The Orange Overlord1 has a couple of things to say about the Sarah and Bristol Palin kerfuffle.
Vincent Rossmeier of Salon: Do you think Barack Obama responded correctly to Sarah Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy?
Yeah, of course. It’s not his job to be digging into that. If the Republicans are going to be all high and mighty about people digging into the lives of candidates’ families, all I can do is laugh, given the treatment that Michelle Obama has been given by Republicans — maybe not John McCain proper, but every surrogate beneath him.
Ultimately, when it comes to Bristol Palin, the issue isn’t, oh well, she’s a bad girl. We’re progressives; we don’t care if she got pregnant. That’s between her and her family and she’s got to deal with it; and in fact, progressives believe in having the services available to make her life better and to help her in what’s going to be a very, very difficult journey ahead. The issue is, of course, that Sarah Palin is a strong supporter of abstinence-only education. Here we have a situation where they claim that abstinence-only will prevent teen pregnancy when her own daughter has gotten pregnant. There are legitimate policy questions that go beyond the fact of Bristol Palin to the kind of governor [Sarah Palin] would be, the way she would help govern this country were she the vice president. And I think that is obviously, legitimately fair game.
Salon: Do you think the Palin pick was a game changer, whether good or bad, and how do you think this will affect the election long-term?
There’s no doubt that it was a game changer. All you have to do is go to Daily Kos and see that we haven’t written about McCain in a week now, right? It’s a singular obsession with Palin. She’s the gift that keeps on giving. To me, it seems pretty obvious that McCain wanted [Tom] Ridge or [Joe] Lieberman but he’s too weak within his own party to get the candidate he wanted, so he had to go with someone to appease the right wing.
They saw that Obama was going to be able to rally the Clinton supporters with Hillary Clinton’s help. They probably saw Obama’s speech and saw how incredible and dynamic and how powerful it was and realized that a safe pick wasn’t going to give them any hope of victory in November so they had to shake things up. They threw a Hail Mary with Sarah Palin, they didn’t vet her, so they had no clue who she was. They saw that she was attractive and very popular in Alaska — remember, Alaska is actually a swing state. It was in play; Obama was competitive in the polls. So they locked down Alaska. And she’s clearly popular with the right and they’ve embraced her because of her radical right-wing views on the role of religion in government, and it completely, utterly, on that Friday, took Obama off the airwaves.
[Click to read more of How to build a vast left-wing conspiracy | Salon Books]
I never did pick up a copy of Crashing the Gate; maybe by 2012, I’ll be caught up enough on my reading.
The Orange Overlord continues:
Footnotes:Salon: The Palin nomination directed everyone’s attention away from Obama. So in that, at least, the selection was effective.
But it’s mind-boggling to me. In the middle of Labor Day weekend, I had the highest traffic day of my existence. This is higher traffic than the 2004 federal election. Higher traffic than the 2006 general election. Usually on long weekends, people disappear. They hang out with family and friends. No one wanted to do anything but [talk about] Sarah Palin.
Now, I don’t think she’s turning out the way they expected it; they expected people to be excited that there was a woman on a ticket and all that. Now people are thinking this was a gimmick and instead of putting country first, he went for someone who would actually knock Obama off the news cycle. So she was a news cycle pick. It bought them a day or two. But now that people are really starting to look into who she is, there are a lot of unpalatable things about her and her record, and I think it’s turning into a nightmare pick for them. Will she stay on the ticket? The Christian right loves her. They’ve decided she is practically the second coming.
Salon: Isn’t that a good thing for McCain?
It is a good thing for McCain, but it means they’ve completely abandoned the center and they’re not going to get any Hillary supporters out of it. We’re in an election where the number of Republicans is shrinking, the number of Democrats is growing and they cannot win on the base strategy alone. We can. For the first time, we can win on the base strategy. We’re not running that, but we could. They’re running a base strategy when Republicans are becoming an extinct species.
And you can’t get rid of her. To take somebody who’s been so warmly embraced by the Christian right and then to dump her for somebody who’s more palatable to the center? Talk about open warfare. It would be worse than having picked Lieberman from the start. To me, it’s fantastic, right? He’s boxed himself in, he can’t get out. So they’re left having to defend somebody. And let’s not forget another important point that I almost forgot because it’s so obvious, is that they’ve completely negated the experience argument. That was probably the only argument against Obama that had any salience.
- aka Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, aka Kos, of Daily Kos [↩]