Sorry for the delay in getting to this issue. Yesterday was wall-to-wall with events, and since Palin was a surprise pick, I had to get up to speed.
I want to divide my comments up into three categories — a statement of the problem as it was, some punditry, and some personal observations and reactions to Sarah Palin. To run ahead a bit, this does change some things.
First, a statement of the problem as it was. I have made plain before my intention to not vote McCain. This was not something that arose out of a third party perfectionism. I am more than happy to work with a strategy of incrementalism, but the problem had become the fact that the Republicans had become the party of incrementalism all right, but in the wrong direction, and just a tad slower than the Democrats. I have come to the conclusion that what we have needed is a genuine reversal in our course, not just more dithering and grumbling in the back ranks of the great progressive march to the abyss. Our culture has been Gotterdamerunging like crazy, fin de siecling our way down the great spiral staircase of damned nonsense. We desperately need something more than another exhortation to “go a little slower” because the “conservatives” are having trouble keeping up as we clatter down the stairs to the basement of oblivion.
That said, my touchstone issue on whether or not this reversal is likely or possible has always been the abortion issue. That is the issue that we have to begin with, and it is therefore a non-negotiable. If we repent there, we can get to other issues as they arise. If we don’t repent there (with repentance measured by nothing less than overthrowing Roe), then it doesn’t really matter what we do elsewhere because it will be nothing but God’s judgment, whatever it is.
Now I have known that if the Dalai Bama is elected, we will have absolutely no chance of getting pro-life judges on the Supreme Court. And if the Republicans have the White House, we might or might not get pro-life judges. But wait . . . there’s more. McCain’s persona of deliberately irritating conservatives with that maverick schtick of his has been such that it convinced me that there was no way that he was going to be the one to topple Roe — right up to the recent reports that were circulating that he was actually considering Lieberman for his VP pick. But the bottom line has always been that if I knew that McCain was going to appoint pro-life judges to the Court, I would be more than happy to vote for him. But I — like many other conservatives — believed his various erratic and eccentric signals. “Don’t ever trust me on this one” was his message, and “okay” was my response. This choice of Palin appears to a clear signal in the right direction, a signal that goes well beyond a pie crust promise –easily made, easily broken. So, is this VP choice making me rethink this election? Yes, it is. I haven’t reached any settled conclusions yet, but I am willing to consider it. I’ll keep you posted, if you don’t mind me thinking out loud.
It is important to note that this is not about an “on paper” pro-life record. McCain really does have that. But if he had chosen another candidate that was ostensibly pro-life in the same kind of way that he is (e.g. Romney), I would have rethought nothing. But Palin is real-time, real-life pro-life. If this is the signal that McCain is making (for pragmatic political reasons, sure) that he is willing to bind himself to a pro-life course of action prior to the election, then it does alter the landscape. I’ll come back to this business of what I think after some punditry — how I see others reacting to this choice.
On the level of political strategy, this was absolutely a brilliant move. Not only was it brilliant, it was brilliant on multiple levels.
First, all the early returns indicate that this has moved discontented evangelicals from “stay at home mad” voters or “hold your nose” voters to enthusiasts. I am not counting here the bedwetting evangelicals who were willing to support Obama, the most radical pro-death candidate to ever reach the national stage. I am not counting them because they don’t count. Among real evangelicals, the kind who read their Bibles, the response to Palin has been striking. As I read the responses from various directions, I can only describe it, in terms of its impact, as an electrifying choice. Think about it. McCain has picked a stridently pro-life, devout Christian evangelical as his running mate. There is nothing else he could have done to mobilize conservative Christians for this election, and he decided to do it.
But her appeal goes well beyond evangelicals. I saw one news commentator this morning say (quite accurately) that Sarah Palin appears to have been manufactured in a “vote-getting laboratory.” She is an appealing woman in numerous ways on multiple levels.
To deal with the obvious first, she is a pippin. She is a beautiful woman who wears her hair up and has those schoolmarm eyeglasses. So there’s the hot for teacher vote, neglected so many times and so callously throughout our nation’s troubled history. I am joking, and this is fun to joke about, but anybody who thinks it an insignificant vote-getter is blissfully unaware of the hidden twelve-year-old boy in half the electorate.
And she is the ultimate red-stater — gun enthusiast, drill for oil now, for Pete’s sake, devoted mother of five, athlete and former beauty contestant, son shipping out to Iraq soon, and “I baked a pie this morning, anybody want some?” In addition, her husband is not a mousy little pencil neck — a commerical fisherman, an oilman, and snowmobile racer. As the governor, she calls him the “first dude.”
She steals a good bit of Obama’s message of “change” because she made her name by toppling a corrupt Republican establishment in Alaska. There is plenty more of that in Washington, so why not? Obama could try to come back at her with the “too inexperienced” argument, but she has more experience than he does, and she is number two on the ticket and he is number one. So, as a shrewd political move by McCain, this was right up near the top.
And, of course, not to be neglected in all of this is the fact that she lived here in Moscow between 1984 and 1987, and graduated from the University of Idaho. As the UI’s ad campaign has it, “from here you can go anywhere.” So there is the “go Vandals” factor.
The stakes are high. And despite this VP selection, for principled conservatives, McCain remains obnoxious for various reasons. If McCain is elected, we can look forward to more neocon turmoil overseas and blecch to that. His McCain/Feingold support for the restriction of free speech during political campaigns — the one place where the Founders would have been concerned to preserve it — shows that he is clueless on some key principles of liberty. McCain has a decent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, somewhere in the eighties, but when he goes off the reservation, he really goes off.
There are other issues as well, and the choice of Sarah Palin was only announced yesterday. I want some time to think about it, and I would invite questions, arguments, and counterarguments in the comments section. But I have to say that McCain really did surprise me with this pick, and I am willing for that surprise to result in me changing my plans.
One more thing. An issue that will be discussed among some conservative Christians is the propriety of electing a woman. Evangelical Christians are overwhelmingly hostile to feminism, and so what is with that? I have argued before from Isaiah 3:12 — “children are their oppressors, and women rule over them” — that feminism is one of the things Scripture uses as an indicator of God’s judgment on a culture. I still believe that, and also believe that we are in fact under this particular judgment in our culture. But as a biblical absolutist, and not a simple traditionalist, I also want to make room for the occasional Deborah. Life is funny, and you should remember that in the Bible Deborah was the dame who upstaged a fellow named Barak. Kinda spooky when you think about it.