Palin pick intriguing

By Ryan Falls

Published: August 29, 2008

Demonstrating his remarkable propensity for bucking convention, John McCain managed Friday to surprise – and perhaps chill – by selecting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as running mate. It is a move that carries certain risk and ensures that the next tandem to take up residence on Pennsylvania Avenue will smash a barrier, either racial or gender.
The choice of Palin stuns because her name was not among those bandied about as finalists for the position, and in comparison to favorites such as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty she is little-known beyond the tundra that is her home turf.
Her experience, like Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s, is thin. Before becoming governor in 2006, Palin was a councilwoman and mayor of Wasilla, a town of 8,500 people. This is hardly the sort of resume expected in one a hair’s breadth from the world’s most powerful office.
Assuredly, Romney would have been, like Joe Biden for Obama, a safe choice. He would have provided counterweight to McCain’s absence of expertise in domestic policy and experience as a chief executive and gaps both perceived and real in his conservatism. But the final point was the most crucial for McCain, and on this Palin resonates.
A mother of five children, including a son with Down syndrome and another in the National Guard, Palin is staunchly pro-life, favors capital punishment and opposes same-sex marriage. She has shined particularly as an opponent of pork, famously leading the charge to defeat the so-called “Bridge to Nowhere,” a $397 million project to construct a span almost as long as the Golden Gate Bridge between two small Alaskan towns.
Like McCain, Palin accepts popular theory on the subject of climate change, but not the folly of the ban on drilling for oil in a tiny section of Alaska’s massive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She has been unflinching in pressing major oil companies to start work on a $26-billion pipeline to move natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope to Canada and the continental U.S.
McCain prides himself on his willingness to confront members of his own party, and Palin’s short career reflects a like spirit. Palin championed Alaska Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell’s bid to unseat Republican Rep. Don Young, a leading advocate of the “Bridge to Nowhere.” She similarly has confronted iconic Sen. Ted Stephens, pushing him to disclose gifts allegedly omitted from his financial disclosure forms. Stephens is the longest serving Republican in the Senate.
One would have to page back to 1984, the only other occasion when a woman was chosen as running mate, to find a selection as intriguing as McCain’s, and his is more so. Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale’s vice presidential pick 24 years ago, was a representative from New York similarly thin on experience but hailing from a state among the electoral map’s largest prizes.
Neither Palin’s geography nor experience augment McCain in the way Romney would have, especially with regard to the latter. But her conservatism assuages a bloc McCain must have to capture the presidency. Those votes surely would have been squandered, and the election with it, had McCain chosen his close friend, Sen. Joe Lieberman, a backer of war in Iraq but a liberal by most other measures.
On the heels of a Democratic National Convention that provided little bounce in the polls for Obama, McCain might today have owned an inside track to the White House. Instead, he bowed, though not fully, to a predilection for stubbornly charting riskier courses. We support Palin as one whose principles and record impress. But we wonder whether McCain needlessly has cast murk over a path to victory that recently had begun to clear.