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Palin stunningly wrong choice by McCain

James Klurfeld

September 3, 2008

Sometimes you just have to say that the emperor has no clothes. That's the case with Sen. John McCain's reckless selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate. Palin is utterly unqualified for the job of vice president. Period.

Forget about all the political analysis of the Palin selection and commentary about her personal family situation. The fact is that her experience consists of a stint as the mayor of Wasilla, with a population under 10,000 (something akin to being the head of a Long Island village); chair of Alaska's Oil and Gas Conservation Commission; and less than two years as governor of a state that has around half the number of people of either Nassau or Suffolk County. According to what we know now, she has been out of the country twice. This is outrageous.

There have been some stunningly poor choices for vice president over the years, going back to Barry Goldwater's choosing an unknown New York State congressman, William Miller, in 1964, or George H.W. Bush's selection of Dan Quayle in 1988. One Republican operative who worked on that Bush campaign said the goal was to choose somebody who wouldn't overshadow Bush. "We succeeded beyond our wildest expectations," he said. But at least Miller and Quayle had some Washington experience.

I'm not making a judgment on Palin as a person. She obviously presents well, has risen quickly in Alaskan politics and has a bent for reforming government. But as vice president of the United States, a heartbeat away from running the country at a time of unusual peril? Especially for a 72-year-old presidential nominee? If you wrote a movie script about this, you'd be laughed off as ridiculous.

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The real issue here is McCain's judgment. The selection of Palin has a seat-of-the-pants, let's-throw-the-dice look that is not reassuring. Yes, it shores up his conservative political base. Give McCain that. But if he believes that Palin will appeal to women who supported Sen. Hillary Clinton, that's a stunningly wrong judgment. The old cliché that the most important decision a presidential candidate can make is the choice of a running mate has to give even some of McCain's supporters serious pause.

If Palin doesn't have the experience to be on a national ticket, how then do the Democrats defend Sen. Barak Obama to head theirs? It's an absolutely legitimate question. The greatest vulnerability of Obama's candidacy is not that he is the first African-American nominee, although that will no doubt be a factor in the election. It is that he has spent so little time on the national scene. The greatest challenge Obama faces is convincing the American people that he is "presidential" - that he has the leadership skills to overcome his lack of experience.

But there's no comparison with Palin. Obama is a United Sates senator. He has gone through a grueling 18-month campaign, during which he has been vetted and tested, poked and prodded as only an American presidential campaign can poke and prod and test. And he came out on top, defeating a powerful front-runner. To the degree that a presidential campaign is an appropriate measure of what type of leader a candidate will be - and I'm not sure what exactly the correlation is - Obama has been through it. His resume is also impressive: Harvard Law Review, professor at the University of Chicago Law School, author of two best-selling books.

Over the years, the selection of vice president hasn't had a major impact on Election Day - although that has been less true recently. Both Al Gore and Dick Cheney had a positive impact on their tickets. But how this will play out politically isn't the point when it comes to McCain's choice of Palin. His choice of a person with no qualifications for the job, is.

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