mushinnoshin

The conventional wisdom seems to be that Palin’s pick was affirmative action in action, a transparent ploy to play for Clinton’s voters. I don’t think it’s so simple.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure her ovaries helped put her over the top, but I don’t think the Republicans are so deluded as to actually believe she’ll swing anything more than a handful of dead-enders. I think to whatever degree her sex played a role, it was simply to try and keep the disunity illusion alive, to give them a reason to keep Clinton’s name in the discussion. More of the same “peeing in the other party’s pool” type of petty disruption tactics that they’ve fallen to repeatedly this year since they know they can’t win a clean fight.

No, I think she actually was picked because she was the best choice (from their perspective), for the sum of a number of reasons, including the above but also:

• Oil.
• She’s a “movement conservative”, the sort of hard-right blend of social conservatism (anti-choice, creationist) with squishy pseudo-libertarian mercantilist economics that reassures the Fred Thompson crowd. In other words, she’s like Marsha Blackburn, except she’s a woman.
• Oil.
• The pseudo-libertarian economics works with the fact that she’s moderately tolerant of Teh Gays to let them spin her as someone for the beltway libertarian / libertarian-republican circles, which is a crowd they can potentially lose to Obama on war and civil liberties, if they don’t think the GOP is giving them anything else. (Of course she doesn’t think homosexuals should actually be treated as equals, but whatever, right? Neither do a lot of those so-called libertarians. And with Obama also stopping short of supporting marriage rights, it’s a hard point to press.)
• Oil.
• “Rising Star”. She’s sort of like their Obama circa 2002 or so. They want to get her on the national stage. They know it’s going to take a miracle to win this election, and unless it turns out Obama is the Antichrist, 2012 will be as out of reach as 1984 was for the Democrats. They’re grooming her for 2016. I’m thinking they’ll maneuver her into Ted Steven’s seat in the meantime, and probably let someone like Huckabee or Romney take the fall in 2012.
• Oil.
• Let’s face it, she’s kinda hot. Nooo, surely the red-blooded red-state NASCAR males they need to rally, who don’t like McCain and might have been tempted to just sit this one out, well that type of guy never thinks with his penis, right?
• Oil.
• McCain probably actually likes her. At the very least, her anti-corruption / party-reformer image meshes well with his own (without regard to the degrees to which either of those images may or may not be genuine). And that he made such a “shocking” choice based on his commitment to this image helps him continue to play maverick. Though how it’s “shocking” that he picked one of the top three contenders according to the political bookies is beyond me.
• Have I mentioned oil? Look, she has an atrocious environmental record, to the right of Bush. She’s popular in the state over which Big Oil has drooled for years. She’s married to a BP exec. We all know who controls the purse strings in the GOP, and she’s their girl.

Well the good news is, I think she does help Obama more than she hurts him. She absolutely takes the experience theme off the table, while simultaneously marking McCain’s age and health issues with a big yellow highlighter.

And when I see “McCain / Palin” close together in a sentence or a logo, my eyes tend to jumble it into “McPain”, which for some reason makes me giggle.