JD Vance & Sarah Palin are the Same Mistake

Meghan McCain

I used to be obsessed with the TV show The View.  It was something that I recorded, initially on a TiVo (to give you an idea of how far back I go) and would binge watch the week's episodes when I cleaned my apartment on Saturday mornings.  The revolving door made it so that certain aspects of it I stopped watching (I am firmly pro-vaccine so I never saw one episode of the Jenny McCarthy era out of protest), and given I have no memory of McCarthy as a cohost, I will own that by-far the host I liked the least of the bunch was Meghan McCain.  The daughter of the former US Senator personified the worst attributes of a NepoBaby: entitled, limited worldview, and genuinely not good at the job.  She didn't have Nicolle Wallace's actual experience in the position...she just was someone who had grown up with one of the then-most important senators in her house, and that was her experience-a rich mom and a powerful dad.

McCain made headlines this past week, and once again proved why she was awful at this job not just for being wrong about it (the conservative host on the show, especially in the Trump Era, is frequently wrong because they have to defend the MAGA platform), but more so for completely missing the point.  McCain was talking about JD Vance on Twitter.  Vance has been compared (repeatedly) to Gov. Sarah Palin, the woman that her father chose to be his running-mate in 2008.  McCain, hearing the criticism stated "There's absolutely no comparison between Vance and Sarah Palin - she's wildly charming, garnered a lot of enthusiasm from women, got a +26 bump after the convention and made a hell of a convention speech.  She was a giant help (at first).  The comparison is politically ignorant."

To give Meghan McCain credit, she's not wrong in the facts of what she said above.  Palin, in the wake of the RNC, was a godsend to her father's campaign.  Senator McCain was running considerably behind then-Senator Barack Obama in the polls, and for the first time it looked like picking Palin, only the second woman to be on a major party ticket, would invite a genuine amount of interest in a ticket that was flagging.  Keep in mind that this was just a few months after Hillary Clinton had mounted a primary campaign, the most impressive one to-date by a woman candidate, and just weeks after Barack Obama not only didn't pick her, but refused to pick a woman, period, for his ticket, instead selecting Joe Biden, meaning that Democratic women would not have a chance at the White House for at least 8 more years if they won.  Palin in concept was a good idea (a play for those disappointed Clinton supporters), and she executed well.  People were fascinated by her, and she gave one of the best convention speeches I've seen.  The downfall happened later.

But McCain makes Palin sound, by comparison, like a good decision, and I think that's wrong-Palin and Vance were both picked knowingly to cater to the worst elements of their party.  Palin was chosen, if we're completely honest (and based on reports from the campaign this appears to be true), because she was a woman.  McCain initially wanted Joe Lieberman as his running-mate, but Lieberman was way too progressive on top of McCain already being considered a moderate, and so his aides refused.  Palin was selected over Tim Pawlenty & Mitt Romney because she might add some heat to the ticket.  And because the party in 2008 had done so little to advance the cause of women politicians, she was really it.  There were other Republican politicians at the time, but their stance on abortion (an apparent line in the sand) made it impossible to pick them.  Kay Bailey Hutchison, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Linda Lingle, Meg Whitman, Jodi Rell, Lisa Murkowski, even Condi Rice...all of them are to some degree pro-choice.  There was no single sitting woman Republican senator or governor in 2008 that was anti-choice except Palin.  If he'd wanted someone other than her, he'd have to go to the House, where figures like Michele Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn were the most prominent members (hardly a step away from Palin).

In many ways, therefore, what McCain did was worse.  McCain picked someone for political expediency, just like Trump did with Vance.  He picked someone deeply unqualified for the presidency, just like Vance.  And he picked someone with such a toxic view of democracy that it threatened its existence.  Donald Trump doesn't exist in a world without Sarah Palin's ascendance-she was really the catalyst to the modern MAGA movement.  People oftentimes talk about President Obama's White House Correspondent's mocking of President Trump as the source of Trump's presidential ambitions...but it was McCain picking Palin that helped launch the Tea Party movement that would make Trump president.  Ms. McCain's defense of her father shows the hollowness of her beliefs-her father picked someone just as bad as JD Vance for the country, just as beneath the role and just as unqualified to take it seriously, someone who would abuse the position for their own aggrandizement.  That it worked initially doesn't take away that it was a complete failure for the nation & a dereliction of duty as a potential future president, and that it should be considered her father's legacy-the destruction of the Republican Party as a political party that respected the peaceful transfer of power.