Behind the Palin gambit: trying to destroy a rational election

It's now commonly assumed that the principal reasons that John McCain selected one-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate were to excite the religious right and tempt undecided women voters to embrace the Republican ticket, since they now have one of their own to turn out for. But there was more to picking Palin than that.

The predictable volume of the blogosphere storm about Palin shows that McCain is achieving at least one of his objectives in selecting a sure-to-be-controversial nominee: diverting attention away from Obama in the wake of the Democrats' terrific convention and Obama's solid acceptance speech. Morever, the paladins of the mainstream media -- believing that unfavorable information about politicians must first come out of the mouths of their quotable foes -- are bending over backwards to avoid noticing anything questionable about Palin. This will force Democrats to start pointing out the enormous problems with her being one step away from the presidency.

Mark my words, as soon as Democrats turn their fire on her, they'll be accused of being anti-women. Obama himself is right to steer around making remarks about her, but Biden needn't do so. Her various hard-right positions and her admissions of ignorance about government (such as saying last month that she had no idea what a vice president does) should be turned into campaign ads against her immediately, or else the Republicans may succeed in defining her as just a colorful frontier-state straight-talker.

They will be doing that to frame the second wave of attention to Palin, which McCain's people surely realized was inevitable: media investigations into her firing of the head of the Alaskan state police, for resisting her attempts to get him to dismiss her state-trooper ex-brother-in-law. The Alaskan legislature started an investigation of this apparent abuse of power, and the report is due eight days before the November election. The McCain campaign was probably untroubled by this scandal -- because it could be portrayed as partisan (again, "unfairly attacking a woman"), and would deny more media time to Obama.

This hints at significant new negative ads about Obama coming soon from the McCain campaign. Combined with feigned but towering outrage at criticism of Palin's dearth of relevant experience for national office, the McCain campaign will be trying to manipulate and distort the nature of news coverage over the next several weeks -- to embroil the fall election campaign in a storm of negative attacks, counter-attacks and media insanity, to distract voters from anything substantive, since on substance, McCain loses.