Print this

A Bird in the Hand

Kip Ward

Posted: 08.29.2008 / 2:06 PM PDT

  

I don’t even know where to start.  What could he have been thinking?  At a birthday party last night there was lots of political chat.  The big topic of the night was Vice Presidents.

Normally VP selections don’t carry a lot of weight, because normally VPs don’t do a heck of a lot.  That is unless something happens to their boss.  And to be perfectly blunt, this election year both candidates have a significantly elevated chance of not serving out their terms.  This year, the VP selection could mean everything. 

Obama’s problem is that he has managed to make a lot of women in his own party really angry.  Angry enough to maybe cost him plenty of votes.  It was a calculated gamble to pick Biden, and we will see how it plays out.  My feeling would be that he would have done better to select Hillary.  The women that I have spoken with felt familiar with Hillary and they know little to nothing about Joe.  Joe may sway the factory workers in Detroit but he’s a cold potato to Hillary’s supporters (which just happen to make up half of the Democratic party).  I think that Obama should have done the math. 

It looks like McCain did the math and is now scrambling to gobble up all of the democratic orts that are falling off of Barack’s plate.   And here is where the story turns bad.

I remember in seventy-two when George McGovern made the worse VP pick in history.  In case you have forgotten, with in weeks of Thomas Eagleton being selected as McGovern’s running mate, it came to light the he had received electro shock therapy for clinical depression years earlier.  That VP selection was like an anchor tied to the foot of an already floundering McGovern. 

But this pick may top them all.  To frame the discussion simply just take John McCain out of the picture.  This young woman’s credentials are that she made 2^nd place in the Miss Alaska Beauty Pageant, was Mayor of a town of five thousand people, and has served less than two years as Alaska’s Governor.  What could possibly qualify her to go nose to nose with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.  That scenario is about as frightening as one can get.

I predict that the Republican’s will soon realize that they are in a pickle; because like the Democrats they want what they see is best for the country.  And now the equation becomes quite simple.  If Obama is out of the picture how will Biden stack up in a time of crises.  If McCain is gone how safe would we feel with Palin at the helm.  The answer is pretty clear. 

Perhaps, at seventy-two,  McCain has failed to factor in his own mortality. In chasing those Hillary votes McCain has thrown away the very things he had going for him.  It’s a sad “gift” from someone who promised to put his country first.

What could he have been thinking?