Briefly, on the big story of the day.<\/p>\n
John McCain<\/strong> selected Alaska governor Sarah Palin<\/strong> <\/a>to be his running mate. A historic choice but a wise one?<\/p>\n Assuming Palin was sufficiently vetted, selecting her was a tactically smart move\u00a0on McCain’s part.\u00a0 Palin has some executive experience but the real value is that choosing her\u00a0 zeroed in on the papered over but yet\u00a0unhealed gender fault line in the Democratic Party from Hillary’s defeat while burnishing McCain’s claim to be an advocate of change. Obama<\/strong> will now have to expend additional effort and time\u00a0to woo independent female swing voters and entice Hillary’s embittered feminist supporters to come out to the polls. McCain has just given them an additional reason to feel good about staying home this year.<\/p>\n Strategically, well…Palin’s not ready to step up and be president of the United States on day one. Let’s be serious – she’d make a great Secretary of the Interior but the fact that she lacks any defense, IC or foreign policy experience would rule her out\u00a0for consideration\u00a0for most major cabinet posts in the national security arena, much less as Vice-president.<\/p>\n However, the same could easily be said of Barack Obama<\/strong> and that implicit comparison is going to be evident to a lot of independent voters.<\/p>\n ADDENDUM: <\/strong>I will add here the views of others on McCain-Palin as my schedule today permits.<\/p>\n Wizards of Oz<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Lexington Green<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Glittering Eye<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0Daily Dish<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0Pajamasmedia<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Newshoggers<\/a>\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0Outside the Beltway<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 NRO The Corner<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Josh Marshall<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Purpleslog<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Hidden Unities<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Progressive Historians<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Fabius Maximus<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Thomas P.M. Barnett<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Sic Semper Tyrannis<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 tdaxp<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 Soob<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Briefly, on the big story of the day. John McCain selected Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate. A historic choice but a wise one? Assuming Palin was sufficiently vetted, selecting her was a tactically smart move\u00a0on McCain’s part.\u00a0 Palin has some executive experience but the real value is that choosing her\u00a0 zeroed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188,415,534,187,251],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-188","category-elections","category-mccain","category-politics","category-republican-party"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}