Not a Big Truck

For the moment, let’s assume that the VP debate between Biden and Palin does in fact take place as scheduled next Thursday.  (At this point I wouldn’t be shocked to see the McCain camp trot out some excuse for why it has to be postponed or canceled.)  The conventional wisdom has been that Palin will be a dangerous foe for Biden, because if he’s not careful he will look like a sexist bully.  I don’t think he needs to be very worried about that.  If she can’t learn how to give better answers to questions than the kind of responses she has given to Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric in those embarrassing interviews, Biden won’t need to do anything in the debate except play it safe and stand back from the gunfire as Palin shoots herself in the foot.

Mr. Graham is in a wheelchair, in case you didn’t get that.

I’ve been interested to observe in recent weeks a shift in how Matt Drudge presents Obama-related material on his news-aggregation website, the Drudge Report.  During primary season, several commentators noted that Drudge adopted a favorable attitude towards Obama; many times he emphasized stories that made Obama look good while ignoring or giving low placement to stories unfavorable to Obama.  This was surprising because Drudge is an acknowledged libertarian with a conservative bent, and he is famous for breaking and driving stories such as the Lewinsky scandal and the Swift Boat campaign tactics that were detrimental to Democrats.

Well, I am now convinced that the only reason Drudge was nice to Obama is because he couldn’t stand Hillary Clinton and despaired at the prospect of having to produce the Drudge Report under four years of a Clinton administration.  He wanted new blood, so he did what he could to help Obama emerge from the Democratic primaries, but now, Drudge has swung hard in the other direction, in favor of McCain.

The last few days are a case study in this.  Drudge has covered the emerging disaster that is the Sarah Palin pick with almost no attention to the skeletons that are coming out of her closet.  He did, however, put a quote from Joe Biden at the top of the page: “Biden: She’s good looking…”  That quote makes Biden look bad, but he actually said that as an example of the difference between Palin and himself — in other words, he was making fun of himself.  But Drudge put up his misleading headline anyway.  What’s worse, he is now blaring a headline “I’ve Got More Experience Than Her!” under pictures of Obama and Palin — as if Obama said those words when in fact he did not.

I’m just disappointed to see Drudge so blatantly in the tank for McCain, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.  Hopefully Drudge won’t be as influential this time around compared to ‘04.

Anyway, the good news is that Obama has finally cracked 50% in the polls for the first time.

John McCain has recently made a habit of using his POW experience as a one-size-fits-all retort for criticisms lobbed at his campaign.  (See our earlier post about allegations that McCain was not in a “cone of silence” before Rick Warren’s debate at the Saddleback Church.)  Today, the Obama campaign released an ad depicting McCain as an out-of-touch moneybags who can’t even keep track of how many houses he owns:

The McCain campaign’s laughable response:

The reality is they have some investment properties and stuff. It’s not as if he lives in ten houses. That’s just not the case. The reality is they have four that actually could be considered houses they could use. … This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison.

Only four houses!  A true man of the people.

The idea that McCain permanently gets a free pass not only on all allegations of dishonesty but also on charges of elitism simply because he was a POW is ludicrous.

Part of me hopes that the McCain campaign continues using this line of defense against criticisms from the Obama campaign.  I’m not convinced of its ultimate effectiveness.  Being a decorated veteran running against a non-veteran was not enough for John Kerry in 2004 or Bob Dole in 1996.  The American people don’t care nearly as much about military service and POW status as McCain hopes they do.

What’s more, I think the endless repetition of the “But I’m a POW” cry from the McCain camp could become a punchline of sorts if they are not careful.  Think of Rudy Giuliani running on his post-9/11 record as “America’s Mayor.”  At the beginning of the presidential campaign season, everyone thought Giuliani had a great shot at becoming the Republican nominee thanks to that record.  But Giuliani could only play that one note and found ways to bring every discussion back to 9/11.  Even though most people still respected Giuliani’s service as mayor, his shameless repetition of it in speeches and debates eventually became kind of a joke, to the point that Joe Biden mocked him as the man whose every sentence consisted of “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”  McCain should watch out, especially if Biden ends up on the ticket.  I think a similar thing could happen to him.  All that’s necessary is a single witty and memorable (but not nasty) line like Biden’s.

The speculative chatter about whom McCain and Obama will pick as their vice presidential running mates has reached a fever pitch in recent days, as McCain has announced the date (August 29) on which he will reveal his selection, and the Obama campaign is running out of time to announce their pick before the Democratic convention begins.  The political sphere is especially focused on guessing who Obama’s pick will be, since he will have to announce his first.  Will it be Biden?  Kaine?  Bayh?  Sebelius?  Reed?  Someone else?

Though engaging in such speculation is fun — I certainly have done my share — it is mostly a waste of time.  Not just because knowing what is going on inside the candidates’ minds is impossible (think of the VP choices just in recent years who have been dark horses, for example, Cheney and Lieberman), but also because the eventual selection of a vice presidential candidate simply isn’t likely to have much of an impact on the election.

For one, the conventional wisdom that a VP pick can deliver certain states or geographic areas in the general election is, these days, questionable at best.  In the past, when the U.S. was more divided along regional lines, this was more true.  John Kennedy’s pick of Lyndon Johnson in 1960 is a classic example of this; LBJ brought most of the South with him to the Democratic ticket.

But regional consciousness has declined significantly since then.  Going from Mississippi to New York in 2008 is a far cry from what it must have been like to go from Mississippi to New York in 1958.  Differences between distant parts of the country simply aren’t as great as they used to be.  The South has urbanized and industrialized.  The Southwest has experienced a population explosion.  Heck, Microsoft has a huge facility in Fargo, North Dakota.  Suburbia with its big box stores and chain restaurants seems about the same whether it is in Nashville or Pittsburgh or Phoenix.  Amazon.com and UPS have brought many of the benefits of urban life — unlimited books, niche food products, you name it — to tiny towns in Wyoming.  Communication and social networking with people in far-flung locales is inexpensive and easy, thanks to the Internet.  Air travel, even with current high fuel prices, is cheaper than it has ever been and Americans travel more and more.

In her August 15 column called “The End of Placeness,” Peggy Noonan suggests that McCain and Obama themselves are representative of this “flattening” trend of recent decades.

OK, quick, close your eyes. Where is Barack Obama from?

He’s from Young. He’s from the town of Smooth in the state of Well Educated. He’s from TV.

John McCain? He’s from Military. He’s from Vietnam Township in the Sunbelt state.

Chicago? That’s where Mr. Obama wound up. Modern but Midwestern: a perfect place to begin what might become a national career. Arizona? That’s where Mr. McCain settled, a perfect place from which to launch a more or less conservative career in the 1980s.

Neither man has or gives a strong sense of place in the sense that American politicians almost always have, since Mr. Jefferson of Virginia, and Abe Lincoln of Illinois, and FDR of New York, and JFK of Massachusetts.

“Placeness” just doesn’t exist the way it used to.  The urban-rural divide is far more significant these days than the divisions between New England, Midwest, Deep South, Pacific Northwest, etc.  In light of this trend, picking a VP in order to deliver certain states or geographic regions just doesn’t make sense the way it once did.  Consider recent VP nominees: Cheney from Wyoming, Edwards from North Carolina, Lieberman from Connecticut, Jack Kemp from New York, Al Gore from Tennessee.  None of those men, with the possible exception of Gore, was chosen because he would deliver a state to the party ticket.

Another way in which the choice of a running mate is supposedly important is that it can assuage voters’ concerns about the presidential nominee, on the grounds of either cultural differences or experience.  A nominee relatively inexperienced in, say, foreign affairs might want to choose a running mate with plenty of experience in foreign affairs to “balance” the ticket.  This is a plausible argument in the case of the 2000 election, when George W. Bush’s selection of Dick Cheney seemed to reassure a lot of people that Bush, though he might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, was going to surround himself with competent people as president and would have a managerial type of presidency.

In most other cases I don’t think the idea of trying to balance the ticket works.  Gore won himself a few old Jewish voters in Florida by picking Lieberman, but picking Lieberman did not help Gore make himself seem less wooden, which more than anything else (except perhaps for his decision to run apart from Bill Clinton rather than on the Clinton record) cost him the election.  (Well, if you say that he actually lost, which he didn’t, but that’s another story.)  Jack Kemp’s knowledge of economic issues didn’t help Dole pull off an upset against Clinton in 1996 in the midst of a strong economy.  John Kerry in 2004 didn’t win himself very many votes from cultural conservatives by picking the affable, sweet-talking country boy John Edwards as his running mate.

And let’s take the current election, where the popular idea is that Obama needs someone with foreign policy credentials and McCain needs a wizard on the economy.  I wouldn’t say that that would be a bad thing in either case, but I also can’t imagine someone who says, “Gee, I don’t trust Barack Obama with foreign affairs and national security” taking a look at his vice presidential choice — perhaps someone like Biden or Reed — and then deciding, well, okay, I trust him now.

In reality, it’s even pretty hard to screw up the ticket by making a bad vice presidential choice.  Assuming the VP pick doesn’t have any skeletons in the closet — a la Thomas Eagleton in ‘72 having received electroshock therapy — nobody really cares so much about who the VP is that they will cast their votes on that basis.  I mean, Dan Quayle in ‘88?  Dan Quayle???  And George H.W. Bush still won that election.

So, enough already with the VP chatter!  It just isn’t that important.

In a future post I will write about what I think is the most important factor in determining the outcome of the election in November.