Kristol: McCain Likes Wild Bets!
I definitely agree with Bill Kristol that the Palin pick is best described through gambling metaphors and reflects John McCain’s gambler persona. I guess, though, that if I were going to say that McCain “went all in with Sarah Palin” I would add that he seems to have decided to go all in without really looking at his hole cards which is pretty odd.
Meanwhile, I wish Kristol would have said more about Joe Lieberman. I could understand passing up Lieberman in favor of a safe pick. But as far as risky gambles go, Lieberman seems like the smarter play. For one thing, he’s been vetted in a VP race before. And for another thing, I understand clearly what the potential Lieberman constituency would be — hawkish Democrats who disagree with Barack Obama on key foreign policy issues and are looking for permission to vote Republican. Lots of conservative elites, of course, were horrified by the idea of a Lieberman VP pick for understandable reasons. But Kristol seems like exact the sort of conservative elite — primarily in it for the bloodshed and vicarious thrills of empire — who would look favorably on a McCain-Lieberman ticket so I’d like to hear his thoughts on the matter.
54 Responses to “Kristol: McCain Likes Wild Bets!”
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September 2nd, 2008 at 11:05 am
he gave you his thoughts on the matter several weeks ago when he wrote a column in favor of lieberman; he won’t give you his thoughts on the matter now because he’s a propagandist first, last, and always.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:08 am
I’m with you that Lieberman would have been a better gamble… but it appears party elders put their collective foot down and he just picked somebody at random out of spite, which are obviously the sort of characteristics you like to see in a Leader of the Free World.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:10 am
Joementum would have been an even worse pick, and by a pretty wide margin. You simply can’t depress the base of your party that much with the VP pick.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:19 am
There’s no way the evangelicals would have tolerated a pro-choice veep. No friggin’ way. It’s a line in the sand as deep as the Grand Canyon. If McCain had named Ridge or Lieberman, they would have stayed home to punish the GOP.
I know it’s really tough for you to understand these people, Matt — I’m betting you’ve never met any, let alone spent time in their world — but they do provide tens of millions of Republican votes. Palin is probably a disastrous pick — a pro-life experienced politician like Marsha Blackburn would have been arguably better — but the idea that Lieberman would have helped McCain in the electoral college is ignorant of the base. Sorry, dude, it just is.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:22 am
Haggai, you may well be right, but those weren’t the only options. A completely unvetted Sarah Palin wasn’t the only alternative to Joementum; heck, even without naming any of the obvious alternative people, how about a thoroughly vetted Sarah Palin?
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:23 am
Lieberman is pro-choice. This is all you need to know. If McCain nominated Lieberman he would probably lose even worse than Mondale did.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:26 am
It is rapidly become evident that a thoroughly vetted Sarah Palin would never have become a VP nominee.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:27 am
Uhm duh, guys. Fighter pilot. It’s what they do!
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:30 am
Well, if there were any lingering doubts about how awesome a pick this is (for Democrats), the Kristol Ball weighing in in favor of it should put those to rest. WIN!
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:32 am
I admit to having absolutely no understanding of the social conservative base, but they’re going to vote for Obama… so would they really stay home? Seems like you could make the case that Lieberman is the choice to help blow shit up in the Middle East, and that he will play absolutely no role in nominating judges and what-have-you. But it seems people here do not agree.
Is the reverse true? Is it absolutely unpossible for a Anti-Abortion candidate on a Dem ticket? I would hold my nose if the person promised to subsume those views… but maybe most wouldn’t.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:33 am
Personally, I wish he would have picked Bobby “The Exorcist” Jindal. That would have been exciting.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:33 am
Ooops missing a crucial “not” up there in the “vote for Obama” phrase.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:35 am
Fighter pilot. It’s what they do!
McCain wasn’t a fighter pilot. Unless the North Vietnamese trained him while they were prepping him to run for president, that is.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:36 am
Frankly McCain should have just but a bunch of names on a roulette wheel and spun it. As long as Larry Craig and mark Foley’s names weren’t on it, what are the odds he would have hit someone with more skeletons in his closet?
The best part of today is hearing all the campaign flacks go on about how Palin was “fully vetted” and McCain knew about all of this beforehand. What worse, that he didn’t know and picked her on a whim, or that he did know and picked her anyway?
http://thesebastards.blogspot.com/
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:41 am
he seems to have decided to go all in without really looking at his hole cards which is pretty odd.
You’ve never seen that happen before? Sometimes you need a strong play to stay in the game. If it works, you send a signal to the other players that you’re a crazy bastard who’s not to be fucked with or bluffed out. If it doesn’t pan out, you shrug and go home.
McCain, an experienced gambler and only somewhat-enthusiastic politician, understands this mindset, I think.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:44 am
There are cases where it’s a good play to move all-in without looking at your hole cards. They tend to occur either when a) you’re really desperate or b) you have little respect for your opponent’s skill level
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:45 am
Haggai, you may well be right, but those weren’t the only options. A completely unvetted Sarah Palin wasn’t the only alternative to Joementum; heck, even without naming any of the obvious alternative people, how about a thoroughly vetted Sarah Palin?
Oh, sure, clearly there were better choices out there, although it probably came down this way because none of them were all that appealing. McCain was probably right in characterizing Pawlenty and Romney as boring choices (according to a NYT article today), he just bungled it by failing to realize that Palin was a worse option. I was just arguing that Joementum was probably the worst option under consideration.
Is the reverse true? Is it absolutely unpossible for a Anti-Abortion candidate on a Dem ticket? I would hold my nose if the person promised to subsume those views… but maybe most wouldn’t.
I really don’t think it could happen. It would be too big a sellout. Women who don’t appreciate people trying to control their wombs are just too important a constituency for the Dems. The party can’t dump on them that directly and still have any hope of winning a presidential election.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:46 am
Fighter pilots don’t gamble…they calculate quickly when there isn’t more time (They usually have seconds to evaluate in real time and the results are instantaneous). McCain gambled and lost. Maybe this is whey he was shot down in the first place. He just veered right when the facts said veer left. We will never know.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:51 am
So Palin’s teenage daughter is pregnant. So what?
Unless John McCain is the father, I don’t see the problem.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:52 am
Lieberman is pro-choice. This is all you need to know. If McCain nominated Lieberman he would probably lose even worse than Mondale did.
Yeah, to make an analogy, imagine how liberals would have reacted had Obama picked Hagel. He was right on one issue in their minds, but basically he was a constant enabler of the Republican party on a host of issues.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:00 pm
I dunno … I think the Palin Clan is doing a bang-up job of reinforcing what we pro-lifers are all about! (Memo to Senator McCain — Hard to demand respect and privacy for your sidekick’s reproductive decisions — and those of her progeny — when you’re out there lecturing the population on what’s right and godly.)
Re: McCain and his decision-making process, what the hell? Is no one in charge of this show? Intelligent design ain’t what it used to be, I guess.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Joementum would have helped give him Florida, and also other hawks who think Obama’s too wimpy. Further, in the general election one generally tries to move towards the center, not to the extreme — and yet McCain actually found somebody who is to the right of him and Bush. As someone else wrote above, it’s not like the base is going to vote for Obama (see, e.g., the video in Kos of a guy from Focus on the Family asking people to pray for rain to ruin the Dem Convention).
The great think about this pick, from Obama’s point of view, is that Palin is so right wing, it helps bring issues to the forefront. If the media can focus on that — and America can finally get a clue that McCain (also) is against abortion, against Roe v Wade, against family planning, etc etc, then he’ll go down in flames.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Let’s say this was planned. He picks Palin, she energizes the base, they contribute cash and get excited. Now McSame proves he’s down with the base. But the Palin problems becomes such a drag that she has to resign and that leaves McSame with a boat load of cash and nowhere to run but back to what he knows, and he knows Joe. The base will see that McSame really tried and will stick with him even though Joe is on the ticket. It’s a win if Palin stays and it’s a win if she goes, but a bigger win if she goes.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:14 pm
McCain is really screwed. Whether he now keeps Palin or withdraws Palin, he will pay a steep price. McCain has now already pretty much blown whatever advantage he might have received from picking Lieberman. He might still have to withdraw Palin, but he can’t clean the slate completely with someone like Lieberman, because the damage has already been done.
The McCain-Lieberman posters would show those two grizzled old guys, with a slogan like “The Experience America Needs”. But the whole benefit of experience is supposed to have something to do with the sobriety, long view, calm judgment and realism experience brings. And every time people saw Lieberman, they would be reminded of McCain’s crazy, impetuous, backfiring gamble. Since you don’t get many do-over’s in foreign policy, that will not be reassuring.
And he’s already done the damage with the hawkish pro-Israel camp Lieberman would be expected to help with most. What is the message, that John McCain will be a great friend of Israel, except on those mornings when he wakes up and decides to roll the dice on a Buchananite?
What’s the point of electing an old guy if he has the impulse control of a nineteen year old?
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Another way in which the Palin pick was a huge mistake is that basically for as long as Obama had secured the nomination, the election had basically become a referendum on him. McCain, while being ‘boring’, was actually benefiting from the lack of scrutiny being applied to him, by a compliant media. Parts of me think that all those appearances at the Sausage Haus in Berlin, NH, and having the cleanup-on-aisle 5 video, was made to make McCain seem adorable in his modesty, etc. And although it wasn’t transformative, it was at least making the race competitive.
Pawlenty or Romney would have been ‘boring’ too, and although they wouldn’t have helped a huge amount, they would have kept the dynamic of the race the same, and kept the election as being a referendum on the new guy. McCain instead decided to chuck the safer bet out the window, and appease the hard-right Christianist base. And with it he also threw out his ‘mavericky’ image, which although had been waning lately, still had traction in his media base.
What a bizarre change of events this is. I’m still unsure what to think of it – I mean, there isn’t some really clever upside to it that we’ve not thought of, is there? This really is as ill-conceived and reckless as it looks, right?
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:17 pm
McCain plays craps, and he’s apparently a go-with-the-gut flamboyant sucker-bet craps player. There’s one at every table, Mr 8 the hard way or Mr single-roll bet, the guy who wants everyone cheering him when it’s his turn with the dice.
The way to play craps and hope to minimise your losses is to bet the pass line with odds. All the time. It’s dull.
Palin is a sucker bet. It gets the crowd excited, and it’ll pay off perhaps once every fifteen attempts, but it’s all about the buzz and the sigh. After all, red-meat conservatives want to go into an Obama administration, if that’s what happens, feeling victimised.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Joementum would have been an even worse pick, and by a pretty wide margin. You simply can’t depress the base of your party that much with the VP pick.
Lieberman might’ve depressed the base. But the base was already depressed. I think that the base, when all is said and done, isn’t going to be that excited about Palin. Yeah, spokesmen for the base, like Dobson, can talk about how excited they are about Palin. And I have no better information about how the base may act, but it seems to me that the base is demoralized over McCain and that no VP, save, perhaps, Huckabee, could’ve energized them.
For my money, even if Palin turns out to be a godsend, McCain has lost my vote. I was on the fence. But I’ll be voting for Obama this fall because McCain’s whole process in choosing the VP lays bare his approach to policy and politics: and doubling-down is not the kind of leadership we ever should get.
So I’ll be voting for Obama.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:33 pm
I would add two items here:
1. One of the president’s most important jobs is appointing people to various positions of power, at many levels of government. If this is how he makes his most important such selection, how can we have confidence in his ability to choose a Secretary of State? Supreme Court justices?
2. If he wanted a mavericky selection that would appeal to the base, I think he ought to have gone with Jindal, who’ll have ample opportunity to appear presidential this week during the Gustav preparation and cleanup process.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:50 pm
The best gambling metaphor is very close to JSM.s heart: a throw of the dice, which his his favorite game. Properly played, casino craps gives the player the best shot…although even then there is a slight house advantage. But it is really quite dull and requires no thought at all. McCain’s gambling style is reputed to be of the plunger, bad-odds but big payoff type. (Say, rolling eleven has odds 18-1 against but pays of 15-1 if it hits. A sure way to lose of the not-so-long haul.)
This VP pick seems very consonant with that style.
In contrast, poker (where the “all in” metaphor belongs) requires patience, steady nerves, a positive attitude, an ability to sense what others are thinking, and rational money management. Sounds like the right style for a President. Obama is said to be a good poker player.
To borrow another poker term, I think with this choice that JSM has gone on “tilt”. (Meaning he has started to play crazy.)
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Let’s say this was planned. He picks Palin, she energizes the base, they contribute cash and get excited. Now McSame proves he’s down with the base. But the Palin problems becomes such a drag that she has to resign and that leaves McSame with a boat load of cash and nowhere to run but back to what he knows, and he knows Joe. The base will see that McSame really tried and will stick with him even though Joe is on the ticket. It’s a win if Palin stays and it’s a win if she goes, but a bigger win if she goes.
There a line of thinking on the left that seems to die hard: that the right is really super-clever and have a brilliant and complex strategy in their minds at all times. I think they are certainly brilliant tacticians who are pretty smart about how to handle the current situation — see how they tried to turn Gustav into a McCain infomercial and nearly succeeded and how they managed to kill any post-speech buzz for Obama. But in the area of fitting their brilliant tactics into a long-term strategy, they are completely and utterly hopeless. The simple answer to what happened here is that they became so fixated on getting someone/anyone announced as VP on Friday morning that they forgot that they’re trying to win an election not a news cycle.
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:46 pm
There a line of thinking on the left that seems to die hard: that the right is really super-clever and have a brilliant and complex strategy in their minds at all times…But in the area of fitting their brilliant tactics into a long-term strategy, they are completely and utterly hopeless.
CHURCH.
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:55 pm
I’m don’t particularly like the way this “McCain as gambler” idea is being framed.
Sure, McCain is a gambler and Palin is a reckless pick. But the real gamble is not McCain’s. His career is really small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.
McCain is gambling with the future of our country. He’s playing with house money, not his own. lt’s ours, and what we have at stake is much more than money, of course.
Cindy McCain was not willing to marry John McCain without a prenup. I don’t see why we should trust him more than his wife. Of course, there’s no such thing as a presidential prenup, which is why smart people should abandon any idea that this guy is fit to be president.
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:03 pm
There’s a difference between roulette and Russian roulette.
/ Deerhunter’d
// Not what is meant by proximity to Russia.
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:45 pm
If we’re going to extend/belabor the gambl0r metaphor, then one could also claim that he’s not so much playing his (hole) cards, but rather, he’s playing his opponent.
September 2nd, 2008 at 3:10 pm
What is Obama supposed to fold? He was never going to go “Palin! Oh no!” and drop out of the election.
A nominee popular among the base with lots of cred, such as Boxer among the Democrats and Huckabee among the Republicans, could possibly choose a VP that was their opposite on abortion. McCain never was seen as a true base believer, so he couldn’t cross the base.
September 2nd, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Meanwhile, I wish Kristol would have said more about Joe Lieberman.
Matt: your words here should read “I wish Kristol had said more about Joe Lieberman.” Sorry for the pedantry, but this ugly and increasingly common (in America, at least) bit of ungrammatical insanity drives me crazy.
September 2nd, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Poker is the wrong metaphor altogether; McCain is a craps addict. (Obama is the poker player, and by all accounts a pretty good one.) So it’s more like betting everything on a single roll of the dice.
September 2nd, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Re: fighter pilot
John McCain was not a fighter pilot, he was a bomber pilot.
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