McCain/Palin '08?

Oh. My. God!?!?!?!?

Un-freakin'-believable.

John McCain just undercut every single argument he has been making as to why he should be president and Barack Obama should not. Every one.

• Here's the real slogan the McCain campaign should now adopt: Putting. Country. Last.

• The McCain campaign's slogan is "country first." It's a good slogan ... But question: If it were your decision, and you were putting your country first, would you put an untested small-town mayor a heartbeat away from the presidency?

• The selection of Palin doesn't simply, as others have pointed out, undermine the notion that Obama is too inexperienced to be president; it gives Obama the chance to actually take the edge on national security while making John McCain's age a central issue of the campaign.

• Underneath her attractive and youthful exterior, Sarah Palin is no different from the old white guys running the Republican Party. She doesn't care about good government, she doesn't believe in science, she wants everyone to live in accordance with her Old Testament Christian values. Basically, she's Tom Coburn with boobs.

• The cons:
  Inexperience.
  Palin has been governor for about two minutes. Thanks to McCain’s decision, Palin could be commander-in-chief next year. That may strike people as a reckless choice; it strikes me that way. And McCain's age raised the stakes on this issue. As a political matter, it undercuts the case against Obama. Conservatives are pointing out that it is tricky for the Obama campaign to raise the issue of her inexperience given his own, and note that the presidency matters more than the vice-presidency. But that gets things backward. To the extent the experience, qualifications, and national-security arguments are taken off the table, Obama wins. And it’s not just foreign policy. Palin has no experience dealing with national domestic issues, either. (On the other hand, as Kate O’Beirne just told me, we know that Palin will be ready for that 3 a.m. phone call: She’ll already be up with her baby.)
  Tokenism.
  Can anyone say with a straight face that Palin would have gotten picked if she were a man?
  Compatibility.
  It doesn’t seem as though McCain knows Palin well. Do we have much reason to think they would work well together?

• McCain has spent the last several years insisting that the most important qualities in a candidate for national office are experience and a background in national security. Sarah Palin was, up until recently, the mayor of a town of 9,000 people, and is currently the governor of a small state with a part-time legislature, with one-and-a-half years under her belt.
  

• I'm just stunned by the cynicism of the whole thing. I'm sure Palin is a fine person, loving mother, devoted wife, learning her way as governor, and so forth. But a heartbeat away from the presidency? Someone with virtually no serious political experience, and no serious experience of any other kind to make up for it? She's going to shake up Washington? I don't know how she'll do on the stump or in the debates. Maybe she'll be great. Who knows? But a potential leader of the free world? You gotta be kidding.

• John McCain has just done something that Obama has not been able to do yet - prove to the world unequivocably that McCain doesn’t have the judgement to be President. He will never ever be able to hold his head up and say that Obama isn’t “ready to lead”.

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