My Offcenter friend Drew posted a very thoughtful commentary on Sen. McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his VP candidate. His first point refers to the “Clinton question.” He writes:

Palin has already been called out that she was chosen to compete for the Hilary Clinton cohort. Bloomberg quotes her saying, “‘Hillary left 18 million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling in America,” Palin said, referring to the votes Clinton won. ‘We can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all.’” The use of the same metaphor is telling. That 18 Million is a market. It’s the same number of listeners of the Howard Stern Show at the time he signed with Sirius. He got an enormous contract because of that size of a base. Her job is to market to that market cluster to get McCain in the White House. But is it too transparent of a move after Hilary Clinton’s speech at the DNC? You bet the Obama camp thinks so and will play that out. How will McCain tarry that blow?

The thing that comes to mind for me about this pick (and credit also goes to my friend Erin on this point) is that if McCain is hoping to capture those 18 million votes that went to Sen. Clinton in the primaries, its a HUGE roll of the dice.  The question for those 18 millions was whether they were voting simply for a woman to make history (Sen Clinton as President or VP), for Sen Clinton specifically to make history, or for Sen. Clinton because they supported her specific positions (exlcusive of the “history” aspect) on the issues.  If the majority are in the latter two, this position will backfire for McCain.

My gut says that this move will galvanize those “uncommitted” democrats (not so flatteringly referred to as PUMAs) into supporting Obama and Biden because they don’t want another woman to be the one to break the glass ceiling, especially one who is dramatically different from Sen. Clinton in so many ways. It will also, in my opinion, energize Sen. Clinton in her support and campaign for Obama because I cannot imagine that she would want another woman to be the one to be “the first.”

I admit that this pick is much more interesting.  Any of the other choices - Romney, Ridge, Leiberman, etc - would have all been yawners for the most part.  This one has at least sparked some interest.

I promise I’ll do a non-political post next.  Probably football related.

But I cannot leave behind without cross posting this image that was in the discussions on dailykos.com today…(I will give attribution if I can find it again).  This is for all you BSG fans out there….

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.