This morning I arrived in Chicago after my brief vacation back home.  There is a lot that has happened in the last few days that I will be talking about before too much longer, but for now I’ll say a few things quickly.  I should say that my initial reaction to the choice of Sarah Palin was much more like Michael‘s than anyone else’s I have seen.  While I have very few reasons to complain about Gov. Palin’s views (her foreign policy remarks on Friday being chief among them), I think it does her a tremendous disservice to name her to a national ticket before she is fully prepared for that role, just as it would have been a disservice to Jindal had he been named.  Leave aside for the moment the important point that drafting a governor not yet halfway through her first term neglects and devalues the importance of state government and insults Palin’s voters. 

If the goal is to drag down the ticket and at the same time provide a Buchananite scapegoat for Republican defeat in the fall, a defeat I now believe to be more likely than it was a few weeks ago, McCain seems to have done his work well.  As Gov. Palin’s remarks yesterday made clear, she seems unlikely to balance the worst instincts of McCain and his advisors and may instead be used to confer conservative legitimacy on McCain’s domestic and foreign agendas.  The remarkable thing about the choice is that it was done for transparently electoral reasons and appears at first glance to be a poor choice with respect to governance, but in reality Palin will likely prove to be an electoral liability, possibly costing McCain the election in the Midwest, and yet I think she would probably be a competent and effective Vice President despite her short time in statewide office.    

P.S.  The controversy over the firings of her state trooper ex-brother-in-law and the Public Safety Commissioner, which had already prompted the establishment of an investigation by the Alaska legislature last month, is also going to dog the campaign, whether or not Gov. Palin did anything wrong.  Correction: I misstated the nature of the controversy: Wooten, the ex-brother-in-law, was not fired, but Monegan, the Public Safety Commissioner, was fired.  It was the questionable nature of Monegan’s firing, which may or may not have been done in retribution for his refusal to fire Wooten, that drew complaints and prompted the legislature to authorize an investigation.

Update: Of course, it will be more difficult for the party regulars to blame the loss on a Buchananite if she insists that she never supported Buchanan.  Apparently, she did not support him in the 2000 election.