Sen. John McCain has gone crazy as a fox in picking Sarah Palin, bold as a lioness, for his vice presidential running mate.

The move was brave and brilliant, and it puts McCain right back in contention just when Barack Obama thought he was poised to open up a wide and perhaps insurmountable lead. Instead he and his team will be reeling from the straight right McCain has just landed on his forehead.

Palin is an even newer figure on the national U.S. political scene than Obama. She was the first female governor of Alaska and the youngest in the state’s history. She will now be only the second woman to run on the national ticket of one of the two main parties in U.S. history, almost a quarter century after Rep. Geraldine Ferraro (D-NY) crashed and burned as former Vice President Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984.

Palin is a very strong conservative who is adamantly anti-choice. But she still has the potential to attract a significant number of female voters away from the Democrats and to embarrass Obama. Many of the supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton.(D-NY) remain riled at Obama not just for beating her out for the presidential nomination, but for denying her the vice presidential slot, too. You don’t have to be a conservative to know that. When Maureen Dowd in the New York Times admitted this week that most of the Hillary Dems she met in Denver were still seething with rage, you don’t have to be Ronald Reagan to work out that putting an attractive, young, hard-driving lady with outstanding executive experience on the GOP ticket will pull a lot of their votes away from the Dems.

 

Over the past two years, Palin has been a success story even while she has imposed financial probity and the highest ethical standards on what is no longer Ted Stevens’ Winter Wonderland.

Despite axing pork barrel jokes like Stevens’ legendary Bridge to Nowhere -- or, rather, of course, because of such actions -- Palin's approval ratings still soar in the 80-percentile group.

By contrast, neither of the Democratic duo has ever run even a fast food outlet -- a much more demanding job than anything on either of their resumes -- let alone a State of the Union in their lives. The idea that either of them could actually do so successfully is risible.

Obama doesn’t even dare to pledge to balance the budge while promising ever more social spending out of every orifice of his body. Palin actually has met real budget demands up there in the Far North.

Palin, in fact, gives McCain a potentially crucial boost on a wide range of fronts: She is a devout Christian who took the decision not to have an abortion when she discovered an unborn son would suffer from Down‘s Syndrome. She is a strong fiscal conservative who has not hesitated to make powerful enemies in her home state by shutting down pork barrel projects. And she is fearlessly and passionately honest. She took on the Alaska Republican establishment and threw a bunch of them in jail to be successfully convicted.

With Sarah Palin on the national ticket, McCain's pledge to transform Washington surpasses that of Obama in the credibility department. And it takes on real teeth. Sarah Palin will really matter. Every vice president in the past 32 years with the unfortunate exception of the decent and shamelessly treated Dan Quayle has packed real power. And Palin is likely to prove that in spades.

She hunts, fishes, and eats moose burgers. She is such a keen runner that she named the first of her five children Track. She is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association and was runner-up in the Miss Alaska beauty contest in 1984.

In short, this self-styled “average hockey mom” is the kind of all-American girl to gladden the heart of the Republican Party — and yesterday Sarah Palin delighted it even more by virtually wiping out coverage of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver on Thursday night.

Mrs Palin may have been Alaska’s Governor for a mere two years, but she is wildly popular, with an approval rating of 80 per cent. She ran in her gubernatorial campaign as a cleangovernment reformer and scourge of wasteful spending, a message that resonated strongly in a state beset by political corruption.

But for all her strengths, both parties know that her nomination is a risk for John McCain. Only two years ago she was the Mayor of the Alaskan town of Wasilla, where the biggest worry is whether there will be enough snow for the annual dog-mushing race. Before her two terms as a councillor in the same town she was a sports reporter for a television station in Anchorage.

Since she took office in 2006 as Alaska’s youngest governor, and the first woman to hold the post, she has delivered on many of her campaign promises. She took a pay cut, dispensed with the gubernatorial jet, and killed the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” project that had become a nationwide symbol of the wasteful spending that Mr McCain has made a cornerstone of his campaign. “As Governor I’ve stood up to politics as usual,” Mrs Palin said. “I’ve stopped wasteful spending, cut taxes, and put the people first.”

A fiscal and social conservative, she is also strongly “pro-life” and belongs to Feminists for Life. She opposes gay marriage, although she says she has gay friends. She has also admitted in the past that she smoked marijuana when it was legal in Alaska — but did not like it. Born in Idaho, Mrs Palin has lived in Alaska since she was three months old.

She once worked as a commercial fisherman with her husband, Todd, her high-school sweetheart and a native Yupik. It was their 20th wedding anniversary yesterday. Her husband works for BP, is a champion snowmobiler — a passion she shares — who has won the 2,000-mile “Iron Dog” race four times.

They have three daughters, Bristol, 17, Willow, 13, and Piper, 7. In April she gave birth to another son, Trig, after refusing to let the results of prenatal testing that showed he had Down’s syndrome affect her decision to have the baby. He was asleep on the shoulder of one of her daughters during her speech.

At the rally in Ohio last night Mrs Palin was given a raucous reception during a poised and forceful speech in which she displayed clear signs of grit, a muscular, family-oriented conservatism, while also reaching out to the disaffected supporters of Hillary Clinton.

“I would be honoured to serve next to the next president of the United States,” she declared, with four of her five children behind her. “I know it will demand the best that I have to give, and I promise nothing less.”

Her son Track will be deployed with the US Army to Iraq on September 11, she added. “As a mother of one of those troops, John McCain is the kind of man I want as our commander-in-chief.”

Instead of a safe choice, such as closest runner-up Mitt Romney or genial Everyman Tim Pawlenty, McCain took some risk with a relative newcomer to national politics. Palin will inject risk, excitement, controversy, and an unexpected historic note to the Republican convention.

First, though, let’s assess the risk. Palin has served less than two years as Governor of Alaska, which tends to eat into the experience message on which McCain has relied thus far. At 44, she’s younger than Barack Obama by three years. She has served as a mayor and as the Ethics Commissioner on the state board regulating oil and natural gas, for a total of eight years political experience before her election as governor. That’s also less than Obama has, with seven years in the Illinois legislature and three in the US Senate.

However, the nature of the experience couldn’t be more different. Palin spent her entire political career crusading against the political machine that rules Alaska — which exists in her own Republican party. She blew the whistle on the state GOP chair, who had abused his power on the same commission to conduct party business. Obama, in contrast, talked a great deal about reform in Chicago but never challenged the party machine, preferring to take an easy ride as a protegé of Richard Daley instead.

Palin has no formal foreign-policy experience, which puts her at a disadvantage to Joe Biden. However, in nineteen months as governor, she certainly has had more practical experience in diplomacy than Biden or Obama have ever seen. She runs the only American state bordered only by two foreign countries, one of which has increasingly grown hostile to the US again, Russia.

And let’s face it — Team Obama can hardly attack Palin for a lack of foreign-policy experience. Obama has none at all, and neither Obama or Biden have any executive experience. Palin has almost over seven years of executive experience.

So what does Sarah Palin stand for? Here we take a brief look at her positions - in her own words.

On drilling in ANWR (the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve): "It will work. Senator McCain's wrong on that issue ... I think he's going to evolve into eventually supporting ANWR opening. Obama is way off base on all that. I think those politicians who don't understand that we need more domestic supplies of energy thrown into our hungry markets are living in La-La land."

On being vice-president: "What is it exactly that the VP does every day? I'm used to being very productive and working real hard and being in administration."

On the Wooten scandal (allegations that she fired a cabinet official over his reluctance to fire her brother-in-law as a state trooper during a custody battle with her sister): "A couple of lawmakers who were unhappy with that decision are looking at me as a target right now and wanting to probe and find out why I replace this cabinet member. And it's cool, I want them to ask me these questions, I don't have anything to hide and didn't do anything wrong there, it is a governor's prerogative. ... I never tried to fire my former brother-in-law."

On capital punishment: "If the (Alaskan state) legislature passed a death penalty law, I would sign it. We have a right to know that someone who rapes and murders a child or kills an innocent person in a drive by shooting will never be able to do that again."

On listing the polar bear as an endangered species: "We are suing the federal government, recognising that the Endangered Species Act is not a place to kind of mess around with listing as threatened a species that right now is very very healthy ... Our fear being that extreme environmentalists will use this tool to eventually curtail or halt North Slope production of very rich resources that America needs."

On smoking marijuana in her youth: "I can't claim a Bill Clinton and say that I never inhaled."

On abortion: "(I am as) pro-life as any candidate can be. ... (I have) adamantly supported our cause since I first understood, as a child, the atrocity of it."

By picking Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has wowed the public and enthused the Right. He has reinforced some of his winning themes — that he has the mindset of an outsider and a fighter against corruption. He has also reinforced his appeal as the candidate more in touch with traditional values on moral issues.

None of McCain’s possible choices was perfect, and attention is being paid to the way that Palin undercuts other McCain themes, such as the importance of experience in foreign policy. Palin will have to reassure voters of her steadiness when she speaks at the Republican convention and when she debates Joe Biden. McCain, meanwhile, will have to carry most of the foreign-policy load himself and showcase his good health.

We hope that the choice of Palin also signals a decisive turn toward a campaign theme of fighting for the middle class. McCain and Palin can and should say that they will fight to protect Americans from our foreign enemies, to stop liberal excesses, and to reform dysfunctional institutions. They should not accept the portrait of middle-class Americans as hapless victims that so many of the Democratic speakers this week portrayed; but they need to show that they share middle-class frustrations. Strength in foreign policy; reforms of taxes and health care geared to the middle class; and a moderate social conservatism: It’s a potentially winning message, and now Republicans have a ticket that is suited to it.