If they weren’t Republicans, you could almost feel sorry for them. Inside the GOP convention hall — the ultimate dittohead echo chamber — party faithful in St. Paul seem to be blissfully unaware that a concensus is forming that Sarah Palin, John McCain’s choice for vice president, is irreparably flawed.
To gauge the level of panic in the McCain campaign, note that the news of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy was timed to hit the airwaves just as Hurricane Gustav was making landfall near New Orleans.
But the real scandal here isn’t Palin’s thin resume, her ornamental status as what a commenter here described as McCain’s “trophy VP,” the ethics investigation into her personnel practices as governor, her past membership in the Alaska Independence Party, which treasonously promoted secession from the Union, or even the pregnancy of her 16 year old daughter despite Palin’s fervent, if fantastical, belief that abstinence is the only acceptable form of birth control.

The real scandal here is John McCain’s colossally bad judgment in what is universally regarded as any presidential nominee’s most important decision. It borders on an act of criminal negligence for a man who would be the oldest-ever first-term president to nominate as vice president someone as inexperienced as Sarah Palin, a former sports reporter and beauty queen with no foreign-relations experience — who just months ago admitted she had no idea what a vice president did every day.

Choosing Palin reveals that, despite his slogan of “country first,” politics trumps everything with McCain, including the security of the United States. It ought to be a career-killing moment, in the way that former Sen. George Allen’s revelatory use of the racial slur “macaca” ended his presidential ambitions.

First of all, it appears that McCain resisted choosing Palin. Reports have it that late last week McCain had narrowed his short list to two pro-choicers, Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge. Unfortunately for McCain, say the reports, neither of those men was on the short list of his campaign managers, Rick Davis and the Karl Rove acolyte, Steve Schmidt.

What is known is that the McCain campaign was in turmoil, that the candidate was at loggerheads with his staff, that Rove interferred in the decision-making process, and that in the end, McCain lost, and Palin was chosen.

The fact that McCain bowed to the demands of his underlings doesn’t just look weak, it is weak.

Worse still, even if Palin had turned out to be as good as she looks, she was undoubtedly the wrong choice. While McCain would lose support among his base with Lieberman or Ridge on the ticket, he’d at least have a shot at picking up votes among moderate independents, which is a far more plentiful demo than the Christian nationalists who favor Palin.

With Palin, who believes in creationism and holds other anti-science views, on the ticket, McCain has no shot with educated voters.

But even if Palin had been the candidate’s first choice, her rushed, inept vetting amounts to political malpractice:

People familiar with the process said Ms. Palin had responded to a standard form with more than 70 questions. Although The Washington Post quoted advisers to Mr. McCain on Sunday as saying Ms. Palin had been subjected to an F.B.I. background check, an F.B.I. official said Monday the bureau did not vet potential candidates and had not known of her selection until it was made public…

“They didn’t speak to anyone in the Legislature, they didn’t speak to anyone in the business community,” said Lyda Green, the State Senate president, who lives in Wasilla, where Ms. Palin served as mayor…

“I started calling around and asking, and I have not been able to find one person that was called,” [said Representative Gail Phillips, a Republican and former speaker of the State House]. “I called 30 to 40 people, political leaders, business leaders, community leaders. Not one of them had heard. Alaska is a very small community, we know people all over, but I haven’t found anybody who was asked anything.”

The current mayor of Wasilla, Dianne M. Keller, said she had not heard of any efforts to look into Ms. Palin’s background. And Randy Ruedrich, the state Republican Party chairman, said he knew nothing of any vetting that had been conducted.

State Senator Hollis French, a Democrat who is directing the ethics investigation, said that no one asked him about the allegations. “I heard not a word, not a single contact,” he said.

If McCain’s staff forced Palin on him, and subsequently failed to vet her, which appears to be the case, heads should roll — because Palin is being vetted now in a way that could prove deadly to the campaign. Reporters are swarming all over Alaska, and revelations are coming out in slow but steady drips, which almost invariably leads to political death by a thousand cuts.

For example, Republican talking points insist that Palin has more executive experience that senators Obama, Biden or McCain because she was a mayor and a governor — no matter that she was mayor of a village of 7,000 and governor of the 47th largest state. But what sort of executive was she? The reviews of her performance as mayor are bad:

“Four months of turmoil have followed in which almost every move by Palin has been questioned, from firing the museum director to hiring a deputy administrator at a cost of $50,000 a year to a short-lived proposal to move the city’s historic buildings from downtown,” the Associated Press reported in a Feb. 11, 1997 dispatch. “Critics argue the decisions are politically motivated.”

Wasilla’s former police chief, Irl Stambaugh, sued Palin that year for alleged contract violation, wrongful termination and gender discrimination. The police chief claimed Palin fired him for being disloyal.

Palin also terminated the city’s librarian, a move that pit Palin against angry Wasilla residents who launched a campaign to oust her from office. The recall election, however, never got off the ground. And a federal judge rejected the lawsuit the police chief’s lawsuit.

Just as importantly, what does it say about Palin’s judgment that she accepted their offer knowing her pregnant teen-aged daughter would be put under scrutiny in the national spotlight that might well scar her for life?

If Palin was vetted, how did escape the Republican operatives’ analysis that their vice presidential nominee’s daughter would likely become the most famous unwed pregnant teenager since Jamie Lynn Spears? Now that Bristol Palin has already made her first appearance on the cover of the gossip glossies, these same operatives insist that unplanned pregnancies are just something that happen in families — ignoring the fact that this assertion puts the lie to a fantasy cherished in their party, and advocated by Bristol’s mother — that “abstinence only” works. Bristol Palin is now the poster child for the failure of that theory.

How panicked were the operatives at the top of the McCain team? Note the timing of the release of the news about Bristol’s pregnancy. With no good options for burying the story, they released it timed to hit the airwaves just as Hurricane Gustav was making landfall near New Orleans.

Early on, Trish predicted that Palin would not be on the ticket come November, as did my friend Roz. Now even our betters are discussing it. But even if Palin decides, just a wee bit too late, that it’s in her family’s best interest for her to stay in Alaska, it’s unlikely McCain will be allowed to pick either Lieberman or Ridge. (It will probably be a troglodyte like Mike Huckabee.)

By the time McCain is making his second choice, however, it’s likely rank and file Republicans will be wishing they could replace both their party’s nominees.