Background: Presidential running mates are consistently chosen for one of two reasons: to either help carry a particular region or state in an election or to help balance a presidential candidate's resume. This year John McCain chose Alaska governor Sarah Palin for the former reason, Barack Obama chose Joe Biden for the latter.
The Issue: In this particular election season, the vice-presidential nominees have played a surprisingly large roll in both guiding their respective campaigns and influencing the electorate. Barack Obama chose to ignore the cries from within his own party to chose Hillary Clinton as his running mate and ran the risk of alienating the 17 million people who voted for her during the primary for Joe Biden, the foreign relations veteran.
Obama's decision left McCain with a basic choice: play it safe with Mitt Romney or take a risk that could give him a solid chance at winning the election. McCain decided to take a risk on Sarah Palin. This was cleary a poor decision. Initially, before the public understood what this choice truly meant, she boosted McCain's showing amongst conservative Republicans and evangelicals. However Palin caused two huge problems. Firstly, she alienated many of the conservative Democrats and independents that would have otherwise voted for (or at least considered voting for) McCain. Because of this issue, Gov. Palin has destroyed McCain's electoral map. Instead of choosing Romney (who could have kept parts of New England and Michigan in play) Palin wiped these regions off the map and added no new states.
The second, and arguably most important, way in which Sarah Palin has set the McCain camp behind is her inexperience in every facet of national politics and policy. Her claim to fame is energy, yet she offers no solutions for rising prices or alternative energies short of "drill baby, drill". Her record on foreign policies is empty and she has a basic understand of economics at best. Over half of Americans believe that she is unqualified for the office of the presidency and many see this as evidence of McCain's poor judgement (including high ranking conservatives and GOP members such as Colin Powell and David Brooks).
Simply put, Sarah Palin does not help McCain in any legitimate way. Her greatest positive effect on the McCain campaign is energizing the far right; however these people were already going to vote for McCain. Nobody saw Alabama or Mississippi going to the Obama camp. But with Romney on the ticket, Nevada, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Colorado would be much closer than they are.
What to do: Too late McCain. Change the subject to the economy if you can, however the problem is that you are already only on defense in the electoral college and Sarah Palin is not going to help you pick any new states up.
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