"This election is not about issues…"
From the Washington Post (hat tip Crooks and Liars):
Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain’s presidential bid, insisted that the presidential race will be decided more over personalities than issues during an interview with Post editors this morning.
“This election is not about issues, said Davis. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”
Which explain why they picked Palin. (George Lakoff explains it very well here.) An excerpt:
But the Palin nomination changes the game. The initial response has been to try to keep the focus on external realities, the “issues,” and differences on the issues. But the Palin nomination is not basically about external realities and what Democrats call “issues,” but about the symbolic mechanisms of the political mind — the worldviews, frames, metaphors, cultural narratives, and stereotypes. The Republicans can’t win on realities. Her job is to speak the language of conservatism, activate the conservative view of the world, and use the advantages that conservatives have in dominating political discourse.
The good news is, the Obama camp seems to get this, while most Dems, Lakoff argues, haven’t learned much from the Bush/Reagan years.
Our national political dialogue is fundamentally metaphorical, with family values at the center of our discourse. There is a reason why Obama and Biden spoke so much about the family, the nurturant family, with caring fathers and the family values that Obama put front and center in his Father’s day speech: empathy, responsibility and aspiration. Obama’s reference in the nomination speech to “The American Family” was hardly accidental, nor were the references to the Obama and Biden families as living and fulfilling the American Dream. Real nurturance requires strength and toughness, which Obama displayed in body language and voice in his responses to McCain. The strength of the Obama campaign has been the seamless marriage of reality and symbolic thought.
So, yeah the Palin pick was strategic pandering (since McCain hasn’t done too well with any of the above), but also a hastily made and borderline reckless decision, given the controversy, scandal and serious questions brought up on Palin over the last few days. Given the media’s focus on her and that they are beginning to question whether or not Palin should drop out, you’d have to ask if McCain could have found a better, safer choice to activate the ‘conservatism’ message in his campaign.
However, even if she stays on, I think she can do her job effectively, as she really wasn’t meant to talk to people like me anyway. It’s all about getting the base out to vote for McCain – something they weren’t all that excited about doing prior to Palin.
