Volume 1, Number 24
I was on vacation in Hawaii when John McCain announced his pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate. The night before, our guests asked who I thought might be the pick. I told them I thought it would be Mitt Romney. I felt fairly confident in my pick given that CNN was reporting Romney was headed to Dayton, Ohio, the location where McCain would announce his choice. Romney also had been consistently rumored to be at the top of the list of choices for weeks. A staunch conservative, he would have energized the party faithful. His gracious and enthusiastic endorsement of McCain upon ending his own bid for the GOP nomination also surely worked in his favor. I was up early the following morning to clean up emails and participate on a client conference call, and turned the television to Fox News. Given the Hawaiian time zone, it was the crack of dawn on Maui. A few minutes before McCain took the stage in Dayton, Fox was broadcasting that Palin had been picked. “Who?” I wondered. I had read a short bio of Palin weeks earlier when her name was among half a dozen others rumored to be under consideration. What stood out was she was a conservative and a former beauty pageant winner. I shook my head as the Fox team repeated the news, “It’s Sarah Palin of Alaska.”
I watched intently as Palin spoke to the crowd in Dayton, and boy was I impressed. This is a woman who is confident, articulate, immensely likeable and, yes, not too hard on the eyes. The more I learned about her, the more I liked her.
It is said that the measure of character is what a person does when no one is watching. Palin gave birth to her fifth child this past April, a boy born with Down Syndrome. Palin and her husband knew months beforehand that the boy had Down Syndrome, and they elected to keep the baby and lovingly raise it. Statistics show that fewer than 8 in 10 women would make a similar decision under those circumstances. When Palin says she is pro-life, she’s proven it. And in the process she’s taken the abortion issue completely off the table. What Democrat dares to lecture her about the “right to choose.” Palin made her choice, and what a glorious one it was.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the selection of Palin is how women have reacted to it. Hillary Clinton called it a “historic nomination.” My wife, and her friend who joined us in Maui, know little about politics. They couldn’t have told you who Sarah Palin was. But it didn’t take 10 minutes of news reporting about her background, the description of her as a mother, her decision to keep her Down Syndrome baby, and seeing her at ease on the stage in Dayton before both women had made up their minds: they were voting for “Sarah.” Not Governor Sarah Palin. Sarah. For two days all over Maui, I heard women repeatedly refer to her as Sarah. They feel like they know her. They like her. She is one of them.
Barack Obama has based his entire campaign on the amorphous idea of ‘change.’ Yet his Vice Presidential pick of Joe Biden is as old, tired and inside-the-beltway as they come. How is this guy with white balding hair (hair plugs at that) and sagging jowls going to look standing next to the fit 44 year old former state basketball champion? Not very well is how. Who will really represent change when the cameras have them both on stage? The Senator who has been in Washington longer than half of America has been alive, or the young attractive Governor who has fought corruption in her own party while staying married to her high school sweetheart and raising five children? Wow, what a contrast. Let’s go ahead and have that ‘change’ debate.
Kudos to Senator McCain for a truly brilliant, race-changing pick. He took a risk but it is one that could well result in him winning the White House. And kudos to his staff for their brilliant manipulation of the news cycle. Their timing of the announcement, and the surprise that is was, totally trumped Obama’s expected media glow coming off his exceptionally well-delivered (but largely non-substantive) speech in Denver. Obama and their campaign were blown off the front pages with the pick of Palin and were left bumbling trying to react.
# # #
Comments