| Happy birthday, Johnny Mac! You're 72 now, a cancer survivor, and a presidential candidate who has said on many occasions that the most important criteria for picking a vice president is whether he or she could immediately step in if something happened to the president. Your campaign against Barack Obama is based on the simple idea that he is unready to be president. So you've picked a running mate who a year and a half ago was the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a town of 8,500 people. You've selected a potential leader of the free world who knows little or nothing about the major issues of the day beyond energy. Oh, and she's being probed in her state for lying and abuse of power. |
Apart from the last sentence, which I am sure we will be hearing more about, Mr. Alter gives the natural first reaction of any decent political grown-up.
However he and the rest of them then get distracted from the true analytical path, as it seems to me, partly due to their fixation of the horse-race aspect [1] and partly due to taking the Commanderissimo of AEI and GOP and EIB rather too strictly at his own word. Since not even a dumb Mugwump admires gambling games, we can correct both mistakes by attempting to look at things from J. Sidney’s own point of view, weird and uncongenial though it be.
Briefly: (1) JSM certainly approves of Mme. Sarah Putin (sp?) on grounds entirely independent of whether or not she will help to get him installed. No courageous self-profiler would be caught dead actin’ on naked self-interest like that. Your generic Mister Profile would rather perish rather than appear self-interested in the slightest. The specific J. Sidney McCain is surrounded with Big Management Party operatives who would like to win the election in the worst way -- in the Lee Atwater way -- so he could not indulge his dumb mugwumpery altogether without stint or limit. The hired handlers managed to talk him out of Sen. Lieberman, at least, but I suspect he made a deal that they were not to say ‘boo’ about the exact identity of Anybody-But-Holy-Joe. [1]
(2) That was J. Sidney’s mugwumpery in action. His dumbness was active as well in the selection of Governess Putin, in the sense that the man is not clever enough to understand his own motives and express them accurately. Accordingly, he had different and stronger subliminal or ‘unconscious’ reasons for this exuberance than will have appeared in his own words and thoughts, even the campaign-confidential ones.
The thing to do, I’d say, is to work backwards from the undeniable public act to the ideally best possible set of J. Sidney McCain private motives for such an act and the best possible JSM private understanding of the act’s context -- without relying too heavily on the perp’s own testimony, let alone on his hired handlers’ or his Party neocomrades’ spin-ridden testimonials.
As follows, approximately:
Q. GIVEN that Mme. Sarah Putin, extremist Republican governess of the great state of Alaska, is the best possible runnin’ mate for Cap’n M’Cain, what colour is the sky in M’Cain World? A. (forthcoming) |
But God knows best. Happy days.
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[1] And then some of ’em probably did say ‘boo’ even after promisin’ not to. But that would be perfectly OK with J. Sidney. Additional evidence that other mortals are not up to his own self-profiled mark can never be entirely unwelcome. One cannot play the rôle of Coriolanus without a large supporting cast of vulgar importuners continually whisperin’ vile things about "whatever it takes to win!" into one’s imperial ear. To get mad at them for importunin’ would be silly as well as indecorous.
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