McCain’s bold choice

MINNEAPOLIS – John McCain’s advisers predicted weeks ago that the presumptive Republican nominee would use his national convention week to try to recapture his image as a maverick reformer and shake up the presidential race. He did just that Friday with his surprise choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate.

McCain’s selection of the nationally untested Palin is the most unlikely choice of a running mate since George H.W. Bush tapped then-Sen. Dan Quayle in 1988.

The little-known Palin, 44, brings a blue-collar conservatism and strong anti-abortion views to the ticket and appeals to a party base sometimes suspicious of McCain.

Appearing at a rally with McCain in Dayton, Ohio, on Friday, she made an immediate pitch to female voters, especially those who had supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries, saying that her selection “could help shatter the glass ceiling once and for all.”

But she is also less than two years into her term as governor, and her only previous political experience came as mayor of the town of Wasilla, which has a population of about 6,700. Democrats immediately seized on her lack of political experience, noting that McCain, who turned 72 on Friday, will be confirmed next week as the oldest first-time presidential nominee in history.

The choice of Palin, the first woman named to a Republican presidential ticket, adds another chapter to a campaign that, mostly on the Democratic side, has been about breaking down racial and gender barriers. McCain’s hope is that, with Clinton now on the sidelines, Palin can help close a sizable gap with Obama among female voters that threatens to block his path to the White House.

Picking Palin also helps McCain consolidate his party’s conservative base, which has been at best lukewarm toward his candidacy. The governor’s conservative credentials are not in doubt, whether on abortion or gun rights or gay rights. The announcement of her elevation to the ticket brought an outpouring of enthusiasm from the right flank of the GOP and will assure a more energized convention next week in St. Paul, Minn.

But what tipped the balance toward Palin was that she gives McCain a partner with a record of challenging the establishment in her own party and in Anchorage, reinforcing the case that he would be more fearless and effective than Obama in taking on special interests in Washington.

“I have found the right partner to help me stand up to those who value their privileges over their responsibilities, who put power over principle, and put their interests before your needs,” McCain said in introducing Palin on Friday. “I found someone with an outstanding reputation for standing up to special interests and entrenched bureaucracies; someone who has fought against corruption and the failed policies of the past.”

The Alaska governor does differ with McCain on some issues, including his opposition to drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And while she is considered a crusader for the reform of the state’s famously insular political culture, she is also the subject of a state ethics investigation of the involvement of aides and family members in lobbying for her former brother-in-law’s removal from the state police force and whether the refusal to do so was connected to her decision to fire the state police commissioner.

McCain did not laud Palin as immediately ready to take over, which he once said was his highest priority for a running mate.

Instead, he called her a partner in reform, who would bring an outsider’s perspective and a reputation for bucking the Republican Party and the status quo.

“She’s got the grit, integrity, good sense, and fierce devotion to the common good that is exactly what we need in Washington today,” McCain said. “She knows where she comes from, and she knows who she works for.”

Palin was poised in her first turn on the national stage, with her husband, Todd, and four of her five children – daughters Bristol, Willow and Piper and 4-month-old son Trig – behind her. She said her oldest son, Track, enlisted in the Army last Sept. 11 and will be deployed to Iraq on Sept. 11 of this year.

“As the mother of one of those troops and as the commander of Alaska’s National Guard,” Palin said she believes that McCain is the “kind of man I want as our commander in chief.”

But in turning to Palin, who is halfway through her first term as governor, McCain risks ceding the most effective argument he and fellow Republicans have made against Obama. For months, Republicans have attacked the senator from Illinois as not ready to be president. Now McCain has put someone who Democrats argue has even less experience one election and a heartbeat away from the presidency.

He also has gambled that the governor of a geographically large but sparsely populated state can make the transition to the national stage, with no opportunity for an off-Broadway tryout. Unlike some of the established politicians who were believed to be under consideration, Palin is a total newcomer to the national spotlight and thus vulnerable to making the kind of mistakes that would raise questions about McCain’s judgment.

But Mark Salter, one of McCain’s closest confidants, said Friday that the campaign will argue that Palin’s experience actually exceeds Obama’s, both as an executive and as a hard-charging reformer willing to take on not just special interests but her own party as well. “Obama has no such record,” Salter said.

McCain’s campaign has exuded confidence of late after a month in which it pounded Obama as an elitist and a lightweight celebrity. But the choice of Palin hints at the underlying anxiety within its inner circle that the fundamentals of this election year still favor Obama and the Democrats. McCain was looking for ways to counter the Democrats’ argument that he is merely an extension of President Bush and concluded that he needed a game-changing decision, with all the risks that entailed.

He had safer and more conventional options, although those perhaps became less attractive as he watched the Democrats celebrate Obama’s historic nomination in Denver.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was one alternative, but the uproar over the many homes McCain owns perhaps made the wealthy businessman a problematic choice. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty was another, a conservative with blue-collar roots. But the more Minnesota looks like an uphill climb for McCain, the less Pawlenty might have been able to do for the GOP ticket.

McCain’s heart may have been with two supporters of abortion rights: former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, a fellow Vietnam War veteran and an old McCain pal from their days in the House, and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent Democrat from Connecticut who has been a regular traveling companion of McCain’s on the campaign trail.

The choice of either, however, could have blown apart the Republican convention over the abortion issue. Lieberman, in particular, would have been a problematic pick. He and McCain agree on little beyond the Iraq war and foreign policy, but his selection would have reinforced the closeness between McCain and Bush.

For all the enthusiasm Palin’s selection generated among conservative constituencies, many GOP strategists were privately bewildered by McCain’s decision.

One Republican strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid view, said in an e-mail, “I would rather be arguing with conservatives about abortion than with the Democrats about a lack of experience on our own ticket.”

“She really destroys the ‘not ready’ mantra,” another strategist noted.