Word: picking
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Democrats claim John McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate is cynical. Palin has sparked a culture war, they say, which will trick people into voting for the candidate they like over the one whose policies will benefit them...
...past week, the campaign has written off much of the skepticism about the qualifications of vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin as the reaction of a biased media establishment out of touch with real Americans. "She's not part of the Washington, D.C., cocktail circuit," Steve Schmidt, one of McCain's senior advisers, told TIME. "Elite opinion looks down with contempt at people who are not part of their world." Left unmentioned was the fact that McCain himself has been an A-list member of the Washington élite since he arrived in the capital more than 30 years...
...there's more to the McCain campaign's claims of bias than numbers or narratives. Complicating the debate is the metastasis of informal, and unreliable, information sources online. As soon as the Palin pick was announced, liberal-leaning websites and blogs swirled with rumors about Palin's personal life, and in their critique of the press, surrogates for McCain have conflated such websites and opinion columnists with the reporting of major news organizations...
...clues are in the text itself. Scully started working on the vice-presidential speech a week ago, before he or anyone else knew who the nominee would be, and it's not hard to pick out the parts that would have been the same regardless of who delivered it. Scully unspooled two centrist themes via Palin that have been key to the McCain message: the idea that the Republican nominee puts service to country ahead of career and the notion that he's the true representative of Middle America. Both themes implicitly push Obama and Biden to the left...
...surprised, though, if the combination continues. McCain wanted to pick a centrist Vice President not just because he liked candidates such as Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, but because he badly needs to close the gap in swing states like Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin, where he trails Obama. But he had to pick a cultural conservative like Palin because he couldn't risk alienating an already demoralized base. If Palin was viewed as the most likely right winger to sell in the swing states, Scully is the right pick to help repackage her from a base pleaser into a bridge...