It wasn’t a good week for John McCain. As Hurricane Gustav threatened a repeat of the New Orleans disaster on its approach to the Gulf Coast, much of the fanfare that followed his choice of Alaskan gun enthusiast Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate was drowned out. Then, after being upstaged by the weather, attention returned to Palin with the news that her unmarried 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant. That had Democrats claiming that McCain had failed “to vet her properly”, reports The Daily Telegraph. “Put it this way,” says The Salt Lake Tribune, “as a political storm, Gustav is a distant second.”
So was McCain too quick to call on Palin? “The choice of Sarah Palin as running mate is bold and it is exciting,” says Gideon Rachman in the FT. “It is also stupid.” Because, at a stroke, the McCain campaign has negated its single most powerful argument: that Barack Obama is too inexperienced to be president. Before joining the McCain campaign, Sarah Palin had been governor of Alaska for less than three years, and her only experience before that was as mayor of a town of only 9,000 people. “McCain is staking his whole campaign on the ability of a young woman whom he had met only once, to convince the American people she can handle the jobs of commander-in-chief and the president of the United States,” says William Rees-Mogg in The Times.
But Palin will add fuel to the somewhat depleted McCain rocket, says Dominic Lawson in The Independent. Her political background – fighting oil corruption in Alaska, imposing sharp tax increases on big oil as governor – challenges the claim that the Biden-Obama ticket is the only one capable of change. “Her political career is a case study in taking out the big boys,” says The Wall Street Journal. By contrast, “Obama rose through the Chicago Democratic machine without a peep of pushback”. And in Palin, Senator McCain has found a running mate who is a “genuine Conservative” – not a Washington neo-con – who will sit well with the same voters who built the Reagan majorities of 1980 and 1984, agrees Rees-Mogg. Donors have certainly been cheered, contributing more than $10m since the selection was announced, reports the San Jose Mercury.
But are McCain and Palin the dream ticket to take on Obama? As the Republicans headed to Minnesota this week, they trailed the Democrats by more than ten percentage points in the polls, notes The Economist. And although the Palin nomination has brought him head-to-head with the Democrats, it would be “astonishing and against the odds” if the Republicans went on to win. At 72, he would be the oldest president ever inaugurated. And after eight calamitous years of Republican rule, McCain’s reputation as a war-monger will prove a sticking point. Some might see him as “the safe choice in dangerous times”, says Rachman, “but this is wrong”. A man who was calling for an invasion of Iraq long before the terror attacks on New York and Washington, and who also argued for throwing Russia out of the Group of Eight much before the recent conflict in Georgia, is too radical in international dealings for a country reeling from two disastrous wars. No matter how clever this marriage of “fighting soldier” and “political underdog”, as Rees-Mogg dubs them, the obstacles seem insurmountable.