Watching Washington

Hey McCain And Obama: Who's Your Paulson?

Here's a quick question: Who were President George W. Bush's first two secretaries of the Treasury?

If no names come to mind — or if you're surprised to hear there were two before Henry Paulson — you are in good company. Until Paulson left Goldman Sachs in June 2006 to become Bush's third try at Treasury, the position commanded far less notice than it does today. The big newsmakers in the first seven years of the Bush Cabinet were of course the secretaries of State and Defense and the attorneys general.

All that changed when the mortgage and credit crisis deepened over the past year and Paulson emerged as the man of the hour. His power seems to have grown with every month and every downturn in the market. When a deteriorating situation became a full-scale meltdown, Paulson and his staff brought forth the massive $700 billion plan Congress is now expected to adopt (with alterations of its own) this week.

So for the Bush regime and its economic program at this crucial moment, the point man, the triggerman and the main man is Hank. The president has deferred to him in the present moment, and the power he would wield under the terms of the new bailout agreement would be unprecedented in American economics. Newsweek put him on its cover with just two words: KING HENRY.

An exaggeration? Not in the financial world. It is stunning to realize how much authority Paulson has had to choose winners and losers in recent weeks and months, and truly breathtaking to contemplate the potential for that power's expansion.

Sure, there is to be a bipartisan oversight board. But we've seen this movie. And that's why the centralizing of authority remains a salient point of attack for critics on the right and the left (Mr. Gingrich, meet Mr. Nader). Yet the plenipotentiary Treasury secretary remains a key feature of the plan.

So if the Treasury secretary is to be the new czar, who will be the new Treasury secretary? Paulson serves a president who will leave office in less than four months. Unless the new president asks him to stay — as Warren Buffet and others have urged — Paulson will soon transfer his extraordinary new powers to a new pair of hands.

Whose hands will those be? Just one man will decide, and that man will be either John McCain or Barack Obama. So it would have made sense, in the first presidential debate, for moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS to ask these two men to reveal whom they had in mind for Treasury secretary. Why not tell the world just which wizard of Wall Street we can expect to see running the financial industry next?

Back when McCain and Obama were choosing their running mates, the broad public perked up and the media got a case of the vapors. Shouldn't the new czar of all sectors public and private be at least as important?

At the moment, everyone is guessing. We see the men and women the candidates have recruited as advisers, to be sure. We know that until he embarrassed his candidate, former Sen. Phil Gramm (now working for the Swiss investment bank UBS) was co-chairman of McCain's campaign. After he called the U.S. "a nation of whiners" suffering from "a mental recession," Gramm made himself scarce. But if McCain were to become president, Gramm might come out of hiding in a hurry.

Few may recall, but Gramm himself ran for president for a time in 1996, and his campaign chairman was none other than John McCain, who in the past has referred to Gramm as his "economic brain."

Other prospects include some of McCain's former rivals in the presidential hunt, such as former governor and venture capitalist Mitt Romney, and prominent backers from the executive boardroom, such as Carly Fiorina (late of Hewlett-Packard) or Meg Whitman (eBay).

Obama has not been seen as often in the company of blue chip business folk, with a few notable exceptions such as former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and Robert Rubin (the best of Bill Clinton's three Treasury secretaries and a Paulson predecessor as Goldman Sachs CEO). Neither is considered a likely pick for the rigorous new task at Treasury, although there has been talk of a return engagement for his immediate successor, Lawrence Summers, who had several stormy years as the president of Harvard University in the interim.

Another prospect often mentioned is Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Fed, who has been known to advise Obama. Steven Rattner, a onetime reporter for The New York Times who became an investment banker in the 1980s, is also regarded as a prospect.

Whoever gets the nod will need to balance the demands of the financial and political communities while also navigating the world of the media. It's quite a job description. Let's hope it gets some airtime in the "town hall" debate slated for Oct. 7.

And by the way, the first two Bush secretaries of the Treasury were Paul H. O'Neill and John W. Snow.

O'Neill left after two years very much at odds with his boss. Not only did he resist the tax-cutting at the heart of the Bush economic program, he sponsored a study that estimated the country would need a 66 percent increase in income taxes to meet all its obligations at home and abroad in coming decades. If that were not bad enough, O'Neill published a book (The Price of Loyalty) accusing the Bush administration of using the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to justify a pre-existing plan to invade Iraq.

Snow was not nearly so outspoken, and his 42 months on the job saw economic conditions improve dramatically. But Snow was not able to able to transfer the luster of the improved economy to his boss, who needed it badly. After ignoring broad hints from the White House for more than a year, he gave way to Paulson in June 2006.

Since then, Paulson has given the job unprecedented importance and visibility. His successor will have to live with both.

7:28 AM ET | 09-29-2008 | permalink

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Out With One Era Of Regulation And In With Another

The era of less government is over.

If that sentence sounds familiar, it should. Back in the mid-1990s, President Bill Clinton told the first Republican-majority Congress in 40 years that "The era of big government is over."

Republicans stood and cheered. So did some Democrats. Clinton was acknowledging a political reality. The party of government had been rebuked at the polls after just two years of controlling the presidency and both chambers of Congress. The party of the private sector and the free market taking the initiative in Washington.

Over the next decade, a deregulatory spirit generally held sway in Congress, going beyond an earlier push to get government out of the marketplace in the late 1970s and 1980s. Among its more notable achievements was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a monument to the regulatory spirit of the New Deal.

Glass-Steagall was intended to rein in speculation and restrict the activities of banks in the wake of the crash of 1929 and serial bank failures thereafter. Some of the law was repealed in 1980, allowing savings accounts to offer higher rates of interest, free from regulation by the Federal Reserve. Later in that decade, further deregulation of the savings and loan industry led to a massive meltdown and the biggest financial bailout by the federal government ever. Or at least up until then.

The larger repeal of Glass-Steagall, advertised once again as a way to free the market, was achieved in November 1999 in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. It dismantled those firewalls against investment abuses, regarding them as an outdated restraint on the competitiveness of U.S. financial institutions.

The full consequences of this hubris would not be apparent until this year, when they contributed to the metastasizing of bad mortgage debt through much of the nation's financial infrastructure. When Bear Stearns suddenly collapsed in March, the onset of nostalgia for Glass-Steagall began.

And since then, it has only grown worse. Much worse. Consolidation and collapse have taken all but two U.S. investment banks (Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs). The largest insurance operation in the world, AIG, is already essentially in government hands. So are the enormous mortgage backers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, those "government-sponsored enterprises" that are now part of the government.

The Bush administration has also dipped into a little-known, Depression-era fund so as to insure all money market accounts. And it has imposed at least a short-term ban on short selling in financial stocks (a move denounced by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan as "a terrible idea").

And all that is prelude to the Big One, the mother of all bailouts, expected to take shape in the next week and beyond. The federal government is going to rescue the mortgage market itself.

That's right. In this past week, as the stock market thrashed about and the credit market seized up, history turned a corner. And this time it did not even take an election to do it. Nor did it take a president.

This time, the man turning the page in the history books was a regulator.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson first signaled that the federal government was up to something big. Word leaked that Treasury and the Federal Reserve would back a bailout for the mortgage credit crisis along the lines of the Resolution Trust Corp., the government-sponsored solution to the collapse of the savings and loan industry at the end of the 1980s.

How big would the bailout be? In what must have been the shortest news conference of such consequence in history, Paulson told the world he was going to need "hundreds of billions" of dollars. Can anyone say, a trillion dollars?

So deep had been the sense of impending doom that the markets took the prospect of federal intervention as a shaft of light from the heavens. Paulson himself was a wizard of Wall Street before moving on to Washington, but still, here was a regulator talking about the biggest federal intervention in 75 years. And it made traders almost giddy with renewed optimism. The market went up more than 400 points on the rumor on Sept. 18 and nearly as much on the official news the next day.

Most investors were still far from whole, of course, looking back at the heights scaled in 2007. But compared with the dizzying drops they had seen, the latest trend in valuations was most welcome.

Will it still be so, after Congress has weighed in and free-market analysts have picked Paulson's prescription apart? Some of his proposals are going to bring the era of regulatory oversight back with a vengeance. Surely the defenders of laissez faire are not ready to surrender without a fight.

Still, the die appears to be cast. To quote the White House: "Our economy faces unprecedented challenges, so we are responding with unprecedented action."

Unprecedented? Not really. Just the passing of one era, and the coming of another.

5:02 PM ET | 09-19-2008 | permalink

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In Politics, It's Not Too Late To Enter The Game

Right now quite a few people are getting interested in baseball, Wall Street and the presidential election. Possibly in that order.

Of course, some people are interested in all three, and some are utterly preoccupied with one of these subjects all the time. Indeed, whichever of these pursuits you spend time on, you will find hardcore types who do little else.

They are the participants in The Conversation, the incessant buzz about The Game, The Market or The Race. Disparate as the subjects may be, the stare and the addiction and the rapid-fire jargon are much the same.

Of course, you have seen the baseball version. They have their own fantasy teams that occupy their working and evening hours. There's a well-worn baseball cap somewhere in the office, and a gleam in the eye this month that's not been seen since pitchers and catchers reported to training camp in February. The BlackBerry is programmed for 15-second-refresh on a team Web site, where you can see each pitch to each hitter located relative to a graphic strike zone.

And you thought they were checking their e-mail...

Then there's the Wall Street equivalent, watching multiple screens ablaze with market measures and the performance of individual stocks. When not absorbed in this green glow, this person is very likely listening to talking heads discuss market moves and stock plays and what's happening to bonds in Brazil. The e-mail is full of tips. There is an online trading account number somewhere.

When this manic personality moves into political mode, it's still deep in the data. They're all about precincts and polls and past percentages of vote by race, gender, education and income. There are Web worlds devoted to fundraising, ads and blogs. You can move from link to link for days without ever leaving cyberspace. You are the campaign and the campaign is the world.

No, these obsessives are not average or typical or, to be blunt, entirely normal. They are junkies: professionals, semipros, devoted amateurs and constant observer-commenters who pounce on every new nugget of information as though it were food. They live among charts and graphs to keep track of the charts and graphs.

Ultimately, in all three fields, it's all about projecting human behavior. The basic belief is that if you can get enough hard data on what people have done before, you can predict what they will do next. And maybe you can, although most efforts to do so go awry (or fall short of their desired effect).

What is distressing in the political realm is that the self-contained world of The Conversation becomes more the focus for candidates, campaigners and media than the larger realm of the electorate or its issues and concerns. Voters, after all, are many and mysterious, contradictory and hard to pin down.

This time of year, you see people following baseball who usually don't. In July, they didn't know the wonder of the Tampa Bay Rays or the woes of the Detroit Tigers. But in late September they'll look up to see who's in the playoffs or going to the World Series.

For the markets right now, the broadening of the audience is not so much seasonal as crisis-driven. You see people's nerves twitch when someone says Wall Street. Once upon a time they did not even open that envelope that comes in the mail from their company's 401(k) manager. Now they're calculating just what each 100 points on the plummeting Dow may mean to their retirement date.

As for politics, our interest is about a season's end and a crisis that may be just beginning. People who otherwise need a war or a recession or a sex scandal to watch Washington news will perk up as the presidential election season nears its end. And as they turn in on schedule, they are finding a presidential contest far more significant than they might have presumed.

Voters may come to this election disillusioned with recent events and recent politics, deeply suspicious about both parties and largely unpersuaded by the candidates at hand.

And latecomers matter when it comes to elections in a way they do not in the worlds of baseball and high finance. Those who come to baseball late in the season are merely spectators who have nothing to do with the outcome. In the market, the distracted small-time investor may wake up in time to send a sell order, but the larger forces will remain beyond his apprehension.

Only in politics does the verdict of those who just showed up at game's end really matter. In fact, those who are just tuning in often break decisively for one candidate and determine the winner.

7:29 AM ET | 09-16-2008 | permalink

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New Polls, New Race, New Questions

Whether you are watching the polls, the television or the Internet, you know John McCain's presidential campaign is riding a grand wave generated by his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate.

But where are we on the arc of the wave? Has it crested, or is it still building?

So dramatic has the reversal of momentum been since the first word of the Palin pick on Aug. 29 that it's hard to fix the full value of the turnaround.

This much is indisputable: McCain-Palin is a stronger ticket than any other McCain might have been contemplating. The governor of Alaska has touched the GOP passion nerve that McCain has long had trouble locating. Instead of telling pollsters they are less enthusiastic about voting than usual, Republicans are saying they are more so. That's good news not only for the presidential nominee but for all his party's candidates for elected office.

Just as important, and just as much by design, the Palin pick has inspired millions of independent women and not-so-political women to take a fresh look at McCain and his party. The powerful identification with President Bush and Vice President Cheney has been masked. Neither attended the convention, and great effort was expended on obscuring their existence.

Restored at last to the political persona that has worked best for him, John McCain is once again exuberantly claiming to be the candidate of change and reform.

Sharp turns in public perception have extended effects. The gusher of interest in Palin has refreshed interest in McCain. Polls show Americans suddenly open to McCain's ideas for the economy more than ever before, much as public approval for President Bush's ideas on education and economics shot up right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Given these attitudinal shifts, the question you want to ask is not why McCain has gained so much in the polls against his Democratic rival but why he has not gained even more. Indeed, it is entirely possible that his surge has only begun.

But another look at the polls suggests an alternative scenario. Consider that with all the positive coverage of the Palin bounce, the last week has, so far, brought Obama down from a modest lead to a modest deficit. Some major polls still show the race a tie, others have Obama trailing — but within the margin of error.

The two pro-McCain polling results that have attracted the most attention both came from news organizations. The first was the Gallup Poll for USA Today published Sept. 8. It showed that, among those most likely to vote, McCain had leapt to 54 percent, pushing Obama down to 44 percent. That was the first double-digit lead the Republican had enjoyed over the Democrat in any poll since January.

At the same time, it was only 6 points greater than the McCain advantage among the likeliest voters that Gallup reported for the same newspaper in late July, a full month before either party's convention. At the time, this was the only survey anywhere showing McCain ahead. Others were favoring Obama by 5 points or more.

The same Gallup poll this month found that among registered voters, McCain's lead was just 4 points (a function of the "likely voter" screen and its greater reliance on older and nonminority voters). Gallup's separate tracking poll has also found the McCain lead in single digits this week.

The second eye-opening headline came from ABC News and The Washington Post, which said candidate preference among white women had shifted by 20 points. That meant that what had been an Obama edge of 10 percentage points within this demographic group had become a 10-point bulge for McCain. That made the Palin choice seem positively brilliant.

This 20-point swing means that one white woman in 10 has moved away from Obama and toward McCain, a less than seismic event, perhaps, but enough to move the needle significantly on this key gauge. The question now becomes: Will this trend hold or will some of these women drift back to Obama? If just 5 percent of the white women in the country did so, it would halve the post-Palin move to McCain within this demographic.

One body of evidence indicates that with all the histrionics of the two conventions and the supercharging Palin element, the relative strength of the two candidates has remained remarkably stable. Several national polls that showed a small bump for Obama after his convention now show that improvement eclipsed by the McCain-Palin convention.

The Rasmussen tracking poll, a new entry to the big leagues of national polling this year, still finds the race a dead heat. This is especially noteworthy because Rasmussen was showing the exact same results just before the Democratic convention began.

So is the boom for McCain-Palin still building, or has it reached its apogee?

Stay tuned. Because this campaign full of surprises and turning points probably has a few more in store.

7:25 AM ET | 09-10-2008 | permalink

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GOP Puts Faith In Stories, Old And New

SAINT PAUL, MINN. -- This week's Republican National Convention was dominated by one personality and one personal story. That in itself is not unusual. But in this case, the personality and the personal story did not both belong to the same person.

If you watched any of the convention, you know the story in question was John McCain's ordeal in a prisoner of war camp in North Vietnam 40 years ago. Other elements of his life, including his 26 years in Congress and his plucky bids for the presidency in 2000 and 2008, were mentioned during the course of the week. But the focus always came back to those wrenching years of captivity.

Night after night, speaker after speaker mined this rich vein. Former senator and presidential aspirant Fred Thompson dwelt on the dramatic details of McCain's torture for much of his speech. Others hit the high points.

Some thought the compelling theme was being emphasized early and often so that the candidate himself could be spared the memory in his own remarks on the final night. But not so. The "Hanoi Hilton" nightmare returned in the nominee's acceptance speech, and in the critical role of closing anecdote. Sure enough, many in attendance told reporters afterward that they were moved by this recollection more than by any other part of the speech.

Let's agree that repetition is the soul of political communication. And the McCain campaign was not going to neglect its featured weapon on the last night, the one that traditionally attracts the largest prime time audience. So the POW story dominated throughout the week. And at this point, anyone in the U.S. who remains unaware of it is not likely to be a voter.

But if that story is set aside, the dominating presence at this convention was not McCain but the woman he chose as his running mate, Sarah Palin. Just a week earlier, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska was unknown to most people in the country and indeed to most participants in this convention. Yet by midweek she had ascended to something like the status of an American Joan of Arc.

Palin had a far more natural and kinetic connection to the activists who populated the convention floor than McCain has ever had. She was with them on abortion (favoring a ban even in cases of rape and incest), gay marriage, sex education, guns and a host of other issues. The simple act of choosing her did more to endear McCain to the base of social conservatives than anything he had ever done.

Palin gave the week's most galvanizing speech, delighting the crowd with morsels of policy and hard jabs at Barack Obama and his party. Most of all, she pleased her audience by bearding the media for disrespecting her candidacy.

Surely there has not been another convention so dominated by a vice presidential candidate since the squabble over renominating Henry Wallace in 1944. To buy peace at that wartime convention, the ailing Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed the Southern delegations to bump his leftish No. 2 in favor of a relatively unknown moderate from a border state. That man was Harry S Truman, from Independence, Mo. Within less than a year, FDR would be dead and Truman would be president.

In one of many intriguing moments in her speech, Palin herself made reference to Truman and his sudden rise to prominence. She said she drew inspiration from the example of the man from Independence. And if Truman went into history as an aggressive partisan, he was also one to work across the aisle on foreign policy and national security, a model the McCain camp was eager to invoke.

There have been other controversies over vice presidents, of course. Adlai Stevenson livened the 1956 Democratic gathering by letting the delegates decide his veep. Richard Nixon became a problem for Dwight D. Eisenhower after his selection in 1952 (the occasion for the famous "Checkers" speech) and Dan Quayle for George H.W. Bush in 1988. The greatest fiasco in recent history was the choice of Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri in 1972, who had to leave the ticket after revealing his psychiatric treatment history.

Palin at this point is primarily an asset for McCain, having brought life to his convention and helped him unite his party. But she is also a threat to upstage him, as she surely did here in St. Paul. This is partly because she is both a natural media magnet and a natural media target. The two halves of the ticket scarcely dare to campaign separately for fear that the No. 2 will prove a greater draw than the No. 1.

This fear was borne out a bit on the final night of the convention. Aside from the well-received retelling of his POW stories, McCain seemed less than utterly comfortable with his audience (both in the hall and watching from home). He seemed aware that many in the hall had preferred another, more conservative option (or would have, given the opportunity). After all, McCain sneaked up on many primary voters and sewed up the nomination so early that a full-scale backlash against him never had a chance to develop.

It may be awkward to have a man so little loved by the conservative movement entrusted with the party's ultimate mission: winning and holding the White House. And it is awkward to have his fate in the hands of someone so little known, even to him, until last week.

But if that is the latest price McCain finds he must pay to pursue his goal, well, as he likes to say, he's been through far worse.

11:27 AM ET | 09- 5-2008 | permalink

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Potent Palin Speech Makes Case, History

ST. PAUL, MINN. — It took until the third night for this Republican National Convention to start to act like one, but liftoff was finally achieved thanks to Sarah Palin, the woman who has made this convention, this week and perhaps this campaign a referendum on herself.

The governor of Alaska, 20 months out of Wasilla and bearing down on the White House, infused what had been a lackluster confab with her personal mix of offense, defense and celebration of small-town America.

In a line that summed up her down-home appeal and her role as designated hitter, Palin asked the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom such as herself. Her answer: "Lipstick."

Palin delivered the pro forma buildup for her new boss with an attitude of admiration and even reverence: "There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you in places where winning means survival and defeat means death, and that man is John McCain." She slashed rival Barack Obama for writing two memoirs and no major legislation.

At no point did she deal with the controversies of her brief time in Juneau or her two terms as mayor in Wasilla. But she cast her own struggles against media inquiries as the plight of a public servant who wants to do good: "Here's a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion — I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country."

It was among her most successful applause lines.

Palin came to the stage without an introductory speech, and none was needed. Hers was the most anticipated speech of the convention, and her appearance instantly electrified the crowd. She stood for several minutes simply absorbing the adulation in her hip glasses and country hairstyle — bestowing her beaming smile on the crowd. Far from fearful under the pressure, she seemed to have been living for nothing so much as this moment.

Through most of her speech, she kept a level tone and alternated her steady gaze between the crowd and the camera-teleprompter. The calm demeanor helped offset the high pitch of her voice, and the low-key overall style made her spikier anti-Obama lines more effective. Could any male speaker have slipped the knife in so often without seeming malicious? Could any have been as derisive about the work of community organizing — not once but repeatedly — without seeming contemptuous of communities in need?

One measure of Palin's effectiveness was the contrast with the preceding performance of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Granted nearly half of the final prime-time hour — the 60 minutes when all the broadcast networks join in the coverage — Giuliani seemed intent on delivering a barnburner. In the end, he pretty much put the torch to the whole farm.

He often chuckled in advance of his own punch lines and repeated some of his lines, as if to admire them first before actually sharing them with the audience. It was hard to believe that at one point less than a year ago, this man loomed as the likeliest Republican nominee in 2008.

Giuliani was not alone in the Greek chorus supporting the young governor. He was joined by two other former candidates who had divided the conservative vote in the early primaries, making it possible for John McCain to win the nomination (with help from Fred Thompson, who had spoken the previous night).

The best offering among these came from the last GOP rival to succumb, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. The former Baptist minister's warm baritone caressed the audience, and his words conveyed the sense that his feelings for the man who beat him were genuine.

On the other hand, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, said the right things, but in rapid-fire fashion that suggested he was planning to jet home before the evening program came to an end. Once again, he seemed not quite able to believe he was not getting the nomination himself.

Some of these also-rans had also been mentioned as potential running mates, and Romney was apparently on the final short list. He was also the first choice in a survey of GOP convention delegates by The New York Times. But he was not the choice of McCain, who reportedly preferred two offbeat prospects: former Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, an independent and former Democrat.

The conflict over these prospects apparently ended in an impasse. Competing factions within McCain's party and campaign went looking for a compromise and came up with two governors: Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Palin. The better-known and more cautious choice would have been Pawlenty, the host for the convention and a boon in a state that might be close in November.

But McCain had been struck with Palin's personality, her feisty record as governor and her falling out with the old guard of Alaska's GOP. It made a more mediagenic picture than Pawlenty's more conventional life and politics. So McCain called her and her family to Arizona last week. There she submitted to a three-hour interrogation by an attorney and a 70-item questionnaire. Reportedly, she also volunteered the information regarding her pregnant 17-year-old daughter.

So now the McCain campaign has become the McCain-Palin campaign, and the hyphenated version matters more than usual. Earlier this year, McCain was a second or third choice among Republican stalwarts (in crucial early primaries, he won less than a plurality of their vote but prevailed because other candidates split the rest). Now he has more emotional connection to them and will use that to lay claim to their allegiance.

If things work as well on the trail this fall as they did on this night in St. Paul, the risks of the Palin pick will pay off.

12:11 PM ET | 09- 4-2008 | permalink

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Palin Questions Recall Quayle Backlash

ST. PAUL, MINN. — The stories that have come out about Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska in the days since she became a household name are not enough to spike her candidacy for vice president. At least not yet. Something more damaging may still emerge. More likely, there will be a succession of minor revelations, more disquieting perhaps than disqualifying.

Democrats and others will say it all suggests a pattern of poor judgment on the part of the young governor. More to the ultimate point, they will say it casts doubt on the judgment of presidential nominee John McCain. If he knew all about the potential controversy, as he has said he did, why would he want to risk unwanted revelations during the GOP convention? And conversely, if he did not know, how much else escaped his campaign's attention?

What was the nature of the vetting process for Palin? We are told she submitted to a three-hour interview and answered a questionnaire with 70 questions. We do not know whether these inquiries covered the issues that have since caused heartburn in the campaign, or what sort of information was volunteered by the Palins. You have to wonder whether the scrubbing was the prosecutorial kind that locates land mines — or a less rigorous exercise, restrained by other concerns.

McCain and Co. see it all quite differently, of course. They regard Palin as a natural complement to the presidential nominee, an unbridled kindred spirit. Initial polls show intraparty enthusiasm higher for McCain's choice of Palin than it was for Barack Obama's choice of Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware. And the campaign believes that the near-uniform support Palin is receiving among social conservatives — and Republicans generally — will be reflected in the response of the general public.

They may well be right. And if they are, they may get the backlash they would like to see against the media questioning and other probes of Palin now under way. It could start to go that way as the delayed Republican convention here gets going, or after Palin herself gives her speech at midweek. Or it may come in the days and weeks ahead, as the country gets a longer look at Palin and tires of the inquisition.

That's what happened 20 years ago this summer when George H.W. Bush gave the VP nomination to Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana, announcing the choice on the weekend before the convention. Quayle brought good looks and youth to the ticket and reassured social conservatives still uncertain of the elder Bush's commitment to their causes.

At his first news conference, however, Quayle stumbled on the question of his military service. He had been in the Indiana National Guard during the Vietnam War and did not deal well with the implication that he had shirked a more active role in the conflict. When it was learned he had once spoken of "riding it out in the Guard," the sour note threatened to cause greater discord in the campaign.

The pursuit of Quayle on this and other issues (including a golfing weekend he and some colleagues had shared with an attractive female lobbyist) came to a climax on the day he returned to his home state after the convention. A full plane of media had followed him home, trying to run him to ground. When the campaign finally made him available for questions, he was ringed by reporters sitting on risers. The candidate stood at ground level, penned in, very much Daniel in the lion's den.

The onslaught began, the candidate answered with wide-eyed innocence, and the spectacle went on and on. Reaction roared in, heavily weighted against the media. Bush went up in the polls, and the questioning of Quayle petered out. While the derision continued in some quarters throughout the campaign (and beyond), the Bush-Quayle ticket carried 40 states in November 1988.

The scrutiny attending Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy in 1984 was a different story. The initial media reaction to her selection by Democratic nominee Walter Mondale was dominated by delight at the novelty (she was the first woman so chosen). Questions arose about her relative inexperience as a junior member of the U.S. House from New York, and later about her husband's business dealings and associations. Nothing incriminating came out, but the bloom was off the rose. And after a decent performance against George H.W. Bush in that autumn's vice presidential debate, Ferraro had no further effect on the campaign. Incumbent President Ronald Reagan won every state except Mondale's Minnesota.

Ferraro was not able to change the larger dynamic in her year, and Quayle probably did not have an appreciable effect in his. Even the disastrous vice presidential candidacy of Thomas Eagleton, dropped from the ticket in 1972 after his psychiatric history was revealed, did not seal the fate of Democrat George McGovern that fall. McGovern himself and another miserable Democratic convention that year had already done that.

The Palin saga may matter more this year, one way or the other, simply because the presidential race is close and hard to predict.

10:00 PM ET | 09- 2-2008 | permalink

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Palin a Game Changer, But What's the Game?

SAINT PAUL -- It is too early to tell whether the stunning choice of Sarah Palin as running mate will do John McCain's campaign more good than it does damage. It will certainly make Palin herself an instant media celebrity. She will appear on every TV screen and magazine cover, the delight of the social conservatives and the darling of the GOP convention here.

Who knows? Maybe her verve and crossover appeal will be just what McCain needs to win and redefine the Republican brand over the next several years. And maybe we will all look back on this as the dawn of the Palin Era in American politics.

But the essential question to ask right now is this: Is Palin the person McCain would have chosen to be vice president if he were already president?

If in office -- or assured of election -- would he have looked to a person he had met for the first and only time earlier this year? Would he have called on a second-year governor from a remote, sparsely populated state? Someone with absolutely none of the foreign policy or national security experience -- or even exposure -- that he has said a president must have?

It is not only unlikely, it is all but inconceivable.

So it will be fair for objective observers to conclude that this was a choice made in order to enhance McCain's chances of election. Palin is a game changer, as her admirers say, because she appeals to women voters in a way McCain does not. She may not be a magnet for hardcore Hillary Clinton supporters, but other women undecided until now may see McCain in a more positive light.

Palin also revives McCain's credentials as a reformer, because she ran against a compromised Republican governor in the 2006 primary and has been at odds with the power structure of her party in her state.

But her real upside potential is in putting a new face on the Grand Old Party. She personifies the latest wave of populism on the right. The host governor here in Minnesota is Republican Tim Pawlenty, who has said the party needs to concentrate less on people who go to the country club and more on people who go to Sam's Club. Pawlenty did not get the running mate nod himself, but his "Sam's Club Republicans" are the demographic Palin represents.

So Palin is a game changer in the sense that she changes the electoral landscape in ways that should help McCain's campaign. It's all about getting him elected.

Of course, she also forces a less welcome change on the campaign's central strategy. Up to now, McCain has stressed his preparation to be commander-in-chief and leader of the free world. He has drawn a contrast between his years in Washington, in government, in the foreign policy loop, and the relatively thin credentials of Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

This argument will not resonate the same way if McCain also wants to tell the world that a self-described "hockey mom" is prepared to be president on day one. And that claim, which McCain and surrogates are making with a straight face, will not restore any luster to his faded "straight talk" image.

Let's be clear. It is not a crime or a sin for a nominee to choose a strictly political running mate. In fact, that's been the rule more than the exception.

Through much of our history, the Democratic Party tried to balance every Northern nominee with a Southerner and vice versa. The Republicans did the same with their Eastern and Western wings. The vice presidency itself did not amount to much. Until the late 1940s, we did not even have a means of replacing the vice president if he died (or became president). Several presidents served nearly their whole terms without one. It was as if no one cared.

But in the nuclear age -- the television age -- the vice presidency has gained new significance. There have been 13 vice presidents in that time, eleven of them elected. Five have become president and a sixth (Al Gore) won the popular vote for president in 2000. Two others were nominated for president. And yet another, current Vice President Dick Cheney, has had such broad and deep influence that at times he seemed almost the co-president.

When President Richard Nixon had to replace his vice president in 1974, he chose Gerald Ford, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives. When Ford needed a vice president of his own, he chose New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, one of the best known figures in American public life. Those are the kinds of decisions presidents in office, both Republicans, made when it was the job, not the election that mattered.

Were he in a similar circumstance today, John McCain would do the same.

7:00 PM ET | 09- 1-2008 | permalink

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