The Lofty Lantern

The Republican Governor of South Carolina was considered a serious candidate to be John McCain’s Vice President until he went on television. Now, everybody, from the uninformed to the leading expert on South Carolinian politics, Lee Bandy, says he won’t be it.

What happened?

A reporter asked Sanford on television, what were the differences on economic policies between McCain and Bush, and Sanford blanked. He said he couldn’t come up with one, for maybe a minute until he finally did.

There have certainly been better television appearances, especially considering McCain would like nothing more than to distinguish himself from Bush, particularly on economic policies, particularly at this moment. But is this really a fatal mistake? Joe Biden, who is now imagined by some to be a legitimate Vice Presidential candidate, described Obama as “clean,” in one of the odder scandals of this cycle. John McCain has been trying to undo the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact by readhering the Czech Republic to Slovakia. Hillary Clinton had her confusing answer on licenses for illegal immigrants.Nobody has declared the end to any of these people’s careers.

If George Allen taught us in 2006 with the macaca incident that Youtube can kill, it is now becoming apparent that with the amount of video cameras on every (national) candidate, there will be such videos on everybody. We’ve jumped the fence and are in the land of overkill. (This will, incidentally, become more, rather than less true, as noted by former Ramaz grad Jacob Savage and some other person.)

The point being that if such videos don’t exist on the other “viable” Vice Presidential candidates, that is simply a matter of time. (I already miss Dan Quayle) And what damage exactly would this video do? Is McCain really afraid Obama is going to spend his warchest on a 60 second ad to attack his Vice Presidential candidate? If Sanford does get chosen (which wasn’t and remains not particularly likely), all this will become is a youtube video seen by the partisans for the respective campaigns. It might make the news, briefly. It’ll become quickly just another of the whole mess of negative news cycles that this campaign seems doomed to become.

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Bobby Jindal, Republican Governor of Louisiana, is a legitimate Vice Presidential candidate for John McCain. He balances out a number of McCain’s problems; he’s young (his 37th birthday was yesterday) to McCain’s old, his expertise is domestic to McCain’s foreign, and he’s brown to McCain’s white. He is also beloved by many on the religious Right. This, however, is the main reason why he probably won’t get the position. He’s, well, a little crazy.

Bob Novak, conservative political analyst extraordinaire argues that there is no legitimate chance for Hillary to get the Vice Presidential nomination. Though she probably won’t end up getting it, there do remain a number of reasons why she will be strongly considered. Of the four demographics in which Obama may face his earliest problems, in order of importance Reagan-Democrats, Latinos, Jews and feminists, Hillary is stronger than Obama in each. There remain a number of grains of salt to take with that analysis, however. In an awkwardly executed (combining polls over a month?) but as yet not disproven poll by Gallup, Obama has a decisive 62-29 lead over McCain among Latinos, a margin which neither Gore nor Kerry matched. (In another poll with awkward methodology conducted by NBC News/WSJ, Obama has a 62-28 lead.) Though Hillary is stronger than Obama amongst Reagan Democrats and Jews, she is far from the strongest surrogate to those voters.  As for feminists, it remains difficult to imagine significant amounts of those voters disillusioned by Hillary’s defeat staying home when the pro-life John McCain is on the ballot. This recent report, however, suggests that I may be the one suffering from a lack of imagination. All these caveats aside, however, Hillary Clinton remains one of the few people who can assist Obama with each of those groups, and decisively with some.

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