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John McCain’s vice presidential nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, is full of surprises.
To begin with, no one foresaw her being McCain’s pick. The Internet gives everyone a voice, blogs give everyone license to spew opinionated predictions, even at random, yet somehow few predicted Palin’s ascension.
In the past week, other surprises have followed. Most people also did not know, before it made national news, that this anti-abortion rights (even in the case of rape or incest) activist’s unmarried 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant. That sort of thing is hard to miss, and so we have all been duly surprised.
How could the McCain campaign not have known about the scandals that clung to its girl?She is a lifelong National Rife Association member who once was a member of the Alaska Independence Party, so-called because it favored Alaskan secession from the Union. And while Palin rose to prominence fighting the corruption and cronyism of the Alaska state government, she is somehow in the middle of a legal battle over her own abuse of power. Not that she’s guilty of firing state trooper Michael Wooten just because he was divorcing her sister – she just fired the Public Safety Commissioner who refused to do so for her.
Some have suggested that it was the McCain campaign’s great lengths to keep his choice secret that opened the door for all these surprises. To keep Palin’s name off the radar, the VP vetting committee avoided contacting other Alaskan public servants and asking what they thought about her – normally a standard part of the process. And if her name had been floated months in advance, her pandora’s box could have been opened more slowly, more manageably.
McCain wanted his unknown. He wanted to shock voters with his pick of a hip, young, former beauty queen of whom the world knew very little. Except no one stays unknown forever, or even for a little bit, when they could be a heartbeat away from becoming leader of the free world.
What can we think about this? It is hard to know because our intuitions cannot be trusted. Our intuitions have been wrong about McCain’s vice presidential contenders since the beginning of time.
Here is my process in thinking about all these surprises:
Wait, the campaign now says it knew all about [these scandals].How could the McCain campaign not have known about the scandals that clung to its girl? Wait, the campaign now says it knew all about them.
That means that the campaign foresaw the revelation of these secrets and even anticipated – nay, counted on – the widespread negative reactions.
For a while now, we have seen how negative reactions polarize voters. People get offended that others are reacting so strongly to an issue they care about, which gets them out of bed to go vote. The McCain camp, familiar with this phenomenon, has counted on the negative reaction to its VP. They have picked a woman with a Ph.D. in base-polarization. Guns, abortion, states’ rights, family values, women/maternity (for all you Hillary supporters). You name it, and Palin comes with some kind of controversy on the issue.
It was just reported that she thinks global climate change is a myth. I’ll bet that she soon doubles down on evolution, and then she will have the complete set.
They have picked a woman with a Ph.D. in base-polarization.So what do I make of McCain and his advisers' scandal mishandle? I think they are counting on mainstream Palin disapproval to invigorate the single-issue voting blocks Palin polarizes so well. Each abortion scandal makes a pro-life voter all the more likely to remember to show up on election day. The McCain camp is starting as many fires as they can, using Palin's personal life as fuel under their voting blocks' collective pants. Not that she minds; indeed, it might be all her idea.
So I think it is about time that, when we see a political campaign manipulate the electorate by trumping up a polarizing issue, we finally call "scandal" ourselves.
[Huffington Post, The NRA, ABC News, USA Today, NY Times, Boston Herald, St. Louis Today]
Jeff Dubbin is a contributing editor for TheSequitur.com.
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