The GOP October Surprise?

[Ender]

The October Surprise

In an election campaign notable for its surprises, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice- presidential candidate, may be about to spring a new one — the wedding of her pregnant teenage daughter to her ice-hockey-playing fiancé before the November 4 election.

Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. “It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”

There is already some urgency to the wedding as Bristol, who is six months pregnant, may not want to walk down the aisle too close to her date of delivery. She turns 18 on October 18, a respectable age for a bride — and the same age as Barack Obama’s pregnant mother when she married his Kenyan father. The Democrat has already declared Bristol’s private life off-limits as far as his campaign is concerned.

The selection of Palin, 44, the moose-hunting governor of Alaska, as his running mate was one of McCain’s biggest gambles. It paid off handsomely at first, but she could benefit from a fresh injection of homespun authenticity, the hallmark of her style, provided by her daughter’s wedding after appearing out of depth away from her home state.

David Letterman, the late-night television chat show host, joked that Palin’s meetings with world leaders at the United Nations in New York looked like “take your daughter to work day”.

In a series of heavily criticised interviews with Katie Couric of CBS News, she fumbled her points about Alaska’s proximity to Russia and sounded like an over-crammed, under-informed student. Palin was stumped when Couric asked her to provide examples of McCain’s proposals for reforming the banking industry. “I’ll try to find some and I’ll bring them to you,” she said eventually. Republicans are quailing in advance of one of her biggest tests of the election, her televised debate with Joe Biden, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, on Thursday in St Louis, Missouri.

The conservative commentator Kathleen Parker, an early admirer, shocked McCain supporters late last week by calling on Palin to withdraw. “My cringe reflex is exhausted,” she wrote in National Review Online, a conservative journal. “Palin’s recent interviews . . . all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out of Her League.”

Parker advised Palin to “save McCain, her party and the country she loves” by announcing that she wanted to spend more time with Trig, her five-month-old Down’s syndrome baby: “No one would criticise a mother who puts her family first.”

The Republicans’ Palin “bounce” ended last week as concern for the plunging economy mounted. Obama ended the week four points ahead of McCain on 48% to 44% in the RealClearPolitics poll of polls. A Rasmussen survey showed that McCain’s lead among white women voters slipped to two points, as opposed to 14 points for George W Bush in 2004.

However, Palin has a remarkable ability to galvanise the evangelical voters and social conservatives who form the Republican base. The party boasted last week that it will probably surpass its fundraising goal of $100m for September and October. Much of it is because of the grassroots enthusiasm for Palin, boosted by her decision to have Trig and to support her pregnant daughter.

McCain is expected to have a front-row seat at Bristol’s wedding and to benefit from the outpouring of goodwill that it could bring. “What’s the downside?” a source inside the McCain campaign said. “It would be wonderful. I don’t know that there has ever been a pre-election wedding before.”

When McCain picked Palin as his running mate, Bristol’s pregnancy was regarded as a potential liability with voters. The idea was to keep her condition quiet initially. However, rumours quickly surfaced that Trig was Bristol’s son. News that Bristol was pregnant, making it a near-biological impossibility for her to be Trig’s mother, had to be rushed out.

Johnston was greeted with a handshake and friendly slap on the back by McCain in St Paul, Minnesota, and treated as a member of the family during the Republican national convention when he appeared on stage after Palin’s speech.

The ice-hockey player wrote on his MySpace page he was a “f****** redneck” and stated, “I don’t want kids.” But a McCain insider predicted he would marry Bristol whenever his future mother-in-law wanted. “It’s a shotgun wedding. She kills things,” the source joked.

The McCain campaign is divided over how to handle Palin’s appearances, which have been so limited and over-rehearsed that last week Campbell Brown, a CNN anchor, accused it of sexism. “Stop treating Sarah Palin like she is a delicate flower who will wilt at any moment,” she said. “If she were a man, would we be putting up with this? . . . Would she be coddled this way, cloistered this way? I don’t think so.”

Inside McCain’s camp, aides are arguing over the benefits of “letting Sarah be Sarah”. Some officials believe her appeal to voters is such that it would be worth risking a few gaffes in exchange for letting her personality shine through.

The question will assume particular importance when she faces Biden, 65, in debate. The chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee has already come up with a multitude of gaffes, from asking a wheelchair-bound man to stand up at one of his rallies to admitting that Hillary Clinton “might have been a better pick” for vice-president, without any seeming ill-effect.

McCain officials believe that Palin’s underdog status gives her a chance to shine. “Joe Biden is going to have to destroy her for it to be perceived as a victory for him,” said an aide.

The scary thing is, I can see that working. A huge celebrity wedding would easily grab all kinds of positive press for them, Obama's own policies prevent them from going after the family, and the press will go after the huge ratings rather then calling it out.

[MKSheppard]

Silly ender. The october surprise is an israeli airstrike on iran.

Get your wordage right!

*collects check from Jews*

[Tribun]

If they have to resort to this, they admit that they are indeed in deep trouble.

[Pablo Sanchez]

If they have to resort to this, they admit that they are indeed in deep trouble.

At the same time, stupid people love a celebrity wedding. If they prevented backlash over the fact that it is an obvious shotgun wedding with a strong political motivation, and the appearance of political involvement in the wedding itself (imagine the stories if it turned out that Rick Davis coordinated the wedding or something of the like), I can see a lot of stone-cold retarded Americans voting for McCain-Palin because "that thar hitchin' was sum good Tee-Vee".

[Covenant]

Those types are already voting republican. The question is how many independants will be swayed to the right by a teenage shotgun wedding with the bride already pregnant.

[Redleader34]

Still saying that Shep is correct here, if that happens, all bets are off though.

[Solauren]

I believe I called this in one of the early Pallin threads

[Tanasinn]

I don't believe a stupid hick marrying a stupid hick is going to draw in any new voters, frankly.

[Tribun]

I don't believe a stupid hick marrying a stupid hick is going to draw in any new voters, frankly.

Never underestimate the stupidity of people.

[The Kernel]

Does every thread about the election have to contain post after post of people harping in on the stupidity of the American electorate? It's getting really old.

[Jim Raynor]

It's true though.

[Duckie]

This isn't so much an October Surprise as an October Expected Certainty.

[Durandal]

Everyone knows how rednecks will vote, so getting them excited with a shotgun wedding is no big deal. But undecided voters don't historically break for someone because of social issues, so I doubt there'd be much impact on them. If anything, it would throw Palin's abortion stance back into the national spotlight along with McCain's, which would just hurt the ticket among women.

And I honestly just can't see independent voters positively reacting to that kind of personal drama being aired on national television from a vice presidential candidate. People are hurting from rising healthcare costs, energy costs, and they're starting to worry about their retirement funds' values. They want solutions, not spectacles.

In short, it's the economy, stupid.

[Adrian Laguna]

It's true though.

The problem is that even if it's true, repeating it doesn't really promote intelligent discussion, and indeed may perhaps serve to stifle discussion. It would be better to break down how any particular action undertaken by a campaign will affect people demographically, rather than just go, "lol, 'mericans r stoopid". Like this:

The educated democrat voting upper-middle and upper classes will not be be affected, similarly the rich off their asses business interests will also not be affected. Dumb red necks were voting for Palin anyway, as were the religious. Blue collar workers either go for Obama's protectionism, or McCain-Palin's social conservatism, those undecided but leaning toward social conservatism will likely be more encouraged to vote for the Republican ticket. The middle-class should be fairly similar. A group among most demographics will likely go "aww, how cute" and be more likely to vote for Republican, but I think in the end this marriage is not by itself going to change any voter's minds, but rather function as part of a larger strategy of trying to steal the spotlight from Obama and avoiding issues discussions like the plague.

[RedImperator]

It's true though.

It's also repeated over, and over, and over, and over, often by people who otherwise have nothing to contribute. "LOL Murricans r stoopid!" isn't an analysis unless you can show how it will effect the election, and it's not an original observation unless there's some kind of new data to back it up. Otherwise, it's just spam.

[Edi]

It's true though.

It's also repeated over, and over, and over, and over, often by people who otherwise have nothing to contribute. "LOL Murricans r stoopid!" isn't an analysis unless you can show how it will effect the election, and it's not an original observation unless there's some kind of new data to back it up. Otherwise, it's just spam.

I'd like to second this. I have been guilty of making that statement as well, but usually I've added some commentary on how and why in that particular case. However, many of the people who jump on that bandwagon with the one-liners here actually have a vastly overinflated sense of their own intelligence and capabilities, which isn't really going to endear them to the others forced to put up with those one-liners.

[Gerald Tarrant]

Everyone knows how rednecks will vote, so getting them excited with a shotgun wedding is no big deal. But undecided voters don't historically break for someone because of social issues, so I doubt there'd be much impact on them. If anything, it would throw Palin's abortion stance back into the national spotlight along with McCain's, which would just hurt the ticket among women.

And I honestly just can't see independent voters positively reacting to that kind of personal drama being aired on national television from a vice presidential candidate. People are hurting from rising healthcare costs, energy costs, and they're starting to worry about their retirement funds' values. They want solutions, not spectacles.

In short, it's the economy, stupid.

Completely agree with the above. Governor Palin's principle contribution to the campaign 'til now has been to energize the Republican base, who had been making noises about sitting this one out.

To emphasize this

If anything, it would throw Palin's abortion stance back into the national spotlight along with McCain's, which would just hurt the ticket among women.

More highschool students would get to live Bristol's life if Governor Palin got her pro-life choices enacted as policy. This kind of thing would probably turn off most independents who make an issue of it, by starkly highlighting the consequences of her policy (something that many parents may not have experience with).

[Durandal]

Not only that, but it gets the yuppie mother crowd (who traditionally scare very easily and are a reliable voting bloc for Republicans) thinking, "Jesus, do I want my daughter getting pregnant and married at 18 because she had sex?"

[apocolypse]

I honestly think (or maybe I'd like to think) that the net effect of this will be minimal. The public is already getting fairly polarized, and those that are already voting either way won't be shifting because of Palin's daughter getting married. And the undecided/independents aren't likely to shift their preliminary thoughts based on this either imho. I could actually see it backfiring a bit, at least with some. Some last minute wedding right before the election is going to look rather odd. The same as McCain's last minute debate withdrawal and subsequent attendance didn't go unnoticed either.

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

I could actually see it backfiring on the McCain campaign. Even if Obama declared attacks on Bristol Palin off-limits, he could still condemn the Republicans for exploiting her condition for political gain and trying to distract the country from the issues. If people could see through McCain's "let's suspend the campaign and call off the debate!" gimmick, this could easily be spun as a crass, last-ditch attempt to get attention by a campaign that has nothing else going for them.

[RedImperator]

I don't think this is going to count for dick. Maybe it'll help restore Sarah Palin's favorables a few points--she could use some, seeing as she's standing at -10 right now--but it's not going to lock up the election cycle for a week, and it could blow up in their faces if they misplay it. How about a lavish wedding for Bristol Palin while the rest of the country is worried about losing their jobs?

[Durandal]

McCain can't afford to bring the campaigning to a halt for a week. That would just be fucking dumb. Obama is the one with the lead, and a week-long timeout just lets him sit pretty. If the only thing the country sees from the McCain campaign for an entire week less than 40 days before election day is a glorified redneck wedding, then he's pretty much fucked.

And Obama can use it as an opportunity for some stealth campaigning. He can hold town halls, away from TV cameras (which I guess would be focused on Bristol's wedding) and be a little more candid, out of the national spotlight. It lets him speak directly to voters with less risk if he makes a gaffe. And whenever someone asks him about Bristol's wedding, he simply says, "I'm happy that Bristol's child will grow up with a mother and a father, a blessing I never had. But her wedding has nothing to do with the millions of children who are growing up without fathers, without health insurance and without a good education."

[Bob the Gunslinger]

While I'm sure that the Palin wedding will take place late in October, I'm willing to bet that the Republicans have more up their sleeve. They might have some dirt on Obama that they haven't released yet, but more than likely they have something going on with Iran, too. The current administration will probably release some wild-eyed intelligence report of Iran making suitcase nukes or invading Israel or something else to terrify the populace; McCain's two (supposed) advantages over Obama are his foreign policy experience and his aggressiveness, and I'm sure that the republicans will find some sort of menace to trump up to scare Americans into voting for Big Mean Grampy McSame to same them.

Also, I expect gas prices to continue to drop right up to November 5th.

[General Zod]

While I'm sure that the Palin wedding will take place late in October, I'm willing to bet that the Republicans have more up their sleeve. They might have some dirt on Obama that they haven't released yet, but more than likely they have something going on with Iran, too.

If they had any serious dirt at all on Obama, they would have dropped the ball by now. Frankly I'd say the worst they had to dish out was during the primaries with the "Secret gay lover who he snorted coke with in a limo" scandal, which turned out to be a complete and total fabrication.

[Yogi]

Does every thread about the election have to contain post after post of people harping in on the stupidity of the American electorate? It's getting really old.

We'll stop talking about it as soon as people stop forgetting about it.

Not you specifically, but these comments always come in the context of.

A: That's so stupid, no one could possibly fall for it!
B: Oh yes they can! Remember how stupid Americans are?

B is, of course, correct.