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Palin becomes irrelevant; McCain prepares his endgame

By Jack M. Balkin

At last night's vice-presidential debate Sarah Palin gave a mediocre but adequate performance. True, she dodged every difficult question and stuck mindlessly to her talking points. She appears to know very little about the key issues of the day. But she did not embarrass herself and she did not implode. Given the baseline of expectations established by the Couric interview, she did just fine.

But ironically, the effect of her performance is that she is now largely irrelevant to McCain's chances of winning the Presidency.

Palin began as a star, a charismatic celebrity that could contrast with Obama's charisma. McCain made fun of Obama this summer for being just a celebrity, then he went out and got his own. For a while, it worked. Audiences swooned, large crowds came out to see her while conservative pundits dutifully made nonsensical arguments about her obviously superior qualifications.

Then came the public assessment of Palin and her credentials. This took the luster off of her candidacy. The McCain camp shielded her from press inquiries, and then, when she did give interviews, she seemed uninformed if not incoherent.

The Vice-Presidential debate gave her a chance to show that she was not an empty airhead trading on newly found celebrity; that is, precisely what McCain claimed Obama was this summer. She came through the debate without disastrously failing, thus alleviating people's greatest concerns about her. But that's about all she has done. She will not return to her former degree of charisma and attraction, at least outside of her devoted followers in the Republican base. Now that she is more of a known quantity-- charming but mediocre-- she no longer holds any special attraction for independent voters, the voters that McCain so desperately needs. As a result, in a period of about a month, she has gone from being McCain's secret weapon to being a potential disaster to being essentially an irrelevancy. She will neither hurt him nor help him much at this point.

Instead, if McCain is to make a comeback at this point, it will probably not be because of anything Sarah Palin does. Rather, it will come from two pieces of news. The first is that Congress has passed and President Bush has now signed a bailout plan. This may reduce the urgency of McCain's need to talk about the economy; the successful passage of a bailout bill may take people's minds off of what is McCain's greatest weakness and the area where he has shown himself to be the most unsteady and erratic. Perhaps now that the immediate economic emergency seems momentarily behind us McCain will be able to pivot to discussions of national security, where he is stronger. If the economy continues to remain the central issue, however, he may not be able to do so. He must hope that concerns about national security begin to dominate the public's attentions once again, and in ways that make him look like a better choice.

The second important piece of news that might help McCain is the report that McCain is about to throw yet another Hail Mary pass: he is going all out with negative campaigning. Since this election has basically been about whether voters trust Obama enough to make him President, and since he seems to have passed the test of basic trustworthiness following the first debate, McCain's goal must now be to destroy that sense of comfort. He must now do everything in his power to so tarnish Obama that voters will find him alien, radical, and downright scary.

If this is McCain's endgame strategy, and the evidence suggests that it is, the press must pay attention not only to what McCain says, but also his surrogates and coordinated supporters are saying. McCain is behind in most of the swing states and he has to win almost all of them to become President. At this point McCain really has nothing to lose.

It is true that McCain's own reputation may be in tatters by the end for engaging in such a scorched-earth strategy, but he doesn't have to be admired and respected to win. He just has to be loathed less than his opponent.

Full post as published by Balkinization on October 03, 2008 (boomark / email).