Why Governor Palin?
If the answer to the above question is because she’s a woman, congratulations: you’re wrong.
Sarah Palin’s sex is incidental in this case. It’s wonderful to have a woman on the Republican ticket for the first time ever, of course, but anyone who thinks John McCain will pick a Vice Presidential candidate based on the presence of a uterus doesn’t know anything about John McCain or politics in general.
Palin is smart choice (and not just because she has more executive experience than the entire Obama/Biden ticket combined). A lot has been made of her being McCain’s second choice, but all of that is irrelevant because she was his last choice and the right choice.
On the matter of experience, who else was there? Romney, who exchanged blows with McCain during the primaries? Pawlenty, who’s a good governor but is as unknown as Palin and lacks the polish and flair that Palin has? Huckabee, who also slapped McCain around pretty well during the primary? No, certainly not.
Furthermore, for those Republicans (like myself) who have watched the Bush administration descend into the scandal-ridden corpse of its former self, Sarah Palin brings her no-nonsense, non-partisan anti-corruption credentials to the ticket. Whether the pervasive feeling that the Bush administration has done a lot of illegal things is justified or not (and that’s a matter for another day), to nominate Governor Palin to be Vice President shows that John McCain is making the most out of the fact that he wasn’t hand-picked by the gOP establishment. Palin has experience going after her own party when corruption is present, and that’s the most important part of her experience.
The prevailing wisdom (if you can call the talking points of the likes of Barbara Boxer and Barack Obama wisdom) that Palin is a pair of breasts to balance the ticket is not only insulting to the Governor, but also to all women. They’re saying that women can’t do valuable things, can’t be working professionals, can’t be excellent candidates for high national office; they’re just there to look pretty. This just goes to show that NOW represents women in the same way Jesse Jackson represents blacks.
All in all, Palin is an electrifying choice. Her gender adds to her already massive appeal and ensures that, no matter who wins, the United States takes an embarrassingly overdue step forward. And even if Barack Obama wins, Governor Palin will continue her meteoric rise–assuming Obama doesn’t get the country destroyed by February 2009.
