Hoping For The Best

While there would seem to be no obvious connection between the two groups, it occurs to me that the same ultimately baseless hope that has motivated certain Obama supporters is driving anti-McCain conservatives to cheer on Sarah Palin.  Like some antiwar and pro-J Street progressives waxing rhapsodic about the potential of Obama to revolutionize foreign policy, some dissident conservatives are grasping at any shred of evidence of Palin’s supposed ties to various parties and past campaigns that are very close to our own views in an expectation that someone sympathetic might be in a major leadership position.  The evidence that Palin had any of the associations that we very much would like to believe she had has been fairly weak, if not quite as weak as the evidence cited to show that Obama favored even-handedness over Israel-Palestine, and all of the claims of AIP membership and Buchanan links have been strenuously denied by the campaign and declared to be “smears.”  One has to assume that Palin either accepts that it is a “smear” to associate her with the AIP and Buchanan, among others, or she is unable to stop the campaign from making such a characterization.  Either way, it does not exactly inspire confidence that Gov. Palin will make a dent in the way a McCain administration is run. 

More to the point, to the extent that these claims are true they will compel her to be even more of a party-line follower than she was going to be anyway, just as rumors to the effect that Obama was sympathetic to Palestinians necessitated his endorsement of a fairly hard “pro-Israel” line.  Instead of having influence and flexibility to change policies in the desired direction, the mere impression of sympathy based on a few bits of anecdotal evidence constrains the candidates to be publicly less sympathetic to the respective causes to which they have been loosely linked.