Providential Palin

St. Paul

John McCain was inching up on Barack Obama last week in the presidential polls as his campaign cleverly picked and pecked at Obama's vanity. At the Democratic convention, speeches by the Clintons and Senator Joe Biden, Obama's running mate, salved the campaign a bit. Then came the address by Obama before 85,000 people at Invesco Field in Denver. The event was a grandiose spectacle that overwhelmed the doctrinaire content of the speech. But as a political happening, it worked like nothing I've seen before.

Republicans were demoralized, which could be fatal in an election year in which most of the larger political forces are working against them. I'm not going to list those forces. Read the newspaper. And it looked like we were in for the selection by McCain of a humdrum vice presidential running mate, followed by a not very interesting Republican convention in St. Paul.

Sarah Palin changed all that. She was not only a surprise choice but also an electrifying one, and her selection has far-reaching implications. Her entry will change the nature of the presidential race. And if the McCain-Palin ticket wins, it has the potential to carry Republicans through a rough patch and even ensure conservative dominance of the party--for years to come.

That's an awful lot of political significance to ascribe to a vice presidential pick. But given who Sarah Palin is and what her future might be, it's not too much.

Let's start with the presidential race. Republicans have made some serious headway in recent weeks. You might have thought House speaker Nancy Pelosi would have enough sense not to spark a fight with the Catholic bishops on abortion. But no. She came up with the insight that Catholic doctrine on abortion is in flux, justifying support of legalized abortion by Catholic politicians.

One of the most politically savvy of the Catholic prelates, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, rebutted Pelosi. But she wouldn't give up. And Biden, also a Catholic, jumped in on Pelosi's side. After all these years, Democratic politicians still don't understand that picking a fight with the Catholic bishops on abortion is a political loser. It energizes the Republican base.

Democrats also awakened another member of the Republican coalition, an unreliable member: the business community. It has belatedly come to understand that a Democratic sweep of Congress and the White House would lead to the enactment of "card check," a tactic to avoid the secret ballot in union elections and thus dramatically improve the prospect of success in organizing drives.

The Democratic convention made the hostility of Democrats even clearer. Speech after speech demonized business. Obama credited workers with the productivity gains of recent years, ignoring the more important role of a massive investment in technology. If he knew better, he didn't let on.

So Republicans were beginning to come together, but it was thanks largely to Democratic noisemaking. Republicans weren't on offense. Now, with Sarah Palin's elevation, they are. McCain couldn't mobilize the Republican base, but Palin can. Indeed, she already has. By 10 P.M. Friday, the day her selection was announced, the McCain campaign had raised $4 million online--more than six times its previous daily record.

Palin is a different kind of Republican. She's a conservative reformer who, somewhat like McCain but more like Ronald Reagan, is forever poised to challenge the sluggish (or corrupt) Republican establishment and shake up the status quo. "I didn't get into government to do the safe and easy things," she declared after McCain introduced her as his running mate. "A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not why the ship is built."

She brought down Alaska's governor, attorney general, and state Republican chairman (see my "Most Popular Governor," July 16, 2007). She killed the "bridge to nowhere." She used increased tax revenues from high oil prices to give Alaskans a rebate. She slashed government spending. She took on the biggest industry in Alaska, the oil companies, to work out an equitable deal on building a new gas pipeline. Obama can't match even one of these accomplishments.

McCain gets enormous credit for naming a conservative woman to his ticket. But it was Palin herself, rather than the boldness of McCain, that instantly galvanized conservatives. Palin's reform credentials, her social and economic conservatism, and her personal story had become well known to conservatives. This was a surprise to me.