Keep in mind - this isn't an endorcement of one candidiate or the other, just my views on the strategy behind the election.
As for McCain's move? It was brilliant. It's a move that will win him the election, despite the deck seeming to be stacked in their favor this year. Why? Three reasons:
First, there's the timing of the announcement. McCain made his announcement the morning after Barack Obama's acceptance speech before 80,000 screaming fans at Invesco Field in Denver. Most accounts of the speech called it moving, historic, yet the timing of McCain's announcement blew it out of the news cycle - a day the Obama camp probably thought would be a 24-hour long free campaign commercial for them as the pundit class played and replayed soundbites from Barack's speech. In military terms McCain outflanked Obama and blunted the impact of his milestone address.
Of course if McCain had made a conventinal pick for VP, the newsies might have gone back to Obama's speech pretty quickly. But rolling the dice and picking an absolute outsider like Palin guaranteed that the press would be glued to the McCain camp as they digested the news (this would be reason #2 in why it's a briliant move). Palin gave the McCain campaign something far more than a one-day spectacle, she validated the image of McCain as a maverick. Not only is she a Washington outsider, but she's an outsider with a record of taking on the powers that be. Palin took on one of Alaska's most powerful political families, the Murkowskis - defeating the patriarch Frank in a primary fight to win the Governor's seat. She also took on the powerful oil and gas industry (the lifeblood of the Alaskan economy) and in a move that likely endeared her to McCain, fought against funding for the infamous "Bridge to nowhere" that McCain rails about from he stump as pork barrel spending gone amok.
And while McCain was validating his image as a political maverick by tapping another maverick to be his running mate, Obama decided that the best person to help him bring change to Washington was Joe Biden, a very nice and honorable man, but also someone who has been in the Senate since 1973. Not exactly someone who screams "change".
But the third, and I think biggest, reason why I think Palin will help McCain win the White House is simply the Left's reaction to her. Almost immediately after the announcement the Obama camp, their surrogates, and allied media outlets and pundits began the attacks against her (the Right did the same thing when Biden was announced as Obama's VP of course). Their main line of attack is that Sarah Palin doesn't have the experience to be president.
This is a really odd (and poor) choice of attack considering that one of Barack Obama's biggest selling points early on was that he is "an outsider", someone not tainted by years in Washington. And that only someone who hasn't spent years becoming engrained in the Washington culture (like say, Biden) can really bring about the type of change we need. That begs the question though why is inexperience a virtue for Obama, but a flaw for Palin? You basically can't get further from Washington than Alaska.
To make it worse, they are arguing that Palin is too inexperienced to be "one heartbeat" from the presidency. They point out that she's only been governor of Alaska for two years and that three years ago she mayor of a town of 8,000 people (she served as mayor for six years). Yet these same people argue that Obama is qualified to BE president despite having only two years in the US Senate before deciding to run for president (along with seven years as a state senator in Illinois). In terms of number of years in elected office, Obama has more, but there is one important difference.
Obama has zero years serving as an executive, where Palin has two at the state level and six at the local (plus she and her husband ran a small business, something Barack never did). Why is that important? Because sixteen of our presidents were first governors, only two came to the presidency via the Senate. And that's not surprising, the president is essentially an executive, one who ultimately has to make tough decisions and live with the consequences (or as George W. Bush once infamously quipped, "I am the decider"). That's what governors (and mayors) do, they make decisions, where senators talk (and talk and talk). Not that there's anything wrong with that, the Senate is meant to be a deliberative body where decisions are made by consensus, but history has shown it's not the same training for the White House that serving as governor is.
So you could make the argument that Palin in fact has MORE relevant experience than Obama. I won't make that argument, but I can see the logic behind it. The bigger point here is that any questions raised about Palin having the experience to be president only serves as an unpleasant reminder that Obama too is a neophyte when it comes to the political big time.
But where I think Palin's critics are really going to damage (to themselves) is not in the questions about her experience, but the questions about her personality. The Huffington Post is already in a tizzy over Palin, most of the front page of their site was dedicated to hit pieces about her (that and stories about how Lindsey Lohan is mad at her dad and that David Duchovny has a sex addiction). The policy pieces are fine, questions about her past positions are more than valid. But the pieces about her hair, her glasses, her shoes, the way she talks, the way she acts with her family are not. Why? Because Sarah Palin looks and acts and talks like middle America. Another genius element to her pick is just how Middle America she looks.
I think these comments are going to be read as having an air of elitism about them. That this is the way the people in New York, and Washington and LA look (down) on "flyover country" as they like to call the big swath of the country between the coasts. The problem for Obama is that if people think his surrogates are elitists, they will think he is an elitist. George W. Bush's blood may be as blue as John Kerry and Al Gore's but Dubya came off as a guy who would have a beer with the fellas at the corner bar, Kerry and Gore were painted as never setting foot in a place that didn't serve brie and a nice cabernet. We all know how those elections turned out.
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