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Just when it seemed like the campaign was going to settle into trench warfare McCain's troops have given the flag to someone with fresh legs (it's a sports reference guys - no sexual harassment intended) who is charging into the freshly formed battle lines of the Democratic Party.
Just when I thought it was going to be the old white guys against the young Black guy John McCain throws me a curve ball high and tight. I was just starting to lean in thinking I knew what they were about to deliver and whoosh, it grazed my chin! Instead of a hawk, instead of another wrinkled old dude, he brings in Sarah Palin the youngest newcomer on either ticket.
Now she is a dangerous pick for the Democrats at a lot of levels. She has a son who will be in Iraq soon as an Army infantryman. She has a son with Down Syndrome of whom she says, "Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking, in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?" She has three daughters. She is a known as a reformer who takes no prisoners in either party.
Sarah Palin has some serious pluses for the Republicans. She's American as apple pie. She's female, she's a mom, she's young, she's a principled leader from all reports I've found, she's the daughter of a school teacher and coach. The only exception I found in my quick and dirty research is her firing of Walter Monegan as Commissioner of Public Safety allegedly for refusing to fire a state trooper who was married to her sister. She did pull a bit of a Putin move with a dairy that I'll talk about later.
Sarah Palin apparently eats moose burgers, rides snowmobiles and owns a float plane. She and her Tup'ik Eskimo husband Todd have five children, two boys and three girls. He is a champion snowmobile rider and she is a former beauty queen and state champion basketball player. She's also a lifelong member of the NRA. She could only be a more perfect Republican if she was male but in this election, her gender may be the perfect chemistry for making McCain's ticket a winning one.
Of course Sarah Palin has to overcome the inexperience knock but then she did that in becoming the Governor of Alaska, and the youngest ever and only female ever to boot. I don't think that the Democrats are going to dislodge her as a serious candidate on that issue. I think it's a waste of time to do more than make the statement that the sum of her experience is as PTA member,Mayor of a town of less than 9,000 people, and less than two of years running a state awash in oil money. Perhaps the most challenging job she's had was the PTA.
Her leadership naivete and overzealousness may be exposed somewhat by her failed attempt to keep the Matanuska Maid Dairy closure from happening. Sarah Palin, in a move that would make Putin proud, replaced the entire Alaskan Board of Agriculture and Conservation in order to prevent the dairy from closing. She used her authority as governor in an extremely heavy handed move that only delayed the eventual financial failure of the dairy and cost the state even more than the $600 million it had already invested.
The Democrats are going to hit her hardest on her conservative values. She has lived her pro-life stance when she refused to terminate her pregnancy upon learning that her youngest son would be born with Down Syndrome. She was not only the team captain of her state championship basketball team, she was the prayer leader. She is against gay marriage although she did support equal access to benefits for same sex couples in Alaska.
All in all I think that choosing Sarah Palin is a gutsy, wiley pick by McCain. I am not sure it's going to work but I guess a young Barracuda is better than another old fox. She's going to appeal to a lot of right leaning Republicans but I am not so sure that she will draw in that many women. She may simply be too conservative, too church lady in her paisley frilled blouses, too Annie Oakley in her moose skin jacket, too Hillary in her cold uncompromising demeanor, or maybe she will have all the goods.
Alaska is still the wild, wild west, the beckoning frontier and where better to draw a gritty, straight-talkin', straight-shootin', Eskimo-marryin', moose-munchin' pioneer woman for the Republican party?
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