The hits just keep on comin’ from the McCain campaign. Steve Schmidt, known as The Bullet for a couple of reasons, is rumored to be a smart man, and the representative from Atwater, Rove, and Co.; so he must have known that questions would be asked about Governor Palin’s 17-year-old daughter being pregnant.

Reporters at the Republican national convention hammered McCain senior adviser Steve Schmidt about the Palin pregnancy during a press conference. All Schmidt would say is Palin and McCain had discussed the pregnancy and considered it to be a private matter.

He wouldn’t say if they talked about it before McCain picked Palin as his vice presidential nominee.

“I answered that question nine times,” he said.

What stands out here is not the details of the Palin situation. Everyone’s seen this sort of thing happen, and be resolved through the standard operations of family and community. Hopefully things work out great for everyone involved. It’s really not a public matter in that sense.

What is a public matter, and one of great moment, is the judgement shown by the candidate in his choice of running mate. And McCain has very publicly screwed the pooch here. He’s shown blinding flashes of temper in the past, but we’ve let him slide on that; he was a POW. He’s approached every problem with military solutions in mind, but we let him slide on that, too, because he’s the son and grandson of admirals — what would he think? He doesn’t understand economics, but we figure he’s smart enough to have married too well to need to. Not a very scalable plan, but it works for him.

In this case his campaign seems not to have applied Vetting 101 techniques to their Vice Presidential candidate. They refused to confirm that McCain knew about the pregnancy when he picked Palin. Nine or ten times. We already know that the Obama campaign sent an oppo researcher to Palin’s small-town newspaper to check its archives, which are not online, and was surprised to be the first to ask for them. Apparently the McCain people had Googled but not phoned. Or perhaps Karl’s databases show she’ll bring in more than she costs, regardless. Certainly we haven’t expected this sort of apparent amateurishness from Republican Presidential campaigns recently. Is this a new Primitivist approach, or are they just out of it?

And of course all this is in addition to the scandal known as Troopergate, and lots of other indications of insufficient vetting. Having their convention pre-empted might actually be a gift for the Republicans; they’ll be able to talk about Gustav and Country First and avoid Bush, Cheney, Iraq, and honest answers.

The question has arisen what the evangelical and fundamentalist wings of the Republican party, which this choice hopes to cement, will think. The knee-jerk reaction might be for the media to expect social conservatives to condemn the prenuptial goings-on, but my guess is that’s unlikely. As long as there’s a wedding soon, they’ll be fine. If the marriage proves to have been ill-fated because ill-considered, well, SEP.

What Palin brings to the ticket is the voter who wishes Monica Goodling were still on the job because we need more Regent grads in government. The social-conservative mindset tends to model the world from internals like feelings, thoughts, philosophies, and beliefs; it’s not much based on externalities. Once this mindset finds a champion or a cause, it believes with all its heart and soul. It often considers powerful belief the greatest human accomplishment. They’ve adopted Sarah Palin because she shares their beliefs, and that’s that. She’d have to admit a secret relationship with Satan to lose them now.

Still, if the Republicans are picking an NRA creationist, who thinks we can drill our way out of the problem, and we’re not causing climate change, just to solidify the base, Rove must be worried; he can’t believe they’ll come out ahead. Can he? I mean, imagine you’re the theoretical undecided voter, seeing some value in McCain, maybe his heroic military service, and some in Obama, perhaps his hopeful message. Does picking a grossly unprepared political symbol for VP make you more or less likely to vote for the candidate? How much do you have to hate abortion to be willing to hand Sarah Palin the second set of keys to history’s most powerful military machine? Obama’s gotta be gloating over his VP choice right now.

It’s looking like McCain might have been a guy you’d follow in battle; he has a strong will to survive, and doesn’t mind taking chances when he feels it’s necessary. Such a method would work occasionally, even if it wasn’t prudent. But how many people want that kind of President? Not nearly as many as are in diapers over the prospect of a hot-headed leader doubling down in Las Vegas one night and Washington the next.

Some of McCain’s signature actions arrive directly from his unconscious, unmediated. He’s making decisions on instinct and gut reaction, sometimes failing to apply standard logical procedures to his impulses before he acts on them. And this aspect of his campaign seems to me entirely honest; this is really who he is.

Posted by Chuck Dupree at September 01, 2008 08:27 PM

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