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What Might Have Been

Alex Massie offers this challenge to Palin critics: Still, a super-qualified running-mate is not much use if they don’t help the ticket win in the first place. And that’s why I ask: what was John McCain supposed to do? The front-running candidates for his Veep would each, I think, have guaranteed his defeat. Mitt Romney? […]

Alex Massie offers this challenge to Palin critics:

Still, a super-qualified running-mate is not much use if they don’t help the ticket win in the first place. And that’s why I ask: what was John McCain supposed to do? The front-running candidates for his Veep would each, I think, have guaranteed his defeat. Mitt Romney? Please! Tim Pawlenty? What a snooze. Joe Lieberman? You have to be kidding. none of these men could have had Sarah Palin’s impact upon the race. None of them would have been a potential game-changer.

There is no question that no other selection, except perhaps choosing Jindal (and probably not even that), could have dominated the news for the last two weeks in the same way, but I’m not sure it’s true that none of them could have had the potential to change the dynamic of the campaign.  Choosing either Romney or Liberman would have been a game-changer, all right, but in the way that a forfeit changes a game.  While movement leaders and many activists would still have swooned, it seems certain that selecting Romney would have been an electoral catastrophe.  Palin provoked so much hostility from the left and from the media because of culture war themes that were magnified by class differences, and despite Romney’s ceaseless effort to make himself into a culture warrior he does not possess the credibility to generate the kind of excitement or fear that Palin does.  Romney would have actively alienated evangelicals and working-class Americans just as much as Palin has attracted them.  Marginal gains in Michigan would have been offset by demoralization across the rest of the Midwest and the South.  McCain’s mockery of Romney as the “candidate of change” would be replayed daily.  Obviously, I think Romney would have been politically very foolish.  Likewise, had Graham prevailed on McCain and Lieberman became the nominee, the election would already be over. 

My guess is that a Pawlenty choice would have been very different.  As with any counterfactual scenario, we’ll never know, but given what we do know about the response to Palin here are a few reasons why a Pawlenty choice would have shaken up the race considerably.  It is hard to imagine that a more conventional choice making as much of an impact as Palin, but as everyone has acknowledged Palin is an extremely high-risk, high-reward pick and so far we have mostly seen only the reward and not the downside for McCain.  Picking Pawlenty would have been less bold, but also far less transparently desperate and indifferent to qualifications.  While Pawlenty would have been deemed the safe choice–McCain would have been choosing a longtime loyalist whose chances at receiving the nod had been discussed for months–he would have been almost as unknown nationally as Palin without the problem of being quite so obscure and far removed from the national debate.  Despite having been on political junkies’ VP lists for most of the year, most voters would not have known much about him, so he would not bring any more baggage and would bring fewer surprises than Palin. 

Unlike Palin, though, he has a longer record as governor of Minnesota than Palin does in Alaska, he has the distinction of being one of a handful of Republican governors of a “blue” state left standing and he narrowly won re-election in one of the worst years for Republican gubernatorial candidates in decades.  Considering some of the more superficial attributes, Pawlenty has a working-class background (his father was a Teamster), he is the same age as Obama, and he actually plays hockey, all of which would have added a similar dose of youth, working-class voter appeal and a connection with hockey fans across the Upper Midwest.  Like Palin, he was originally Catholic and then converted to evangelical Protestantism, but unlike Palin he grew up in the Catholic Church and so might have had some connection with Midwestern Catholics.  A lot of the same identity-driven enthusiasm about Palin could very well have accompanied a Pawlenty nomination, since it is quite clear that what matters to a lot of her enthusiasts is not anything she has done but who she is and what she represents.  With the convention in his state capital, Pawlenty’s nomination would have seemed particularly fitting. 

As Noam Scheiber noted a few months ago after he wrote a profile of Pawlenty, “Pawlenty is smart and extremely fluent in the details of domestic policy–something McCain can’t come close to claiming, but which will be pretty critical in a campaign waged over health care, infrastructure, and energy.”  Compared to a running mate who doesn’t seem to have a grasp on the basic elements of the federal budget and who reinforces the campaign’s obsession with oil drilling, Pawlenty would have been a more capable lieutenant and consequently a more effective attack dog on policy.  Rhetorically, he has had a habit of breaking with the GOP without diverging much from fiscal and economic conservatism, but has supported enough “populist” legislation (e.g., increasing the minimum wage) that he cannot be readily reduced to a caricature of a Republican.  Electorally, Pawlenty might have helped McCain more in the Upper Midwest.  Given how close Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan still are this year, Pawlenty could have helped offset the Democratic advantage of having a nominee from Illinois.  Granted, Pawlenty is not a very engaging speaker, which is a problem, but he is clearly far more capable of handling the press and arguing his case on television.  Concerning foreign affairs, Pawlenty has led a number of state trade delegations overseas and has visited National Guard units in several countries, so he would not have been as much of a novice in this area as Palin.  On immigration, he has a little credibility as an opponent of illegal immigration and supporter of border security, which would have reassured conservatives a little on that score.  If the Palin nomination blows up in McCain’s face, as I think it still probably will, a lot of people will look back at the supposedly boring, safe choice of Pawlenty and wonder what might have been.  As someone who dreads the prospect of a McCain administration, I’m glad that McCain opted for the riskier choice.

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