FRANK RICH

Sarah Palin’s comeback at the vice presidential debate on October 2 was a turning point in the campaign. But if she “won,” as her indulgent partisans and press claque would have it, the loser was not Joe Biden. It was her running mate. With only a few weeks to go, the 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race - about “the future,” as Palin kept saying during the debate - and the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.
To understand the meaning of Palin’s “victory,” it must be seen in the context of two ominous developments that directly preceded it. Just hours before the debate began, the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan. That state is ground zero for the collapsed Main Street economy and for so-called Reagan Democrats, those white working-class voters who keep being told by the right that Barack Obama is a Muslim who was friendly with bomb-throwing radicals during his childhood in the late 1960s.
McCain surrendered Michigan despite having outspent his opponent on television advertising and despite Obama’s twin local handicaps, an unpopular Democratic governor and a felonious, now former, black Democratic Detroit mayor. If McCain can’t make it there, can he make it anywhere in the old manufacturing states?
Not without an economic message. Mc- Cain’s most persistent attempt, his selfrighteous crusade against Congressional earmark requests in budget bills, collapsed with his poll numbers. Next to a $700 billion bailout package, his incessant promise to eliminate all Washington special-project spending - by comparison, a puny grand total of $16.5 billion in the 2008 federal budget - doesn’t make much of an impact. Nor can McCain reconcile his I-will-vetogovernment- waste mantra with his support, however tardy, of the recent bailout bill. That bill’s $150 billion in fresh dedicated spending includes a dubious project inserted by Congressman Don Young, an Alaskan Republican no less.
The second bit of predebate news, not covered by most of the media, involved the still-unanswered questions about Mc- Cain’s health. Back in May, the McCain campaign allowed a select group of 20 reporters to spend a mere three hours examining (but not photocopying) 1,173 pages of the candidate’s health records. Conspicuously uninvited was Lawrence Altman, a doctor who covers medicine for The New York Times.
There was, however, at least one doctor-journalist among those 20 reporters in May, the CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta. At the time, Gupta told Katie Couric on CBS that the medical records were “pretty comprehensive” and wrote on his CNN blog that he was “pretty convinced there was no ‘smoking gun’ about the senator’s health.” (Physical health, that is; Gupta wrote there was hardly any information on McCain’s mental health.)
That was then. Now McCain is looking increasingly shaky, whether he’s repeating a joke about not being “Miss Congeniality” twice in the same debate or speaking from notecards even when reciting a line for (literally) the 17th time (“The fundamentals of our economy are strong”) or repeatedly confusing proper nouns that begin with S (Sunni, Shia, Sudan, Somalia, Spain). McCain’s “dismaying temperament,” as the conservative columnist George Will labeled it, only heightens the concerns. His madcap mission into Washington during the bailout crisis seemed crazed. His seething, hostile debate countenance - a replay of Al Gore’s sarcastic sighing in 2000 - didn’t make the deferential Obama look weak (as many Democrats feared) but elevated him into looking like the sole presidential grown-up.
Though CNN and MSNBC wouldn’t run a political ad with doctors questioning Mc- Cain’s medical status, Gupta revisited the issue in an interview published September 30 by the website Huffington Post. While maintaining a pretty upbeat take on the candidate’s health, the doctor-journalist told the reporter Sam Stein that he couldn’t vouch “by any means” for the completeness of the records the campaign showed him four months ago. “The pages weren’t numbered,” Gupta said, “so I had no way of knowing what was missing.” At least in Watergate we knew that the gap on Rose Mary Woods’s tape ran 18 and a half minutes.
It’s against this backdrop that Palin’s public pronouncements, culminating with her debate performance, have been so striking. The standard analysis has it that she’s either speaking utter ignorant gibberish (as in her interviews with Katie Couric of CBS News) or reciting highly polished, campaign-written sound bites that she’s memorized (as at the convention and the debate). But there’s a steady unnerving undertone to Palin’s utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right Republican base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder.
This was first apparent when Palin extolled a “small town” vice president as a hero in her convention speech - and cited not one of the many Republican vice presidents who fit that profile but, bizarrely, Harry Truman, a Democrat who succeeded a president who died in office. A few weeks later came Charlie Gibson’s question on ABC News about whether she thought she was “experienced enough” and “ready” when McCain invited her to join his ticket. Palin replied that she didn’t “hesitate” and didn’t “even blink” - a response that seemed jarring for its lack of any human modesty, even false modesty.
In the last of her Couric interview installments, Palin was asked which vice president had most impressed her, and after paying tribute to Geraldine Ferraro, she chose “George Bush Sr.” Her criterion: she most admires vice presidents “who have gone on to the presidency.”
At the debate, she offered a discordant contrast to Biden when asked by Gwen Ifill how they would each govern “if the worst happened” and the president died in office. After Biden spoke of somber continuity, Palin was weirdly upbeat, eager to say that as a “maverick” she’d go her own way.
But the debate’s most telling passage arrived when Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Palin’s perky response - she immediately started selling McCain as a “consummate maverick” again - was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis’s notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being “raped and murdered.” If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.
After the debate, Republicans who had become skeptical of Palin rushed back into supportive roles. They know her relentless ambition is the only hope for saving a ticket headed by a warrior who is out of fuel and out of ideas. So what if she is preposterously unprepared to run the country in the midst of its greatest economic crisis in 70 years- She looks and sounds like a winner.
You can understand why they believe that. She exudes more masculinity than anyone else at the top of her party. McCain and his surrogates are forever blaming their travails on others, wailing about supposed sexist and journalistic biases around the clock. McCain even canceled an interview with the veteran talk show host Larry King in a fit of pique at a CNN anchor, Campbell Brown.
We are not a nation of whiners, as the former McCain adviser Phil Gramm would have it, but the Republicans are now the party of whiners. That rebranding became official when Republican House leaders moaned that a routine partisan speech by Speaker Nancy Pelosi had turned their members against the bailout bill. As the stock market fell nearly 778 points, Barney Frank taunted his Republican peers with pitch-perfect mockery: “Somebody hurt my feelings, so I will punish the country!”
This is the same Democrat who had been slurred as “Barney Fag” in the mid-1990s by Dick Armey, a House leader of the government-bashing Gingrich revolution that helped lower us into this debacle.
Now Frank was ridiculing the House Republicans as a bunch of sulking teenage girls. His wisecrack stung - and stuck.
Palin is an antidote to the whiny Republican image that Frank pointed out. Alaska’s self-styled embodiment of the average guy is not a sulker, but a pistolpacking fighter. That’s why she draws the crowds and (as she puts it) “energy” that otherwise elude the angry McCain. But she is still the candidate for vice president, not president. Americans do not vote for vice president.
So how can a desperate Republican Party save itself- As McCain continues to fade into incoherence and irrelevance, the last hope is that he’ll come up with some new game-changing stunt to match his initial pick of Palin or his ill-fated campaign “suspension.” Until the vice presidential debate, more than a few Republicans were fantasizing that his final ploy would be to dump Palin so she can “spend more time” with her ever-growing family. But the debate reminded Republicans once again that it’s Palin, not McCain, who is their last hope for victory.
You have to wonder how long it will be before they plead with him to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.