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Jane Mayer's article detailing the potency of the quiet campaign waged by conservative elites on behalf of Sarah Palin's VP ambitions strikes me as a bit overblown (Kristol and others were similarly enamored of Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty, etc), but it's certainly got some interesting nuggets. Chief among them:
With just days to go before the Convention, the choices were slim. Karl Rove favored McCain’s former rival Mitt Romney, but enough animus lingered from the primaries that McCain rejected the pairing. “I told Romney not to wait by the phone, because ‘he doesn’t like you,’ ” Keene, who favored the choice, said. “With John McCain, all politics is personal.” Other possible choices—such as former Representative Rob Portman, of Ohio, or Governor Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota—seemed too conventional. They did not transmit McCain’s core message that he was a “maverick.” Finally, McCain’s top aides, including Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis, converged on Palin.Emphasis mine. This illustrates how muddled McCain's message really was. On the one hand, he was the candidate of experience. He was seasoned and known and stable. On the other, he was the unpredictable maverick. But it's hard to be both an unpredictable maverick and a steady hand on the tiller. McCain decided to go all in on "maverick." Which left them saying something like, don't vote for the guy you don't know, vote for the guy whose actions you can't predict. Meanwhile, events shifted and an erratic streak that had always made for good TV suddenly seemed uniquely ill-suited as a philosophy of governance. Eventually, the McCain camp's argument for why you should vote for John McCain ended up in conflict with their argument for why you shouldn't vote for Barack Obama, and that just left people increasingly certain that they shouldn't vote for John McCain.I remain convinced that there was a road not traveled for McCain. A choice like Lieberman, or more to the point, former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, could have demonstrated independence from his party without undercutting the claim to experience. And given Palin's performance, not to mention the eventual centrality of Pennsylvania in the McCain campaign's electoral math, you have to imagine that McCain is rather unhappy with the decision he ultimately made.
