September 27, 2008 | 6:17 pm

Can McCain fix his Palin problem?

Posted by Raphael J. Sonenshein

Ever since the quick burst of celebrity that accompanied her surprise selection for the vice president numination, it’s been all downhill for Palin. 

Her public approval has been dropping steadily in recent weeks, and perhaps even more damaging has been the general sense in the political world that she is not remotely up for the job.  Her two television interviews, with Charles Gibson and then with Katie Couric, were beyond awful.  They were close to unwatchable.

And she’s become a light-night TV comedy staple.

I am a pretty solid softball player, and occasionally have dreamed of playing center field for the New York Yankees.  But I imagine that if I faced a major league pitcher throwing a fastball, I’d look about like Palin did.

The problem is that McCain gave almost no thought to his vice presidential selection.  Like many of things he has done in this campaign, it seems to have been done on impulse with the goal of shaking things up.  Now that the bloom has come off the rose, what does he do next?  He has until Thursday’s vice presidential debate to think of something, or to hope for a crisis that can require her to avoid the debate.  (Perhaps Alaska has to go on alert in case Russian President Putin flies over.  See what I mean about comedy?)

In the meantime, I can see where this is heading.  After the first presidential debate, Obama’s vice presidential choice Joe Biden was all over the news talking about the event.  Palin was nowhere to be seen.  She turned down interview requests.  But in recent days it hasn’t been hard to find Mitt Romney on the talk circuit supporting McCain.  Now of course lots of people thought that even though McCain apparently can’t stand Romney, that he would have been a better choice if anybody could have predicted the Wall Street meltdown.  Romney is big on economic stuff.

My sense is that the short term strategy will be to keep Palin in hiding as much as possible, and turn the functional role of vice presidential candidate over to Romney.  That way, the Republican base that loves Palin (although not as much as originally) won’t be mad and McCain can seem like he has a real running mate.

The implication will be that McCain and Romney will run things if McCain is elected, so don’t you worry your pretty little self about Palin.  Voters who are worried that she might become president will still worry.  The odds are that other key Republicans will fall in line to provide that support in Palin’s absence.

Now I don’t know how long this can work, especially if the Thursday debate is actually held, and if it is a catastrophe for Palin.  And if she does well, McCain can’t really hide her for the rest of the campaign.  There’s a lot at stake for Palin on Thursday, but expectations are so low that she might manage to get through it in better fashion than we think.

Another alternative that I think is at least possible is Palin’s exit from the ticket.  Easy come, easy go.  A non-vetted selection, no investment by the candidate.

So far, McCain’s campaign has been marked by wild roundhouse punches thrown in the late rounds looking for a “change of chemistry.”  Some work, some don’t.

The latest one, the attempt to get out of the first debate, was a dud.  But I could see him thinking that if Palin leaves (on her own accord, of course, to deal with a family issue) then the media will be fascinated by who takes her place. 

The replacement can’t be a pro choice moderate because the base will go nuts and might even spawn a third-party writein campaign.  It has to be somebody that the base will accept, and that is probably Romney.  This move can’t be made unless Romney agrees in advance to join the ticket.  He might even challenge Biden to a do-over of the vice presidential debate, or if it happens before Thursday, who knows?

There would have to be a lot of talk on the Republican right about this, comparable to the discussions that alerted McCain that he had better not choose a pro-choice running mate.

Don’t ask me if any of this makes sense, because trying to predict what McCain will do next is not only baffling to me, but probably to his own staff as well.

But I do think it’s a reasonable possibility that if Palin continues to head downhill that McCain will do something dramatic to get out of that situation.

The last presidential candidate with this kind of problem was George H.W. Bush and his vice president, Dan Quayle.  Bush took fierce criticism but hung on, and won handily even though later surveys found that Quayle did cost him votes.  But that was a traditional Republican campaign, businesslike and tough, and Bush simply decided to bear the cost of Quayle. 

We’ll see if that is the model adopted by McCain or if we are due for another Hail Mary.

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Raphael J Sonenshein, a political scientist at Cal State Fullerton, is spending the semester as the Fulbright Tocqueville Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Paris VIII.

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September 21, 2008 | 4:22 pm

John McCain is in big trouble

Posted by Raphael J. Sonenshein

Even from Paris, I can tell that John McCain is in big trouble. 

As the Wall Street crisis hit like a tidal wave, Obama’s support has jumped.  Meanwhile, Sarah Palin’s support has dropped like a stone.  The ABC talking heads tore McCain apart this morning.  (I can pick this up online.)  What does it all mean?

I think the McCain campaign always had to thread a needle.  The Republican party base is a cruel mistress.  It can give you the presidential nomination, but it has some strict requirements.  Don’t mess with the party’s ideology, even though it is highly unpopular.  Be nice to President Bush, even though most Americans detest his presidency (except Republicans).  The base gets to veto vice presidential choices, so nobody who is pro-choice can be considered.  Do not stray to the center, where elections are won.

And, having met all those requirements, your job is to win the election.

Now, as near as I can tell, McCain had a plan.  It went something like this.  Give the base what it wants on public policy, total backing for President Bush and conservative ideology.  But the rest of the country has to think he is a political moderate, a centrist willing to break with President Bush.  McCain could then use his image of moderation, and his high reputation— nearing reverence among political reporters— to appear centrist.  Thus ideology would not matter, because style and personality would carry the day.

In fact, to my own astonishment, McCain has actually campaigned to the right of President Bush. 

He wants to stay longer in Iraq than Bush does.  His foreign policy advisers seem to be the folks who left Bush because he was not belligerent enough in foreign policy.  But this could work if Americans get confused about ideology, which seems to happen frequently.  His thought seems to be that if people notice that he is attacking Bush they won’t notice that the attack is from the right, simply that it is a criticism of Bush.

Now a couple of things happened that made it hard for this plan to work.  One was the Sarah Palin pick. 

It’s one thing to mollify the base.  It’s another thing to pick a manifestly unqualified person with tons of skeletons in her closet and far right ideology in the hopes of shaking up the race. 

And it did shake up the race, and gave McCain a huge boost for a while. 

But the Palin pick is like a high caffeine drink.  It wears off fast, and you feel really crummy.  Every day her support drops by a point or so, and Americans are focusing very nervously on the possibility she might be president.  It won’t be long before she is the stuff of comedy.

A more patient, thoughtful candidate would have picked an experienced pro-life politician, whether male or female, and tried to tough it out.  McCain went for broke, and now he has reminded people that his age and health really do matter.

The other thing McCain did was lie a lot. 

I wish I could use the various euphemisms for lying (mislead, misspeak, etc.), but they don’t do the trick.  Palin has followed his lead.  These two seem to spout off lies every day.  The problem is that for political reporters who have swallowed all kinds of stuff in the last few years, this was simply too hard to swallow.  Ideological confusion might have worked, and McCain probably could have swung some version of that by muddying the waters. 

But the constant lying, easily countered by video clips and printed quotes, has simply wrecked what used be his base: the media.  The lying gave a timid Obama campaign the courage to attack hard and Obama seems to be having much more fun as a result.  He could get used to this.

There’s plenty of time for this to turn around before election day.  It’s already turned around several times.  I don’t see Palin turning around, though; I think she is going to be a serious problem until election day. 

Describe for me a voter who doesn’t like her today who is going to like her better tomorrow.  I expect to see a lot of Rev. Wright from now on, and then we move to the ground game.  There it will be struggle between the immovable object, Republican vote suppression techniques, and the irresistible force, the Obama ground attack. 

In that sense, the final result of the ground game will seem to us, as Theodore White so beautifully captured it in his classic The Making of the President 1960, “invisible, as always.”

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Raphael J Sonenshein, a political scientist at Cal State Fullerton, is spending the semester as the Fulbright Tocqueville Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Paris VIII.

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September 14, 2008 | 4:40 pm

Shock, awe and lies on the campaign trail

Posted by Raphael J. Sonenshein

Can open lying be a good campaign strategy? That's the question that political junkies are weighing this week.

Politics is not science. Political statements are not "peer reviewed" for accuracy. That being said, I've never seen a campaign engage in such open, easily countered lying, as McCain and Palin have done in the last week. It's really astonishing. They say things that are not true, such as that Palin opposed the Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska, and even after widely debunked, they still say it. And this is only one of maybe a dozen examples in a week. In fact, other than the spelling of their names, I can't find anything either of them has said recently that is verifiably true.

Now in fairness, this week has also seen McCain do very well in the polls. So in the short term, can we say that lying is working? I don't think so. I think McCain got a huge bounce out of selecting Palin, but the debunking of their words since then is a "lagging indicator" that may derail their whole campaign. I think that those who love Palin on the Republican base will not care at all about the truth question. She is their rock star and she can do no wrong. In their view, the media is at fault for attacking her. That should help McCain in the short term to firm up his shaky base, and guarantees that he will not blown out in November and can actually win.

But what about the rest of us? Those in the "reality based community" as right wingers tend to call everybody but themselves? I have a pretty high tolerance for campaign tactics, even when they are used against my side. I can take a perverse pleasure in a good shot, whoever takes it. But this makes me wonder is if these folks have so much contempt for us that they think we will swallow anything if it is said loudly enough.

I should have seen this coming, though. It's inherent in the quirky personality of John McCain. The affable McCain that reporters saw in 2000, and came to worship, emerges only when he is not challenged. There are some people who simply cannot endure being challenged, especially about their integrity. McCain, in my view, is one of them. And for months, whenever he has been challenged, he has simply made things up. When he was read one of his own quotes by Tim Russert, he simply asserted that he had never said it. This is fairly typical of McCain. His temper is explosive when he is challenged, and one way to prevent the explosion is just to deny the charge whatever it is.

McCain has had few tough elections, and has never had a tough media. They have always made excuses for him. Now they are treating him, finally, as a serious candidate who should be questioned. He doesn't like it one bit. His first response, before rage, is denial that he ever said or did what the questioner is asserting, regardless of the truth. Some politicians get angry, evade, push back, but avoid just simply flat-out lying. I wonder if McCain's untruths are his way of holding back the rage.

Now comes the Palin pick, and McCain's camp is totally unprepared for questions because they hardly checked her out at all. So they just made things up. Then they had to endure being fact checked, such as about her alleged trips to Iraq (which never happened) or to Ireland (a refueling stopover). Following McCain's stubborn lead, they just repeat the lies again and again, demanding that they be accepted as the truth.

I don't think this is going to work. If it does work, where does that leave us in a McCain presidency? Perhaps more than McCain ever intended, this whole week of lying is opening a window into his very character and temperament which form, after all, the central rationale for his campaign.

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September 9, 2008 | 6:01 pm

The Palin nomination: What does it mean?

Posted by Raphael J. Sonenshein

My blog won't be as frequent this fall, since I'm in Paris on a Fulbright. So with time zones and stuff, I'm off kilter. But I'm still following things like crazy!

Obviously, the big news is the Sarah Palin nomination. I think it's very revealing, and let me tell you why. I think it says more about the strengths and weaknesses of the contemporary Republican party than anything else. Put another way, McCain had to do something like this, and yet it may backfire as well.

The conservative wing of the Republican party is in firm command of this remarkable political party. The Republican party, at least since the defeat of President Bush, Sr. in 1992, has been a militant, unified, assertive, ideological party. Such parties have been rare in American history, except among third parties for a short time. The "base", in Karl Rove's term, is all. This philosophy does not reach out across party lines. It is partisan and organized and aggressive. It is based on the 51% philosophy. If Republicans stayed united, they can beat anybody, especially the Democrats, whether or not they pursue popular policies. Moderate Republicans can either toe the line of the base, or get out.

In 2004. this philosophy passed a major test, when President Bush was re-elected with a large turnout of his Republican and conservative base. Since then, the Bush presidency has collapsed, the economy has gone to hell, the Iraq war is unpopular, but the base remains.

John McCain could have run for the presidency by challenging the hold of the base on the party, as Bill Clinton did to the liberal wing of the Democratic party in 1992. But I think he determined after his defeat by Bush in 2000 that the base of his party was too strong to be defeated. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. And so he resolved to be the most loyal Bush soldier possible, at the cost of his own previous beliefs. That got him the nomination in 2008, but it never won him the love of the base.

Until his party's convention, Republicans were lagging in enthusiasm compared to the Democrats. The base was sleeping, unwilling to rouse itself for McCain. McCain then took a huge gamble and picked an unknown Alaska governor, Sarah Palin. The base exploded, literally fell in love, and rushed to help McCain. For the base, the age issue now goes away. At worst, they get Palin as president!

The base has been fed and it is satisfied. But...now the problems start. Palin solved one problem, but may open up a host of others. For a few days, even a week, the media and the Democrats were completely bamboozled by the intensity of the Republican base's love for Palin, and their intense defense of her against all attacks. And yet, Palin's problems (political firings, billing the state for days spent at home and for travel by her spouse and children, lack of knowledge on major issues, etc.) are so numerous that they are beginning to emerge in the daily media accounts of the campaign.

Democrats hope that the Obama campaign is playing a very deep game, letting the string play out on Palin over the course of several weeks rather than jumping all over her all at once. We shall see. Remember, though, that when she was first announced and even when her name was circulated, Republican commentators dismissed her as unlikely and unworthy. Now that the base is on fire, those comments have turned supportive, but there was something there...

So, what we have is that the Palin nomination put McCain way back into the game, energized his base, and made 2008 a possible repeat of 2004. Don't give an inch to Democrats and independents, pound out the turnout on the right. But if a portrait emerges of Palin as an ideological extremist with all sorts of ethics problems she will undercut McCain so badly among independents and Democrats that it dooms him as well. It is hard to imagine pro-choice Jewish voters flocking to support her.

For Republican moderates who had hoped that 2008 would be the beginning of the end of the base strategy of the party, the Palin nomination must be a disappointment.

More than ever, it seems that whatever happens to the Republican ticket in 2008, the base will rule.

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