If as Joe Biden suggests the U.S. is likely to be tested by a foreign enemy next year, who of the following would you rather have dealing with it in the Oval Office: Nancy (of Damascus) Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Edwards, Joe (the U.S. drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon) Biden, Mike Huckabee, Geraldine Ferraro, Tom DeLay, Jimmy Carter or Sarah Palin?

My pick? Gov. Palin, surely the most grounded, common-sense person on that list of prime-time politicians. ~Daniel Henninger

Clearly Henninger is doing his best to weight the comparison in Palin’s favor by loading up his list with a lot of incompetent, unpopular or controversial politicians, but there is obviously someone from that list that I think a vast majority would rather have as President than Palin.  Not to push the Huckabee vs. Palin argument too much in one week, but can Henninger be serious when he says he would rather have Palin as President instead of Huckabee during an international crisis?  Let me put that another way, since I doubt anyone can seriously believe that: does Henninger really want to go on record espousing such a ridiculous view?

If there is one thing more annoying than bien-pensant condescension, it is the even more condescending orthodoxy of anti-bien-pensant pundits who reflexively adopt a position because it is fashionably unfashionable and then congratulate themselves for their independence of mind.  “Other pundits dislike Palin and think she is unprepared?  I’ll show them how trendy and eccentric I can be–I’ll say that she is even more qualified and superior.  I’ll even say that I want her to be President in a crisis situation–that’ll show ’em!”  Like bien-pensant opinion, the anti-bien-pensant view is utterly conventional, but wants credit for challenging the prevailing wisdom simply because it is the prevailing wisdom.  Instead of either of these dead-end, knee-jerk responses, we might analyze the subject on the merits and formulate some kind of an argument one way or the other.      

You can agree with Huckabee or disagree with him over what he said in his Foreign Affairs essay and during his campaign, but it’s undeniable that he already possesses a far better understanding of the relevant issues right now and has articulated them publicly.  I don’t know whether anyone advised him on the Pakistan section of his essay, and there are things to which I would object in that section, but it gives a serious and intelligent assessment of what the situation was there at the time.  Henninger doesn’t care about any of that.  Once again, knowledge and preparation count for nothing–being “grounded” is what counts.  Arguably, Huckabee is just as grounded as Palin, so that ought to negate even this advantage, but what is telling here is that Henninger has absolutely nothing else to say on her behalf.  The brevity and emptiness of his argument for her is a stronger indictment of her readiness than anything her critics could say.     

Henninger goes on:

If he had picked any of the plain-vanilla men on his veep short list — Pawlenty, Sanford, Romney or Lieberman — they’d have won approval from the media’s college of cardinals, and killed his campaign [bold mine-DL].

This gives Pawlenty far too little credit, and it conflates several candidates as if they were all equally desirable or undesirable running mates.  Lieberman would have added nothing and lost McCain a lot, though there would have been a brief media extravaganza questioning whether McCain had actually gone mad or was simply pretending, and Romney would have satisfied many movement elites and guaranteed that evangelical turnout would be very poor, but Pawlenty and Sanford would have been creditable additions to the ticket.  Could any VP selection have saved McCain from his own failures during the financial crisis?  Probably not.  Could any VP selection have honed a coherent message for a message-free campaign?  That’s doubtful.  Would Pawlenty have given him a far more effective surrogate and policy-oriented running mate who could make a persuasive case for the campaign’s proposals?  Absolutely.  What Pawlenty lacks in the ability to excite, he makes up for in what he knows and his ability to argue for his views; there is an added bonus–he already has well-formed views on a variety of subjects.  Pawlenty was the anti-Palin in a lot of ways and he has much of the same cultural populist appeal that has won Palin so many fans. 

Henninger complains some more:

It seems only yesterday that the most critical skill in presidential politics was being able to connect to people in places like Bronko’s bar or Saddleback Church. When Gov. Palin showed she excelled at that, the goal posts suddenly moved and the new game was being able to talk the talk in London, Paris, Tehran or Moscow. She looks about a half-step behind Sen. Obama on that learning curve.

Henninger sounds like Michelle Obama complaining about people raising the bar, except that in this case the bar was never raised and the goalposts were never moved.  So now we come back to the gut-level connection.  The very thing that Huckabee did so well during the primaries, but which most conservatve elites (probably including Henninger) found unsatisfying.  Having deemed Huckabee not well-versed enough in policy, which was apparently a fair criticism ten months ago but is now a “cheap shot,” many Palinites are now persuaded that Palin, who knows even less than Huckabee did when he started and much less than he does now, is ready to lead in a crisis.  Of course, it is the ability to do both things at some minimal level of competence that make for successful candidates.  Those who can’t strike the right balance between demagoguery connecting with voters and wonkery usually end up as also-rans.  Obama has been described as having a deficit in both areas at different times (at one time, he was all style and rhetoric, and at another time he was the aloof professor giving dry lectures*), and actually had a surplus in both relative to his competition.  In the end, McCain is paying the price for having a candidacy driven almost entirely by biography and character, and he has been chaotically playing catch-up on the policy side to no avail.  All gut-level connection all the time is not enough.  “Good instincts” are not enough.

*There were kernels of truth to these descriptions of Obama (i.e., he did engage in airy rhetoric, he was sometimes aloof and professorial), but they went awry when they were exaggerated to define the entire man.