, but that's not the world we live in.  And in this election cycle, with a large cross-section of women voters feeling abandoned by the party that denied the Empress her rightful throne, being the ticket that DID offer the vice presidency to a double-X chromosome can't possibly hurt:

Summarizes Lisa Schiffren:

I heard, earlier, Hillary Rosen, a democratic strategist on CNN, say that Palin was stupid to invite a comparison with Hillary Clinton in her speech. Rosen says that Hillary was qualified, and Palin is not, and women can tell the difference.  Yes we can tell the difference: Hillary certainly had more time in Washington — though not at any particular job. But it is a real, core, strength of Palin's that she got to the governorship by herself.  PTA to city council, to mayor, to governor — that is the kind of normal movement up the political ladder that many of us have wished to see in our female candidates. That is what makes her a real role model — along with the five kids, who suggest boundless energy. It doesn't do to "diss" Hillary right now, but marriage to a governor who became president, a Senate seat handed to you, is not the only, or best route to power. In the event, it didn't work.

In other words, Sarah Palin is, in real, practical, nuts & bolts terms, a genuine feminist in the sense of embodying everything that the original feminist movement was supposed to represent - a strong woman who competed with men on their own terms, without any help, and blazed her own path of success - before it got debased with all the social policy wickedness that defines it today (aaaaaand which the Guv has rightly eschewed).  Even women who disagree with Palin on abortion can't honestly not respect her for her accomplishments, which are actually HERS and not glommed off of piggy-backing a man (not quite) to the top.

Case in point:

Not to suggest that this will be the dominant PUMA sentiment, but if a fifth of them - a tenth of the Donk base - defect to McCain/Palin?  That's not insignificant.  And Senator Hairplugs certainly isn't going to woo them back - especially after he has to go up against "Sarah Barracuda".

On top of that, Palin's a wife and mother (hello, soccer - and hockey - moms), angler, hunter, cager, and sportscaster (hello, NASCAR dads).  She vetoes the legislative bacon by day, brings home the real bacon by night, fries it up in a pan, and never lets her oil worker/union member/fisherman/three-time 2,000 mile Iron Dog snowmobile race winner/manly man of a husband forget he's a, well, manly man.  It's tougher in Alaska, and so is she.

4) There will be no revolt at the GOP convention this coming week.  The base is not only heaving a huge sigh of relief after being eyeball-to-eyeball with the prospect of Joe Lieberman, Tom Ridge, or Michael Bloomberg watching Lord Queeg's back, but is fired up enormously about Governor Palin in her own right.  Between her biography and her walk-the-talk conservatism and her issue mettle and her undeniable, infectious charisma, likeability, and genuineness, John Sith McCain is getting what he has not heretofore had and never had any previous reason to expect: a base willing to crawl over broken razor blades through flaming walls of rabid rattlesnakes to get him elected.  After spending the summer scaring the piss out of us with the spectre of an Obama presidency, he has turned the corner and offered us a positive reason to support him, and put a supermodel face on it for good measure.

5) What does Team Messiah do about this?  They're the ones that blew off putting a woman on their ticket; they're the ones that instead chose the ultimate corrupt Beltway insider - allegedly to "compensate for [some of] Obama's weakness."  The two respective veep nominees reinforce the stark contrast between McCain's status as a genuine reformer and Obama's as "all sizzle and no steak."

Worse for His Eminence is the complete brooming of post-speech media buzz the Palin pick dealt him.  For all his skill at reading words off a screen, and the Britney Spearesesque faux Greek Temple behind him, and the Beijing Olympics-magnitude fireworks, and more fainting followers than any three Benny Hinn crusades, and maybe even a few pairs of panties thrown at his feet, the headlines from the moment the sun peaked over the horizon today were (a) "Who is McCain going to pick?" and (b) "Holy Barracuda, Batman, it's Sarah Palin!"  It's like the latest in Barack Hussein Obama's long line of forgettable "historic" speeches never happened - or pretty much like any other rock concert.  Thus did Obama come into the week without the huge lead he should already have had, lose even more ground DURING HIS OWN CONVENTION, and just as he was finally starting to get a poll bump, BAMMO, Sarah Palin sucks all the oxygen out of the state of Colorado.  Because, you know, they're tougher in Alaska.

Frankly, given the level of anger BO had on display Thursday night, the result of McCain's wily needling of his egotistical excesses, the Palin gambit has got to be bursting divine capillaries.  Perhaps that explains his campaign's initial, mind-bogglingly dumb statement on the Dayton rollout:

Barack Obama’s campaign is blasting John McCain for putting “the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

Forget the "wants to overturn Roe/Big Oil/George Bush" remainder of the 'graph, which was pure template and would have been spoon-fed to Barry's Enemy Media choir no matter who Sailor had chosen.  Darth Queeg has done it again - HE's PROVOKED TEAM HUSSEIN INTO YET ANOTHER PUBLIC RELATIONS BOOMERANG.  I don't care how far up his ass the press is, there is no way on God's green Earth that "a former Chicago Donk machine hustler with zero foreign policy experience seeking to get even closer to the presidency" issues a broadside like this.  Nor does a neoBolshevik naif whose foreign policy judgment has been proven to be abysmal across the board ("The Surge will make things worse," I will suck Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's toes, Russia and Georgia as moral equivalents, make Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter look like the George Pattons of military spending) question ANYBODY's judgment without inducing uncontrollable, blindness-triggering eyerolling.

Barack Hussein Obama got caught flat-footed by the Palin pick.  And he's trapped by his own base into such a foolish, reflexive attack mode that just shovels down more dirt on The One's eventual electoral grave.

What does St. Barack do?  If they were smart, they'd hold their fire, keep their powder dry, and see if they can goad Governor Palin into a mistake.  But the past five months have proven that nobody in that garishly overrated organization would recognize "smart" as anything other than the lead character in that mediocre movie remake.

That's as good a segue as any into a peek at the other side of the Palin ledger:

Inexperience: See #1 and #5 above.  She alone of the four candidates has experience relevant to the top job.  And she's not running against Obama, but helping McCain to do so.  Obama has no standing to credibly criticize her for inexperience, primarily because McCain has already thoroughly made that case against Obama.  Enough so that he felt there was sufficient cover to go with a youngin' of his own.

Tokenism: See #3 above.  Same basic answer: It doesn't hurt that she's a woman, but the Democrats have no credibility to make that attack.  And even if they did, Palin brings so much to the table that it just couldn't be taken seriously.

Compatibility (with McCain): I'm not sure I see the point of this objection.  I would imagine that their working relationship in the White House would be a great deal different than that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.  Which, baldly speaking, I would take to be the point.  Nobody will accuse Sarah Palin of being "the mind behind the Maverick."  A better question would be can somebody of her dynamism and energy be content in a job famously described as "not worth a bucket of warm piss"?  Or would President McCain give her a specific policy portfolio such as....energy policy?  Hey, maybe she can be Dick Cheney after all!

The "Dark Side" possibility is that Darth Queeg really is looking at Governor Palin as his Dan Quayle, and after the election will relegate her to the sidelines, her purpose served.  That's the REAL John McCain that we must never lose sight of, and why, much as I like the Palin pick, I'm still not persuaded of the wisdom of hanging the chad for the GOP's biggest nemesis.

Debates: This will be her ultimate crucible.  If the Guv steps in it on that stage with Slow Joe, all the Enemy Media's attempted "Quayle-izing" will gain instant traction.  But that's where her gender comes into play, and the relentless character assaassination will have the helpful effect of lowering the expectations bar, and magnifying any memorable Palin zinger or two at Biden's (or Obama's) expense.

But see #1 again.  She's already conquered a state against all odds.  I just don't see her getting "Cindy Brady on the quiz show" stage fright.  And I just as easily DO see Biden losing control of his mouth at the worst possible moment.

Parochialism: The way she talks?  How could that possibly be a disadvantage in a country that twice elected George W. Bush?

Authenticity: See #3, Susan Estridge.  Quoth AP:

Only Her Majesty, forged in the furnace of overweening privilege, deserves real respect. That point’s metastasizing already, in fact, into an argument that picking Palin actually proves McCain’s contempt for women voters insofar as it shows he thinks they’re automatons who’ll vote on the basis of gender and nothing more.

That’s pure garbage — the near-hysterical enthusiasm on the right today proves her appeal goes deeper than her sex — but I’m positively aching at the thought of our nuanced left affecting high dudgeon for the next two months over, of all things, identity politics. You turds invented this game. Don’t cry because you’re suddenly getting beat at it. When Hillary stops making “plantation” references to the GOP on MLK Day, Palin will stop pitching herself to women voters, how’s that?

Desperation: I think that's a crock.  Has McCain ever acted desperate in this election cycle?  How about when his campaign was dead in the water a year ago after his latest shamnesty gambit?  Heck, I wrote him off, as did everybody else.  But he just plodded forward, like the proverbial Tortoise, while my guy dithered too long and proverbial hares like Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney were peaking too soon.  With Mike Huckabee's not inconsiderable help, by Groundhog's Day the GOP nomination was in the most unlikely hands of all.

On through the spring Sailor chugged in relative obscurity while The Messiah and The Empress took turns bludgeoning each other with sledghammers.  By the time the bloody, battered Chicago Cherubim emerged by the narrowest of margins, his lead over the "72-year-old war horse" was much smaller than it should have been.  After a summer of forced and unforced Obama errors, Maverick finds himself in a statistical dead heat AFTER his opponent's coronation.

THAT is the context in which he introduced Sarah Palin this morning.  It didn't come off like George H.W. Bush bringing out Dan Quayle twenty years ago (a pick which hurt him, but not enough to cost him the election), or a flailing gamble by a doomed campaign trying for a "hail Mary" play; it looked to me, particularly by the "cat who ate the canary" grin on his face, like McCain felt like he was unveiling his secret weapon.

Sure, there were safer choices (Fred, Romney, Tim Pawlenty).  But none of them - not even my guy - would have blown everybody away like Palin did.  With FDT the knock would have been, "Oh, great, TWO geezer cancer survivors on the ticket."  In Romney's case, there'd have been the primary season treasure trove of his advertising and debate blasts of McCain for the Dems to wonder hungrily through like Michael Moore through an Old Country Buffet after a week trapped in an empty meat locker.  Pawlenty, while a solid enough conservative and a very personable fellow, just wouldn't have excited anybody and, frankly, wouldn't have been more than marginally better on the experience scale, and given Alaska's proximity to Russian territory, even inferior on nuts & bolts foreign policy matters.

If right-wing worry-warts wanted a safe veep pick, they should have striven harder to nominate an actual REPUBLICAN for the 2008 ticket, one that wouldn't have needed to worry so much about securing the base.  Some one like...Fred Thompson.  Who may well have selected Sarah Palin himself, for all we know.

And apart from all that, I detest the craven defensiveness that argues our nominee should, in essence, let the other side choose his running mate for him.  For heaven's sake, we already let the other side force McCain on us; arguing that he do the same for his #2 would have redefined the term "running up the score."  Besides, isn't it a GOOD thing when the other side melts down over our veep nominee?

The truth is, there's no such thing as a running mate without weakness or blemish or risk, any more than there is a perfect nominee (Ronald Reagan being the closest any party will ever get).  But the fact remains that people vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom.  The running mates can tip things one way or the other, but they're not game-breakers (just ask President Dukakis).  At worst, Sarah Palin is not going to lose this election for John McCain any more than Joe Biden will win it for Obama.  Or vice versa.

What Sarah Palin WILL do for McCain is shine a 500-watt klieg light on the fact that Obama did NOT put not just any woman, but a very particular woman, on HIS ticket, as well as bring under his wing both a conservative and, dare I say it, kindred "maverick" spirit who will walk the "reform" path, not just yak about it.

You might even call her his "young apprentice."

Darth Barracuda, anyone?