#56 Sarah Palin and Personal Income

There. I've done it again. I've implied a relationship between two ideas that seem peripherally related at best, because I am not talking about Sarah Palin's personal income. But these two topics are related, and have a significant effect on John McCain's campaign.

(1) Let's take Sarah Palin first. She graduated (as Sarah Heath) from the University of Idaho with a B.S. in Journalism a little more than 20 years ago. Those of you who know me also know that I taught at UI from 1970 to 2002, but, no, I didn't know her. Most of that time I was deaning on the graduate level, and she wasn't a student in the few undergraduate courses I asked to teach.

Palin is conservative in most areas, including economics, religion, and gun rights. She will be an asset to the Republican ticket in her appeal to any still-disgruntled Hillary supporters. Whether she will actually win any of them over is to be determined. Like Joe Biden with Delaware, she does not add her home state to her party's electoral votes, since both Delaware and Alaska were expected to go Democratic and Republican respectively anyway.

Republican advisors to McCain must have sized up Hillary's supporters as being very vulnerable to desert the Democratic party despite Obama's courting of them. On that basis, they seem to have decided to do everything possible to convince disaffected HRC supporters to cross over on November 4 to vote for a woman as vice president. And that tactic may work to some extent.

But here's the big question, and it's one the Democrats may have to imply rather than ask directly, depending on how nasty or nice the rest of the campaign gets. Given McCain's increasing emotional and mental debilities, is she ready to become president at a moment's notice? "At 3 a.m.?" as Hillary might ask.

And, yes, I said "debilities." Perhaps he will shed that image at the Republican convention, but right now he fluctuates between appearing almost on top of whatever he's talking about, and appearing borderline bewildered. He is a poor public speaker, so I'm really interested to see how he does with his acceptance speech. His impulsiveness behind the scenes is now pretty well publicized.

On balance, as a female and a conservative, Sarah Palin probably helps the Republican ticket marinally by securing its base a bit more and potentially gaining some women's votes. Younger than Obama, and with McCain's age an issue, however, Palin does not seem to help it in that area, especially given her own lack of governmental experience. I don't know what kind of speaker she is, but the one debate between her and Joe Biden should be fun to watch, the young conservative and the old moderate.

(2) Personal income is a major issue. Heck, the economy is a major issue. Only in part because of the expiration of the stimulus checks, personal income fell in July by the biggest drop in three years, after moving up strongly during the time that the stimulus checks were distributed. It appears (according to AP and CNN reports) that much of the additional income from the stimulus went to pay for gas and food, the two major items whose costs increased greatly during the last year (from Mark Vitner, senior economst at Wachovia).

And now how the two topics in this post are actually related: I think John McCain did well NOT to choose Mitt Romney (for all the reasons I've discussed in previous posts), whose alleged economic savvy would have helped McCain in that area. The economy is in much deeper trouble than the administration, or Republicans in general, are willing to admit, and Barack Obama has the golden opportunity to tap into that unrest among millions of Americans. Whether he will succeed is another matter. Three major battleground states--Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan--will be reflecting the economic problems in the country. Will their voters reflect their unhappiness with eight years of Republican economic mismanagement? Although Obama's speech last night I thought was masterful in its balance of attacks on Republican policies and its proposals of positive change for middle- and lower-economic-class Americans, I am still concerned about latent racism among some number of the electorate. Pennsylvania has already shown some of that latent racism in the exit polls during the Democratic primary; I saw Ohio's sometimes-NOT-so-latent racism when I lived there while in graduate school in the 1960s. Have Ohio's attitudes changed in forty years? I hope so.

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