BEHIND THE HEADLINES
Running mate poses risks
Vice presidential choice of Alaska governor is seen as a colossal gamble.
DENVER — Win or lose, Republican John McCain threw the long ball Friday when he stunned the nation by picking Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.
His choice of a young, largely unknown woman from as far outside Washington as possible shakes up the presidential campaign and has the potential either to help him win the White House or to doom his chances.
On the upside, her reputation as a maverick reformer who is willing to buck her own party magnifies McCain’s renegade image and could help him win independent voters.
Her gender — the first woman ever on a Republican ticket and only the second in history, after Geraldine Ferraro ran on the Democratic ticket in 1984 — could help McCain win some women who had supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries but were angry that she wasn’t chosen to be Barack Obama’s running mate.
The downside: Palin’s relative inexperience in office — she served 10 years in the government of a small town and is two years into her first term as governor — undercuts McCain’s charge that Obama is too inexperienced to be president.
This choice also could leave those voters who are nervous about McCain’s age — he turned 72 on Friday — anxious that he would put a novice a heartbeat away from the presidency, and they could have doubts about her ability to handle foreign affairs or a military crisis.
“She’s the ultimate high-risk, high-reward choice,” said Peter Brown, the assistant director of the Polling Institute at Connecticut’s Quinnipiac University. “She’s a game changer either way.”
McCain clearly wants her to underscore his own history as an independent thinker who is often willing to challenge his own party, a crucial point as he tries to show voters that he can be different from the unpopular President Bush despite his support of Bush’s tax and foreign policies.
Known as “Sarah the Barracuda” for her aggressive style as a point guard leading a championship high school basketball team, Palin earned the title anew when she became the mayor of Wasilla, a small town outside Anchorage, and fired department heads loyal to her predecessor.
As a member of the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, she pushed an ethics investigation of Randy Ruedrich, a fellow commission member and the state Republican Party chairman, for conflicts of interests with oil companies. He was forced to resign from the panel and later admitted ethics violations.
She worked with a Democrat to pursue Alaska Attorney General Gregg Renkes for ethics problems. He also resigned.
Palin was elected governor in 2006, riding what the Almanac of American Politics called her reputation as “a maverick reformer at arm’s length from her party” to defeat Republican Gov. Frank Murkowski in a primary and Democrat Tony Knowles in the general election.
As governor, she pushed new ethics legislation and cut state spending.
But Palin, 44, also faces questions about her role in firing a state commissioner apparently trapped in a Palin family feud.
She has been accused of firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan for refusing to remove her former brother-inlaw from his job as a state trooper. The former brother-inlaw is locked in an ugly custody fight with Palin’s sister.
A “hockey mom,” Palin could appeal to female voters.
Although Clinton and Obama healed their rift at the Democratic National Convention, that may not assuage all her supporters.
A Gallup poll that was released this week and was conducted before the Democratic convention found that about half of Clinton’s supporters weren’t sold on Obama. Some were leaning his way but still open to changing their minds, and some already were supporting McCain.
Those Clinton supporters who strongly back abortion rights are unlikely to switch to the McCain-Palin ticket, however. McCain and Palin oppose abortion rights.
Palin is a mother of five who this year gave birth to a baby with Down syndrome, a fact she knew during her pregnancy. That helped make her a popular choice for social conservatives, a crucial part of the Republican base.
The biggest risk is that voters will think Palin is simply too inexperienced to handle a crisis.
“Palin will face intense scrutiny by the media and by voters who need assurance that she is ready to assume the presidency at a moment’s notice, if necessary,” said Costas Panagopoulos, a political scientist at Fordham University in New York.
Perhaps the most telling moment will come when she faces Democrat Joe Biden in the vice presidential debate, a 90-minute face-off Oct. 2 in St. Louis.
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