figures

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/29/palin.republican.vp.candidate/index.html

I was pretty sure it wasn't going to be Romney, Huckabee, or Pawlenty (the three most talked about choices). I had a feeling it would probably be Palin, but I wasn't sure enough to blog on it when I got home yesterday. I would have probably made some kudos on the prognostication effort. It was really the only choice on the board for McCain that I'd heard at least. He could have gone completely off the map. Romney was precisely the old style GOP that McCain tends to oppose. Huckabee is the second most divisive candidate (other than Hillary), and Pawlenty would just need a Democrat backer willing to run a video clip of a well-known bridge collapse to demonstrate a point (he was from Minnesota for those that don't know who the hell this is). I suppose he could have picked Rice, but it doesn't seem like she's that interested and it wouldn't have created some feeling of separation between Bush-McCain.

As with Biden for Obama, this really doesn't do anything. Obama could have just picked Biden as his Sec State to shore up his perceived foreign policy weakness. Outside of that, Biden isn't really known for anything in the Senate in the general public. I was more amused at the fact that Obama's text message announcement about his unexciting choice of VP went out at 3am in some cases and hence probably pissed off hundreds of thousands of young people. This was similar to the Clinton ad with the phone ringing at 3am...and ringing and ringing.. I'm not sure that the idea that NO ONE answers the phone after 6 or 7 rings, even at 3am, is something you want to subliminally plant in your audience. Democrats seem to have trouble with those wee hours of the morning.

Concurrently, I'm not sure that running a woman VP candidate out there was as important as tossing out the idea of experience as a point of contention in the election for McCain. The demographic of women most likely to vote Republican were probably going to do so without a female VP. I'm not sure that the moderate/independent vote is swayed by cheap political movements, which this was in essence a dig at Obama for not picking Hillary Clinton. It will take something like educated sounding responses to policy issues (including foreign policy, something McCain is less versed in than he claims and for which Palin has zero credibility) for Palin to make anything like inroads for moderate voters in the election for McCain's candidacy. And all while trying to shore up McCains' base. In fact, it's sounding more and more like many moderates (and some extremists) may start looking for third parties as Obama's campaign starts to resemble a normal one and McCain's continues to distance itself from moderate/maverick positions in order to score political points. Barr has been nationally polling over 5% in some polls for example. If this is the case, I think it would shake up Washington much more than either candidate claims they will (as they always do make such claims). The idea that we have this easily stratified society into red and blue would be nice to crash down with some other color on the map once in a while.