Palin vs. Biden in the Midwest

David Broder:

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John McCain has flummoxed the leaders of his Republican Party and most of the media by picking Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. It's a choice no other candidate conceivably could have made -- a typical McCain gamble, unpredictable in its consequences.

The least plausible part of the McCain camp's scenario for Palin is the hope that she will help capture dissident Hillary Clinton voters. If my reporting in New Hampshire and Colorado is right, there were fewer of those voters -- even before the Democratic convention in Denver -- than polls suggested. After Bill and Hillary Clinton's endorsements of Barack Obama, the number shrank further, and those liberal women are not likely to be attracted to a hard-right conservative such as Palin.

This does not make Palin a bad choice. A Bush White House operative said that he can see Palin stumping repeatedly through Midwest battleground states, pitting her own blue-collar background against the similar family story of Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential hopeful.

"She can talk to those worried workers and their families in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania as well as he can," he said. "She is really one of them."

That may be true. But Biden combines his working-class background with decades of experience in foreign policy -- a base of knowledge Palin cannot hope to match no matter how hard she crams for their Oct. 2 debate. Her credibility will be on the line that night in St. Louis, as will Biden's self-discipline. He cannot afford to condescend. She will have to know her facts.

But long before that, Palin will have to go out campaigning on her own and face media interviews -- all the tests that make former McCain campaign consultant Mike Murphy describe her candidacy as "fragile."

Murphy, who was interviewed Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," was undoubtedly right in saying that Palin, with her staunchly conservative social views, will strengthen the ticket among the Republican base. The crucial question is whether her maverick reformer history -- challenging the incumbent Republican governor and the scandal-stained GOP establishment of her home state -- will overcome her almost total lack of credentials to be a successor to the president of a wartime country.

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By picking Palin, McCain has strengthened his reputation not as an ideologue, not as a partisan, but as a reformer -- ready to shake up Washington as his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, once did. My guess is that cleansing Washington of its poisonous partisanship, its wasteful spending and its incompetence will become McCain's major theme.

The Democrats' great advantage is that they are not responsible for the pain and frustration that many voters have suffered in the Bush years. But if McCain and Palin can shift the focus to the future, they may be able to appeal to the "change" voters who will in the end decide the election.

Most of the pain and frustration I have experienced during the Bush years has been in having to listen to Democrats get most things wrong and still be regarded as serious people. Broder continues to make the mistake of accepting the Democrat talking point about "blue collar Joe." Biden and his family were never blue collar. His dad was a manager in several businesses and Biden himself has been a professional politician for decades. That blue collar nonsense is just Democrat spin to try to bring back the "bitter clingers" into the Democrat fold.

Palin's career may not have been in office as long as Biden, but she has shown more political courage in that short time than he has ever shown in his decades in office. He is a down the line liberal who has never challenged the leadership and has a tendency to try to bully those he disagrees with. That is a tendency that is as likely to get him in trouble in his debate with Palin as her lack of knowledge on a specific issue might be.

I think her background in journalism may be a help for her in this campaign. You learn how to gather information and present it in an understandable fashion. I think she will probably do very well.

Update: A background in journalism means you have been taught to review data and be able to present it in a coherent and compelling way. If the training also included radio and TV it would include doing so before large audiences. Those are characteristics which Gov. Palin has demonstrated in her speeches since getting the nod from Sen. McCain. It is possible that Obama's training as a lawyer may have the same relevance, but his unscripted remarks do not show the same flair as Palin's.