The “reckless” Palin pick?
Alright, let’s acknowledge that Gov. Sarah Palin is easy on the eyes in a way that no vice presidential contender has ever been. And let’s further acknowledge the fact her teen daughter is knocked up and that’s going to make for good 24-hour news cycle fodder for all this week. Oh, and the whole trying to fire a trooper over a personal vendetta thing is priceless, ham-handed and maybe a touch worse worse than a certain North Carolina letting his wife get a humongous raise from a state university and travel first class on the taxpayer's dime.
But is McCain's Veep pick reckless? As in, if McCain croaks in office and the United States is faced with something akin to 9/11 are we going to be having a wicked case of buyers' remorse? At least one pundit seems to imply that.
From Slate’s John Dickerson:
Each new fact we learn about Sarah Palin—her reversal on the bridge to nowhere, her disagreements with McCain on issues from windfall profits to global warming, emerging facts about troopergate—contribute to the feeling that this whole Palin thing is being made up as we go along. It may be fun to read about, and it sure is fun to cover, but it also supports the judgment of the Palin pick that I first heard from a Republican veteran shortly after the announcement: "Reckless."Obama was supposed to be the risky candidate. That's certainly how Republicans have painted him. Judging from how he's run his campaign, though, he's very conservative. Nevertheless, polls have shown that voters think McCain is the less risky pick by as much as 20 percentage points. Now that McCain has made a high-profile decision essentially defined by its riskiness—observers have called it a "Hail Mary pass" so often, I'm starting to think it's a play for the Catholic vote—the question is whether McCain has squandered his advantage with voters on the question of risk.
Click here for the whole thing. To be clear, I'm not sure whether Dickerson was talking about "reckless" in terms of a pick for Veep or "reckless" in terms of picking someone to put a heart-beat away, but one would seem to imply the other.
