The Vice President to Nowhere

I read the news today, Oh Boy:

ST. PAUL--A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain's choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.

The first rule of picking a Vice President is to "do no harm." Well, consider this mission not accomplished. Like a hybrid echo of all the lousy picks and appointments from the Bush years (Harriet Miers, Michael Brown), Sarah Palin's was put forth in stunning, "Father Knows Best" fashion. What's clear now is that McCain is a rash man. He makes bold, unpredictable choices, and sticks to his guns. Why take the time to vet Palin? Why make her jump the same hurdles you've placed before Pawlenty, Romney, and Lieberman? I mean, she's got five kids, right? And she just feels right. If you're wondering why America would want to elect a stubborn and irrational man, you're not alone:

Eugene Robinson:

We learned last week that John McCain is not who he is--not, at least, who he claims to be. The steady, straight-talking, country-first statesman his campaign has been selling is a fictional character. The real McCain is either alarmingly cynical or dangerously reckless.

Charles Krauthammer:

The McCain campaign is reveling in the fact that Palin is a game changer. But why a game changer when you've been gaining? To gratuitously undercut the remarkably successful "Is he ready to lead" line of attack seems near suicidal.

Andrew Sullivan:

The salient political issues of the Palin pick are two-fold: Can Palin be trusted to tell the truth? And how competent is a campaign that picks a candidate without any serious vetting of stuff that can appear on the Internet within a few hours of the news? We need to refocus on those core questions. I fear the answers are: we can't trust Palin to tell the truth; and the manner of McCain's pick demonstrates some of the most grotesque incompetence in modern political history.

John Dickerson:

Each new fact we learn about Sarah Palin--her reversal on the bridge to nowhere, her disagreements with McCain on issues from windfall profits to global warming, emerging facts about troopgate--contribute to the feeling that this whole Palin thing is being made up as we go along. It may be fun to read about, and it sure is fun to cover, but it also supports the judgment of the Palin pick that I first heard from a Republican veteran shortly after the announcement: Reckless.

David Brooks:

He really needs someone to impose a policy structure on his moral intuitions. He needs a very senior person who can organize a vast administration and insist that he tame his lone-pilot tendencies and work through the established corridors--the National Security Council, the Domestic Policy Council. He needs a near-equal who can turn his instincts, which are great, into a doctrine that everybody else can predict and understand.

Rob Portman or Bob Gates wouldn't have been politically exciting, but they are capable of performing those tasks. Palin, for all her gifts, is not. She underlines McCain's strength without compensating for his weaknesses. The real second fiddle job is still unfilled.

Margaret Carlson:

The vice presidential choice is the only truly presidential decision a candidate makes. For someone who talks about himself as a man of honor, above politics, who believes that this No. 2 must be ready to be commander-in-chief on Day 2, this is an impetuous, superficial, reactive move designed to excite the fringe of his party and attract disenchanted women from the other.

This would be cynical for someone for whom age isn't an issue. For someone 72 with four bouts of cancer, it's a violation of his duty to do the country no harm. That's true no matter how much you love the Sarah Palin made-for-TV movie.

Keep in mind that all of the controversy currently surrounding Palin comes from people simply poking around the Internet. Palin has not yet faced a news conference as the nominee. She hasn't been asked point-blank whether or not she was a member of the AIP, or what her defense will be in the "Troopergate" inquiry, or what her policy stance is toward allies like Saudi Arabia, hot spots like Darfur, and foes like Venezuela. She hasn't been asked why she supported the "Bridge to Nowhere" back in 2006. Or why the town of 6,700 residents where she was mayor received $27 million in earmarks from Palin's friends Don Young and Ted Stevens. Isn't McCain supposed to be against earmarks? Through it all, Palin continues to be shielded from reporters while a new and improved vetting team heads, after the fact, up to Alaska to find out whether or not she'd actually make a good Vice President.

Not that McCain can take her back. In that way, at least, this selection isn't a repeat of Harriet Miers. McCain is stuck with her. Admitting he made a mistake with his VP pick is tantamount, as Krauthammer put it, to political suicide. No, sir, this shotgun wedding is going forward.

This is what most scares me about McCain: his impulsiveness. Do we want a president who launches surprises on the country and the world when he really hasn't taken the time to think them through? The logic that, "hey, it just might work," is anything but reassuring. And we've seen his tendency to go "all in" and lose in the past. Immigration reform, for example. Brooks is right. This pick is in keeping with the kind of guy McCain is, and that's not man who should be given this much power.