So, Senator John McCain has chosen Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, as his running mate.
Wow.
It’s taken me a while to get my head around this. Sarah Palin is a political neophyte — if your main charge is that Barack Obama is inexperienced, then you have to see Sarah Palin as INEXPERIENCED. All of her avowed positions are far far to the right of mainstream American opinion. It’s impossible not to believe that the campaign picked her in a blatant attempt to pull off a cynical two-fer: (a) The ultra-right goes ga-ga over her ideological credentials; (b) low-information “Hilary die-hards” decide to vote against everything Senator Clinton believes in so as to get a woman — any woman, dammit — into the executive wing. The latter part is so blindingly obvious that, I think, the only people who will fall for it are people who would have found some reason to vote for McCain anyway.
What to do? How to react? The Obama campaign has a lot of people way more plugged in than me, but below the fold, I give my two cents:
(more…)