Home  Editorials Opportunities grasped and lost
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Opportunities grasped and lost |
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Sunday, 07 September 2008 |
Recent events showed that hardly anything in life is certain, and that opportunities can arise and disappear when least expected. One week Jamaicans were overjoyed and giddy with excitement with the tremendous success of the Jamaican Olympic team at the Beijing Olympics, the next they were reeling from the effects of flood waters brought by then Tropical Storm Gustav.
Last week some Americans were enthralled by events at the high-profiled Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado. The highlight was by Barack Obama’s powerful acceptance speech watched by an estimated 38 million people on TV and 85,000 at the Mile High Stadium in Denver. It was anticipated that the speech would provide an opportunity for significant media coverage in the days immediately following, but that kind of coverage lasted just over twelve hours.
At noon the next day Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, seized his own opportunity and surprised the country by selecting the relatively unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his vice presidential choice. The surprise selection was a media-magnet, pulling it to focus on analyzing who this Sarah Palin is, and the reasons why McCain selected her over other nationally recognized potential candidates. Suddenly, Obama’s speech became yesterday’s news.
Palin’s selection turned attention towards the Republican (GOP) Convention that began on Monday. Would this convention match the magnitude of the DNC’s, especially the impact of the great speeches made by Ted Kennedy, Michelle Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, himself?
Of course, McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin was purely tactical. It is quite obvious that McCain made picked Palin, not because she was the best candidate available to him, but because he gambled that selecting her would pull Democrat and Independent women voters who supported Hillary Clinton over to the Republicans. He obviously saw Palin as having a strong pull being a fresh face, a conservative, and a proven anti-abortionist, a 44 year-old mother of five.
Based on the uncertainties of this presidential campaign, there is no guarantee that McCain’s gamble will pay off. The crux of his gamble is the assumption that Democrat women are disloyal, more concerned about voting for gender rather than on commitment to their party. There are certainly signs of this disloyalty. Going into the Democratic convention there were indications of a sharp division between Clinton and Obama supporters resulting from lingering disappointments that Clinton was not the Democratic presidential nominee, and more recent disappointments that she was not Obama’s VP selection. This was a division that the media seized upon and overplayed during the convention. However, attempts at party unity by Clinton, her husband Bill, the Obamas and other Democratic leaders resulted in somewhat healing the breach, and it appeared that the delegates left their convention more united than before. Polls conducted after the convention indicated that 21 percent of Clinton supporters still intend to vote Republican.
This is the opportunity that McCain is seeking to grasp by his selection of Sarah Palin, not minding that she has no experience, national or international recognition, to be “a heartbeat” from the presidency of the United States. Not minding, as it is turning out, that she was inadequately vetted for the position.
Female Democratic loyalists regard McCain’s selection as poor judgment, arguing that Palin is certainly no Hillary Clinton. These women are firm supporters of Clinton, not just any female candidate. But, as good as this sounds to Democrats who are concerned that Palin’s selection could pull votes away from the party, the question of party loyalty still exists. Some would rather Democrats vote for their party and not merely for their favorite candidate. Clinton put this well at the DNC when she said although some people voted for her and others for Obama during the primaries it was now time to vote for the party. Unless Democrats come out and vote for the party in November there is a great risk of four more years of Republican rule.
Sarah Palin may grasp the opportunity and turn out be a credible running mate to McCain or, she could lose it as more details about her, her family and her governance are revealed. However, those that support her should base this on the contributions that she could eventually prove she can make to the Republican Party and as a possible American vice president, not just because she is a woman. |
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