John McCain is already the forgotten man of politics. He said after losing the
election last week: “I’ve got nine racks of ribs and I will be cooking them
up.” At 72, his White House hopes are over and he can look forward to
spending many weekends with his barbecue.
The Vietnam war hero’s legacy may be to bequeath the Republican party a
confident and brash new leader. Sarah Palin, his vice-presidential
candidate, has emerged as the early front runner for the presidential
nomination in 2012.
It will not be an easy run, however. Some McCain officials are determined to
ensure that the 44-year-old Alaskan governor never ventures again beyond the
frozen tundra. They have ridiculed the moose-hunting mother of five as a
“whack job” who went “rogue”. She calls them “jerks”.
According to a poll by Rasmussen, 91% of Republicans have a favourable view of
Palin and 64% said she would make the best choice for the next president.
The same poll found, however, that 81% of Democrats and 57% of independents
took a dim view of the polarising “pitbull with lipstick”. Furthermore, exit
polls found that 20% of conservatives voted for Barack Obama last week.
How to win them back has led to a division in Republican ranks. Should the
party become more moderate or play to its base? Love her or hate her, the
discussions about the future have become tied to Palin’s fate.
In the opening skirmishes of the war of succession, McCain aides have claimed
that Palin was a “diva” and a shopaholic who ran up debts in the “tens of
thousands” on her wardrobe and bought silk boxer shorts and luxury suitcases
for her husband Todd, the Iron Dog snow-machining champion, using the credit
cards of her staffers. This was on top of the publicly acknowledged $150,000
spending spree that so appalled McCain loyalists.
One aide described the Alaskan couple as small-town “hillbillies looting
Neiman Marcus [the exclusive department store chain] from coast to coast”. A
Republican lawyer was dispatched to Alaska last week to collect the goods so
they can be accounted for and handed over to charity, as promised.
McCain’s allies prevented Palin from delivering her own concession speech in
Arizona on Tuesday night – which would have elbowed McCain out of the
spotlight – but that was their last chance to shut her up.
Arriving home in Alaska, she denied she was a diva and hit back, calling her
critics inside the campaign “cowardly” for attacking her anonymously.
“That’s cruel and it’s mean-spirited; it’s immature, it’s unprofessional and
those guys are jerks,” she said. “It is not fair and not right.”
As for the allegations of wild spending, she insisted: “I never asked for
anything more than a Diet Dr Pepper [drink] once in a while.”
Palin has retained a huge fan base of voters who are convinced that the steely
former beauty queen with a pregnant teenage daughter and appealing Down’s
syndrome baby is just like them.
They are unfazed by the revelation that she thought Africa was a country.
Unlike her, however, they might have realised that a telephone call from
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France was probably a prank. Palin told the
fake Sarkozy – in reality a Canadian radio DJ – before last week’s defeat
that she might run for president.
Intimates confirm that after her 15 minutes of global fame she has become
addicted to the spotlight. Judy Patrick, a close friend and former
councillor in Wasilla, Palin’s home town, said: “We’d have to be delusional
to think that she’s just going to come back here and live in obscurity and
stay the governor of Alaska.”
There have been reports that Palin could become a chat show host – as Tina
Fey, the comedian and Palin impersonator, pointed out on Saturday Night
Live, the satirical television show.
“I’m certainly not goin’ back to Alaska,” Fey-as-Palin chirped. “If I’m not
goin’ to the White House, I’m either runnin’ in four years’ time or I’m
goin’ to be a white Oprah, so, you know, I’m good either way.”
McCain has only himself to blame for the Palin phenomenon. He selected her as
his running mate even though they had met for only 15 minutes at a
conference for Republican governors last winter.
By the end of the election campaign he could barely look at her. Their
strained body language was all too apparent when they gave a joint
television interview to NBC. McCain stared uneasily at the floor whenever
Palin spoke, even though she performed adequately. So why did he pick her?
It is now known that he was impressed by the fact that she had wowed a group
of conservative ideologues.
Two conservative publications, The Weekly Standard and National Review, held
cruises to Alaska for their readers last year. Conservative luminaries such
as Bill Kristol, the commentator, John Bolton, the former United Nations
ambassador, and Victor Davis Hanson, the historian, went along. They met the
Alaskan governor and were highly impressed.
Paulette Simpson, leader of the Alaska Federation of Republican Women, told
The New Yorker: “They were very enamoured of her.” Hanson described Palin in
high heels “walking around this big Victorian house with rough Alaska
floors, saying, ‘Hi, I’m Sarah’ . . . She has that aura that Clinton, Reagan
and Jack Kennedy had – magnetism that comes through much more strongly when
you are in the room”.
Hanson and his colleagues thought she was fresher and more charismatic than
Hillary Clinton and had more executive experience as governor than Obama had
as a senator. But they had not banked on her ignorance of current affairs.
Once McCain had selected her as his running mate this summer, Nicolle Wallace,
a senior campaign aide, was given particular responsibility for presenting
her to the electorate. Wallace organised the CBS interview with Katie Couric
in which the Alaska governor fell embarrassingly apart and revealed her lack
of knowledge about the economy and foreign policy. Palin was furious and
felt betrayed.
Wallace went on to be wrongly accused of being responsible for the $150,000
clothing fiasco. Asked to comment, she released a statement saying: “If
people want to throw me under a bus, my personal belief is that the most
honourable thing to do is to lie there.”
In another spat Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s neo-conservative foreign policy
adviser, who was close to Palin, was either sacked or suspended last week
for “trashing” other McCain staff. His campaign BlackBerry was confiscated
and the decision was hushed up.
It is all a reminder of the infighting that led McCain’s campaign to the brink
of collapse in the summer of 2007, which, had it been known about, would
have presented a damaging contrast to Obama’s “no drama” rival effort.
If Palin is now shunned by Republicans, the party could sink into a quiet and
steady decline. If she continues to be a high-profile player, the next few
years will be a wild and unpredictable ride.
Who might run against her for the 2012 nomination? Friends of Mitt Romney, the
defeated Republican primary candidate and former governor of Massachusetts,
are said to have joined in rubbishing her, although they deny it. However,
it is never too early to start training for the next White House battle.
Bobby Jindal, 37, the up-and-coming governor of Louisiana and son of Indian
parents, will be heading in a few weeks’ time to Iowa, the caucus state that
transformed Obama’s prospects. He studied political science and is a former
Rhodes scholar at Oxford.
Another presidential hopeful, Tim Pawlenty, 47, the governor of Minnesota,
came up with a populist way to describe the Republicans’ predicament. “It’s
a Dr Phil moment,” he said, referring to the television psychologist who
counsels the nation’s couch potatoes on their neuroses.
None of these male candidates has the star power of Palin, who in her first
flush of fame after her selection drew crowds that were almost as big as
Obama’s. In the Rasmussen poll, just 11% of Republicans wanted Romney to be
president in 2012 and 12% favoured the folksy Mike Huckabee, former governor
of Arkansas. Jindal and Pawlenty remain, for now, almost unknown outside the
Republican cognoscenti and their own home states.
Palin may be tempted to come to Washington as the successor to Ted Stevens,
the disgraced Alaskan senator and one of several local Republicans with whom
she battled in her populist ascent to the top of state politics.
Although Stevens, 84, was convicted of political corruption last month for
accepting $250,000 in home improvement gifts from an oil executive, he stood
again in Tuesday’s election. He was narrowly ahead of his Democratic
opponent yesterday in the slow counting of votes from this numerically small
but geographically vast electorate.
If he wins, Stevens may be expelled from the Senate by his colleagues and
there could be an open seat in a few months’ time. We may know Palin’s plans
shortly. The television networks and celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey,
have been vying to secure in-depth interviews with her. Greta Van Susteren,
a Fox News presenter, has won the coveted right to air the first
postelection interview tomorrow night.
Fateful days
January 3: Against the odds, Barack Obama wins the first Democratic
caucus in Iowa. Hillary Clinton is in third place.
January 7: Clinton gets tearful when asked about the strain of
campaigning.
February 5: Obama wins more states and more delegates than Clinton on
super Tuesday.
February 18: Michelle Obama is criticised for saying: “For the first
time in my adult life, I’m really proud of my country.”
March 5: John McCain wins the Republican nomination.
March 18: Obama condemns incendiary comments by his pastor, Jeremiah
Wright, but adds, “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black
community.”
April 11: Obama describes working-class Pennsylvanians as “bitter”
people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like
them”.
April 23: Clinton wins Pennsylvania primary.
May 6: Clinton loses heavily in North Carolina and secures only a
narrow win in Indiana.
May 20: Obama reaches unassailable lead in pledged delegates in Oregon
and Kentucky primaries, but Clinton vows to fight on, claiming the support
of party “superdelegates”.
June 3: Montana primary pushes Obama over the edge to victory.
June 7: Under pressure from party grandees, Clinton finally admits
defeat.
July 6: Jesse Jackson, the civil rights campaigner, is caught on camera
saying, “I want to cut [Obama’s] nuts off.”
August 29: McCain chooses Sarah Palin, the moose-shooting governor of
Alaska, as his running mate.
September 3: Palin enthrals the Republican convention with a speech
calling herself a “pitbull with lipstick”.
September 13: Palin reveals her ignorance of policy and the US
constitution in the first of several television interviews, prompting a
haemorrhage of support among conservative commentators.
September 15: McCain says “the fundamentals of our economy are strong”
on the day that Lehman Brothers bank collapses.
September 24: McCain is criticised for suspending his campaign to fly
to Washington to “solve” the financial crisis.
October 15: Joe the Plumber – who criticised Obama’s plans for higher
taxes for those earning more than $250,000 – is mentioned 26 times by the
presidential candidates during their final debate.
October 22: Republicans admit that they paid $150,000 for Palin’s
campaign wardrobe.
November 4: Obama elected America’s first African-American president.
