paradoxcase replied to your post
“Okay, now I'm curious about what you saw of the Tea Party. (Not a new...”
This is fascinating. Can you offer any insight into why McCain picked Palin as his running mate? It seemed very out of character. Was he trying to appeal to the Tea Party?
As I remember it- note, I was a young teenager and may be misremembering things- that was one of the biggest factors (the Tea Party was a bloc by then, though I don’t remember if they were going by that name yet-- I think that wasn’t until after the election). But there was other stuff at work here and it’s all pretty fucking interesting.
See... McCain has always been a pretty establishment Republican, for all his I’M A MAVERICK! A MAVERICK, I TELL YOU!!! spiel. Where he does diverge from the party line, it’s to the left, not the right- for example, he has a principled objection to torture because he was a POW. And... I don’t quite understand how it works, but in the establishment chunk of the Republican party, there’s a practice where sometimes in an election there’s an understanding that it’s one particular candidate’s turn this time and the party leadership will throw their effort behind getting that person elected. It’s quiet, genteel, unspoken, but it’s there.
In 2008, it was McCain’s turn. He won the primary without too much fuss- sure, there were other candidates, but it was his turn. He was getting older, 2008 was probably the last year he could run for president and serve a full eight-year term, and he had built up a lot of political capital. So party leadership backed him and the primary went... relatively smoothly.
But when he won, there were two things he just plain hadn’t counted on.
1. Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton, had won the Democratic nomination for president.
No one on the Right saw this coming. No one. Before 2008 Obama was a senator with a not-especially-flashy record; sure, he was an up-and-coming politician, he’d had a distinguished career as a lawyer and he’d written a few books. But no one thought he had the political capital to run for president, and he was super young. In 2008, he was the guy you kept your eye on to see what he’d be in 10 years- and then he won the nomination. He was charismatic, funny, and relentlessly optimistic-- while also being intelligent, diplomatic, and statesmanlike.
In 2008, Hillary was almost as anointed as she was in 2016. Before the primaries really got under way, the media consensus on the right was that it was going to be Hillary vs. McCain, and McCain would win. Because, as everyone knows, Hillary is kind of a wonk and is bad at playing to the crowd. She didn’t have the ~folksy, down-home charm~ that McCain was planning to bank on.
Obama had it in spades. And Obama had the youth vote. And the black vote. And the Hispanic/Latino vote. If he was elected, it’d be historic- he’d be the first black president. His campaign managed to get people who almost never voted to vote in the primaries, just out of sheer faith in the guy and knowledge that they were making history.
He came out of nowhere and zoomed to prominence overnight. He did everything they’d hoped their candidate would do, and did it better, while clearly being smarter and more Presidential. And he did it all while being black.
By the time the primaries were done, conservatives were fucking terrified of him.
2. The bloc that would become the Tea Party haaaaaated how close McCain was to the party establishment. Haaaaaaaaaaaated.
You could have seen this one coming, even if you were on the right. But most people didn’t care enough to pay attention until the end of the primaries, because it was McCain’s turn. Ron Paul (among other hopefuls) got a fair amount of the vote, because people wanted something Different. Something that the main branch of the party wasn’t going to give them. They wanted someone who’d be like Bush, but even more so- someone ‘dumb’ and folksy, a ‘man of the people’ in the pejorative sense. someone who held their positions on Moral Issues and wasn’t going to back down, or someone who wouldn’t support the neoliberal economic agenda the Clintons and Bushes more or less consistently had.
And what they got was McCain, who looked to be more of the same. They weren’t too happy.
So when it came time to pick a Veep, the qualities they were looking for were something like this:
Outsider- not a mainstream Republican
Can pick up southern and/or Midwestern states that McCain can’t grab
Can get disgruntled Ron Paul + etc. voters interested in the election again
Can get disgruntled Hillary voters to consider voting R
If possible, black and/or female
Yeah, at least half of the reason for choosing Sarah Palin was really naked, ugly identity politics that would make your most identitarian leftist indignant. See, both Obama and Hillary were historic candidates- if she’d been elected, Hillary would have been the first female President, and of course Obama was the first black president. McCain was... well, just another white dude. No one wanted to vote for McCain because he was historic; it was just business as usual.
So McCain’s campaign thought, rather cynically, that they could peel off some disaffected Hillary voters by putting A WOMAN!!1! in the vice presidency. See? It’s historic if you vote for us, too??? We have A Girl????? You voted for Hillary because you wanted A Girl President, right?????
The other thing was, of course, the kind of identity politics even Republicans think is valid; IE: dealing with the voting bloc that would become the Tea Party. Since McCain had never been much of a culture warrior and stuck with the massively-unpopular ‘establishment’ side of the Republican party most of the time, they did what they could to counteract that- mostly, McCain played up how much of a MAVERICK he was in all his ads and the debates, and they picked a vice president who was about as hard line of a culture warrior as they could get.
Sarah Palin has a huge family, a child with Downs’ Syndrome and a pro-life stance based almost 100% around using said child as a prop, a gun fixation, and that frontier backwoodsy kind of “HEY, I’M FOLKS LIKE YOU” thing that Republican voters like. She’s perky and snarky, but nonthreatening. She’s much more traditionally femme than Hillary and in general reminds most conservatives of the women around them- their mothers, wives, sisters, + etc. She’s a culture warrior. She set herself up to be sort of an avatar the Tea Party bloc could project their hopes on. And after all, McCain was pretty old, whoever he picked to be his VP could wind up much more prominent than expected......
Of course, Sarah Palin wound up being much, much more of a liabiliy than an asset, and she’s one of the things that cost McCain the election IMO. She was supposed to be an anti-Obama, anti-tea party nuke, and someone forgot that nukes don’t just blow up the people you point them at.
But that was the reasoning behind them picking her, instead of a ‘safer’, better choice.
