Todd Gitlin makes the point, made more often now, that the Palin appointment tells us much about McCain; little about her.
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Not Maverick but Erratic
By Todd Gitlin - August 31, 2008, 10:09AM
McCain's choice of Sarah Palin is not a weird anomaly. It's of a piece with his standard modus operandi. He's impulsive, erratic. Put him in a jam, he leaps from petulance to exuberant nose-thumbing. He may be old, but he's unseasoned--he's childish. He jumps outside the box and takes pleasure in his insouciance. Faced with a foreign policy problem, he thinks: Bomb. (Sometimes he blurts it out, as in: Bomb bomb Iran.) Faced with energy crisis, he thinks: Drill. Faced with Russia-Georgia-Ossetia, he thinks: Let's get the Cold War on. Bomb and drill, drill and bomb--this is not a steady hand at the wheel; this is a go-for-broke gambler playing the game as he loves to play it.
It would seem that there's also an element of this in his personal life. Matt Welch's book, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, gives many examples of his flaming temper. He leaves his first wife and jumps straight into not only a second marriage but a political constituency. Famously (but not famously enough ) he blows up.
He's still doing that, as in this recent interview with two Time reporters, where he comes close to biting their heads off. Time calls him "prickly" and "abrasive." Listen to the audio on Time's site. An excerpt:
Q. I wonder if you could define honor for us? A. Read it in my books.
Q. I've read your books.
A. No, I'm not going to define it.
Q. But honor in politics?
A. I defined it in five books. Read my books.
Obama was absolutely right to question his "temperament and judgment" in Denver. I noticed a special roar from the crowd at "temperament." Democratic partisans know what he's talking about. The problem is that much of the rest of the country doesn't. They cherish an idea of his steadiness (as POW) and independence (as maverick). They have to be made aware that he's unreliable, unpredictable, a roller of dice.
Hilzoy put it well:
I was also struck by McCain's willingness to gamble not just with our country, but with his own campaign. He has chosen as his running mate someone he has barely met; who has no experience dealing with the kind of scrutiny she is about to face; who has, by all accounts, not been fully vetted; and who is in the midst of a scandal. That is a shockingly reckless thing to do. Obviously, I think it's worse to gamble with the country, but taking this kind of crazy flyer on someone you don't know nearly enough about is recklessness of a different kind, and worth noting in its own right.
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