Center of the political universe

Posted by Alaska_Politics

Posted: August 29, 2008 - 3:44 pm

From Rich Mauer in Anchorage --

I got off the phone a little while ago with Larry Sabato. He's the director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics and a frequent media analyst.

Suddenly Alaska seems like the center of the political universe, Sabato said.

"Ted Stevens, Don Young in a tied race, and now Sarah Palin - vice president Sarah Palin. Who could've believed it?"

Certainly not me, I said.

"I think it shocked everyone."

Sabato sees John McCain's decision to pick Palin as way to shake up a race that otherwise seems to favor Barack Obama.

"The fundamental factors of the election year, the economy, the unpopularity of President Bush, and so on, make it really tough for any Republican to win," Sabato said. "So he has to do something different, he has to disturb conventional wisdom."

The choice of a 44-year-old new governor also has the effect of changing the image of a 72-year-old man looking back to an election about the future, Sabato said.

But in picking Palin, McCain had to sacrifice one of his principal themes.

"The argument against Barack Obama based on inexperienced is now dead. I don't know how you argue that Obama, at 47, with 10 years in a major state legislature and three years, four years in the U.S Senate, is somehow inferior to 1 1/2 years as governor of a small population state ... How do you sell her as qualified to be president in a situation where we might be electing the oldest first-term President ever. And after all, he's had cancer. That's the unanswerable question."

But Palin's inexperience may not matter if her personal history achieves mythic status.

"These personal stories become the substance of our politics, for better or ill. And I think that's another reason why she was picked. There's a lot of human interest stories in Palin's background and they will be told and retold and retold. She will become a myth in the course of this campaign."

That will only help Palin in the future, Sabato said.

"She's electable, and look - even if she doesn't win - she will mount an election campaign in 2012. That's now inevitable. Because most vice presidential candidates do run and she is hero to the (conservative) base. She's going to be extremely popular with the very people you need in most years to get nominated."

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