The dangers of picking a maverick for a running mate
From CNN.com: “Palin’s ‘going rogue,’ McCain aide says”.
Apparently there are complaints from within the McCain camp that Sarah Palin is trying to position herself for a 2012 run at the presidency. Unfortunately for McCain, this means she’s been going “off message”, promoting a “Palin/Joe the Plumber ‘12” ticket at the expense of “McCain/Palin ‘08”. I know she isn’t the first VP candidate to do this kind of thing, but given how much of a liability she’s turned out to be for the McCain campaign already, it’s surprising she’d actively try to compound things. I wonder if McCain is still happy with his choice of running mate…
There’s an article in the New Yorker called The Insiders: How John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin, and it lets the air out of the popular notion that McCain found an outsider-governor to pluck out of obscurity and place on the national stage. It seems Sarah Palin has been working on getting noticed by conservatives in Washington for some time. This puts her in a new light, but doesn’t change the fact that she’s not remotely qualified for the presidency. I can’t imagine she’d manage to win the nomination in 2012, and if she did, I can’t imagine Obama wouldn’t wipe the floor with her in the general election, unless his first term ends up being a disaster. But the prospect of Mrs. Palin “sticking around” past this November if McCain loses is going to take some getting used to.