… even if it’s one we’ll not see on TV. (It’s not from the Obama campign.) It makes the right connection between the mess we’re in and the so-called “maverick” who’s done nothing in 26 years to help fix it.

http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=wJThPjvscFs

It’s on YouTube and I’d embed it if I had time to figure out how.

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:

Second, lay off attacks on Palin’s “experience”. It’s OK to point out the idiocy of thinking that, because Alaska is just across the Bering Strait from Siberia, somehow its governor is automagically an expert in Russian affairs. But don’t harp on the 20-month thing, if only because it keeps alive questions about Obama’s tenure in the Senate. Palin is underexperienced on the face of it; no need to keep drilling it home.

Third, focus your response on the process by which she was picked. Apparently there was remarkably little vetting; they didn’t even check the hometown newspaper archives. Senator McCain met her once and talked on the phone once, for something like half an hour tops. Many other, more obviously qualified, more serious candidates were passed over. All signs point to this being a last-minute, from-the-hip choice. Is that really something we want in the leader of the Free World?

Fourth, it’s OK to ask: Heaven forbid something happens to John McCain early in his term. Is Sarah Palin really the person we want ascending to the Presidency, even temporarily? This helps to underscore McCain’s age, a known millstone in his polling.

But above all, take the high ground and be anti-misogynistic. That is the best way to keep the Hillary supporters and to defuse the gender implications of this choice. It has the rare benefit of also being the right thing to do.

As much as I hate just pointing to other people’s blog entries, I had to link to something from the Carpetbagger Report: “It’s a delicate dance, and John McCain is ‘liable to break a hip’“. In it, CB lists all the different ways John McCain has flip-flopped since beginning his current run at the Presidency. I suspect I’ll have cause to refer to it (and its inevitable successors) a lot during this campaign.

Let’s be clear: It’s OK for a politician to change his/her mind. People change and situations evolve. But McCain, in particular, has run as the straight-talker, the dead-eye with keen judgment who isn’t moved by political winds. Yet every one of his many many flips have moved him from the “maverick” position towards one that just happens to line up with the special interests of whatever group he happens to be addressing. That’s not straight-shooting. That’s not even political evolution.

It’s pandering, pure and simple, and if a panderer wants to run on the strength of his so-called convictions, well I think he ought to be hoist on his own petard.