Barbie for President!

I was never going to vote for McCain, but until yesterday I at least had some comfort that the other side's candidate for once didn't seem too awful. I am utterly gobsmacked by McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for VP, though. I thought if I suspended judgment and waited a day, his good and clever reasons might become more evident, but it's not happening.

McCain seems to me to have been pandering to two constituencies: evangelicals and disaffected female Clinton supporters. Romney or Ridge would have been better qualified, but it seems he too was afraid of further alienating evangelicals to give the nod to either of them. Even given his decision to pander, though, I am astonished at Palin's utter unpreparedness.

McCain is over 70 with a history of recurring cancer, so he really needs to think about his VP's Presidential qualifications. I'm sorry, but being mayor of a town of less than 10,000, plus a year and a half governing one of the nation's least populous and most remote states, doesn't prepare you to lead the world. There's also the question of whether a mother of five young children, including a baby with Down's syndrome, is correctly discerning her life's call if she aspires to lead the world.

McCain seems to be calculating that his two target constituencies are too stupid or too preoccupied with their own narrow concerns to care about those things, but I think it's a bad miscalculation that ultimately will offend more members of both constituencies than it will win. If you're evangelical, are you really going to support a mom who won't be there for her kids? If you're a Clintonista with a feminist political agenda, are you really all that tempted to vote for a guy who chooses beauty pageant contestants for both his life mate and his running mate?

In one stroke, McCain has neutralized his two strongest arguments against Obama: that he's inexperienced, and that he doesn't have the judgment and wisdom necessary for leadership.