Sarah Palin represents John McCain's new focus on reform

Like Hillary Clinton before him, McCain decides the experience argument is not the way to beat Obama. Palin helps personify his new message.

By Robin Abcarian and Peter Wallsten, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
September 1, 2008

ST. PAUL, MINN. -- With his selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain is giving his campaign a political makeover: Rather than selling himself as a war hero with national security credentials, he is donning the mantle of the reformer.

The new approach borrows a page from the playbook of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who late in the Democratic primary campaign framed herself as a hero of the struggling middle class.

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McCain, like the New York senator, has apparently decided that being the candidate of experience is not the formula for beating Barack Obama.

The 44-year-old Palin, with her union-member husband, her staunch conservatism on social issues and her limited foreign policy resume, personifies the new McCain theme.

Republicans conceded Sunday that her presence on the ticket undercuts McCain's argument that Democratic rival Obama lacks the experience to lead in a time of war.

But the surprising pick reflects an acknowledgment by McCain that the old strategy needed fixing at a time when economic woes have overshadowed the foreign policy issues that were once seen as the Arizona senator's greatest strength.

"It's a one-two punch," said John Hinderaker, who helps run Power Line, a popular conservative blog.

Hinderaker said he was initially dismayed, thinking that Palin would diminish McCain's experience argument, but said he had begun to feel that she could help the presumptive Republican nominee.

"You have to have the base turning out and motivated," he said, but noted that Palin would also attract blue-collar voters because of her middle-class roots and taste for hunting and fishing.

Many GOP strategists and voters said they were still digesting Palin's selection and what it meant for McCain's chances. New surveys conducted since Friday's announcement were inconclusive about whether she would have a meaningful effect on the vote.

Campaign officials said Palin could help them woo a constituency that was important to Clinton and remains skeptical of Obama -- so-called hockey moms and other working-class voters. And she has already proved effective in energizing evangelical leaders, some of whom had been threatening to withhold support from McCain.

The Palin announcement was a shock to many Republicans, who had expected McCain, a 72-year-old cancer survivor, to choose someone who complemented his strengths and could easily assume the presidency should something happen to him.

But as McCain and Palin wrapped up their first weekend as a team, it was clear the campaign had changed focus. Palin represents the culmination of a weeks-long search for the best way to blunt Obama's themes of hope and change.

And Palin has quickly been thrust from political obscurity into a starring role.

At the Minnesota State Fair, a hub of political culture in this battleground state, the McCain campaign booth was adorned with a large color portrait of the Alaska governor. There was no comparable McCain photo in sight.

And, while top Republicans such as President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney canceled their scheduled appearances tonight at the Republican National Convention, Palin was dispatched to Minnesota at the last minute to rally the party. The symbolism was clear: Palin, a national newcomer, was now a standard-bearer for the party.

"They had to pivot away from experience," said Republican consultant John Weaver, a former McCain advisor. "In a change election, they have to give that up now."

As recently as Wednesday, in the midst of the Democratic National Convention, a McCain television ad dismissed Obama as "dangerously unprepared to be president." But by this weekend, McCain senior advisor Charles Black was downplaying the idea that experience had ever been a central McCain theme. "We never used experience as the big argument," he said.

And Sunday in St. Paul, the site of this week's Republican National Convention, House GOP leader John A. Boehner dismissed the importance of experience.

"We've all started new jobs from time to time in our career," he said. "And most of you can remember the first day that you spent on almost every one of those new jobs. Because when you got it, you thought, 'Oh my God, how am I going to do this?'

"Nobody's qualified on the first day," he continued. "I don't care whether it's Barack Obama or whether it's John McCain sitting in the White House."

McCain, despite more than a year of casting himself as the best-prepared to be commander in chief, used a Fox News interview to describe the nationally unknown Palin as his "soul mate" for her work as a reformer in Alaska.

"In all due respect to my friends [who think] that she has never been on some of the inside-the-Beltway activities, I say thank God," McCain said.

The McCain shift mirrors Clinton's primary campaign tactics when, trailing Obama, she pushed hard to win support from white middle-class voters with whom Obama failed to connect. The change was not enough to help Clinton overcome Obama's advantages, such as his dominance among African American voters excited about his historic candidacy.

McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds insisted Sunday that McCain's themes had been consistent for months, using the catchphrase "reform, prosperity and peace" to describe the agenda adopted by the GOP since it became clear Obama would be the Democratic nominee.

And Bounds said that experience remained an important issue, noting that Clinton's attempts to exploit it failed only in the context of a Democratic primary decided by liberal voters. "Hillary Clinton's arguments . . . were not illegitimate, ill-founded or ineffective," he said. "It was just a different election."

At the Minnesota fair, many said they were impressed by Palin's unusual credentials, but interviews with a number of voters showed it remained uncertain whether her appeal would translate into support for the Republican ticket.

Tamar Fenton, 45, of suburban Minneapolis, said she admired Palin, a mother of five, and was not bothered by the governor's relative lack of experience. "If you can go up against a teenaged kid," said Fenton, "you could go up against a world leader."

Nevertheless, Fenton said, she could not support a candidate such as Palin who opposes abortion rights and gun control.

Times staff writers Bob Drogin, James Hohmann and Maeve Reston contributed to this report.

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