Last Sunday, 24 hours after Mr. Obama announced his running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, Mr. McCain met with his senior campaign team at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Phoenix. By then, campaign advisers said, the group had long decided that Mr. McCain’s “experience versus change” argument against Mr. Obama had run its course, to the extent that it had worked at all.
At the same time, Mr. Obama’s coming acceptance speech before a stadium of about 80,000 people (and what turned out to be a television audience of nearly 40 million) loomed large. As much as the campaign was publicly dismissing Mr. Obama as a celebrity in a rock-star setting, the concern was that his command of such a large crowd on the last night of the Democratic convention would give him the aura of a president.
In any case, one campaign adviser said, Mr. McCain hated running as the wizened old hand of experience. Despite his embrace this year of President Bush and many of the administration’s policies, Mr. McCain, a campaign adviser said, still saw himself as the maverick who delighted in occasionally throwing political grenades at his own Party.
Ms. Palin, and not Mr. Pawlenty or Mr. Romney, would reinforce Mr. McCain’s self-image, an adviser said. She had a reputation as a reformer in Alaska, she hunted and fished, and she had once belonged to a union. Just as crucial, Ms. Palin, 44, was beloved by the party’s religious base but did not come off as shrill. “She’s conservative,” Mr. Black said, “but she’s not an ideologue.”
This wasn't a VP selection process. It was a middle-age crisis. Couldn't he have just bought a convertible?
4 comments:
Too bad Sen McCain didn't pick Sen Lieberman or one of the other gentlemen. Then the election might have been interesting. Sarah Palin ROCKS!
Great punch line. I'm looking forward to seeing what you have to say about the rest of the campaign.
It sure is fun being a powerful woman, watching the elitist men make up reasons why a woman can only be something in relation to a powerful man. Sorry, mister, but she really IS about to make it to VP on her OWN merits. Even if that gives you a middle-age crisis of your own.
Perhaps. Of course, one might hope that her merits would have been known before she was selected.
And I don't have any issue with a female VP or, for that matter, a female President.
Perhaps if you were a post-feminist, you would be better able to distinguish a criticism based on gender from one based on a male's seeming lack of judgment.
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