For years, I’ve followed politics very closely. I can probably name more members of Congress than can most Americans. Yet even I had never heard of the obscure Alaskan governor whom John McCain had suddenly catapulted onto the national stage.
As my dad filled me in, and as I later read about her online, I, as a Democrat, breathed a sigh of relief. For the past week, I had been terrified at the possibility that McCain would choose Colin Powell as his running mate, a man whose extensive foreign policy experience, respect and popularity across the political spectrum and potential to siphon African-American votes away from Obama could have posed a serious threat to the Democratic ticket in November. In choosing this nobody, McCain seemed to have all but sealed his defeat.
That was probably a premature assessment. Nonetheless, there is definitely a certain risk in McCain’s choice, though perhaps not exactly the one I expected. By now, much has been said by political commentators about the strategic pros and cons of McCain’s choice. Some say Palin will attract disgruntled Hillary Clinton voters, while others insist that she won’t because she is staunchly pro-life, inexperienced, and, above all, not Hillary Clinton. Indeed, many Clinton supporters who might have defected and voted for McCain may be turned off by this transparently cynical move, insulted by his apparent assumption that Clinton supporters will vote for just any woman. Some analysts have said her socially conservative “family values” record will energize the Republican base, whose support McCain has so struggled to solidify, while others believe it will merely seem hypocritical in light of her 17-year-old daughter’s pregnancy. But the biggest risk in choosing Palin may be that her recent entry into the public eye will make her the prime target for media sensationalism and Internet rumor-mongering in these final weeks leading up to the election.
Obama made the right decision in choosing Senator Joe Biden to be his running mate because Americans learned about all of Biden’s various embarrassing missteps quite a while ago––including his unattributed paraphrasing of a British Labour Party leader in a speech during his 1988 presidential bid, and his reference to Barack Obama as “articulate.” This is old news.
Palin, on the other hand, having just come onto the national political scene, is a prime target for scrutiny by political operatives and the media. Indeed, as I write this, AOL.com is swarming with headlines regarding new revelations about the Alaskan governor. Her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. Rumors are going around on the Internet that she faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her daughter. She’s being investigated on allegations of abuse of power in firing Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan, a scandal now being referred to as “Troopergate.” Her husband was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party. A video is circulating on YouTube of her talking about God’s role in the Iraq War, along with videos of her pastor’s radical statements. The list goes on.
This same phenomenon of new political faces getting all the media attention plagued Obama in the long primary battle. Remember Reverend Wright––another controversial pastor? Remember Michelle Obama’s “proud of America for the first time” comment? Remember when 12 percent of Americans thought Obama was a Muslim? (Oh, wait, they still do.) All these controversies were products of his relatively recent appearance on the national stage. Why didn’t Clinton suffer similarly because of what her husband did while he was president? Again, that was old news, so the media were not reminding voters of it constantly, and therefore voters were probably less likely to be thinking about it in the voting booth.
There are few things Americans love more than a good scandal. We may not realize it, but we love to be shocked, appalled and disgusted. The ratings-obsessed media pander to these basest human instincts, and websites like YouTube ensure that we can always get our daily dose of public figures (whether politicians or celebrities) saying or doing something stupid, dishonest or offensive. But we also have a very short attention span, and once the videos of Reverend Wright shouting “God damn America” had been replayed three or four times on the evening news, the shock value wore off, and then it’s on to Hillary’s “sniper fire” misstatement.
The net result of all this is a political climate in which elections are never won, only lost. If you’re the candidate with the fewest and least recent nasty rumors floating around about you, the fewest minor scandals and the fewest statements taken out of context and replayed ad nauseum in political ads and on YouTube, you win.
In the coming weeks, we’ll probably learn a lot more about Sarah Palin, most of the information of the sordid variety that we’ve come to expect from our sensationalist media. And with election day rapidly approaching, voters may be more likely to vote against the woman with the pregnant teenage daughter than against the guy with the pastor who hates America, because the former is the thing they’ll remember.