Below The Beltway

Over at Donklephant, Alan Stewart Carl wonders if Barack Obama hasn’t taken his eye off the ball:

I’m starting to wonder: is the Barack Obama campaign grossly mishandling the Sarah Palin vice presidential nomination? Suddenly, it seems like Obama is running against Palin. Shouldn’t Obama be focused on John McCain? I mean, I know the guy’s old but, as long as he’s healthy, Palin will likely be no more than a glorified goodwill ambassador, just like most VPs before her. Is it worth taking the heat off of McCain in order to delegitimize someone who will likely have very little power?

Carl does have a point, it really does seem like Barack Obama is spending as much time talking about Sarah Palin as he is talking about John McCain, if not more:

Listening to Barack Obama, it can seem like Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin is the main person standing between him and the White House instead of John McCain.

Obama is putting as much heat on Palin as he is on the man at the top of the GOP ticket, objecting to the Republican Party’s portrayal of her as a reformer who can bring change to Washington.

That is supposed to be Obama’s distinction, and he’s not taking kindly to Palin trying to claim it. Especially when it appears the new star on the GOP ticket is helping boost its standing: McCain has jumped to a dead heat or narrow lead over Obama in the latest national polls since choosing Palin as his running mate.

Obama said last week’s Republican National Convention did a good job of highlighting Palin’s biography — “Mother, governor, moose shooter. That’s cool,” he said. But he said Palin really is just another Republican politician, one who is stretching the truth about her record.

“When John McCain gets up there with Sarah Palin and says, `We’re for change,’ … what are they talking about?” Obama said Monday, arguing that they aren’t offering different ideas from President Bush and they are just trying to steal his campaign theme because it seemed to be working.

“It was just like a month ago they were all saying, `Oh, it’s experience, experience, experience.’ Then they chose Palin and they started talking about change, change, change,” he said.

And it’s not just the candidate who seems obsessed with the Governor of Alaska these days:

Obama’s supporters appear to be just as fired up against Palin. In Farmington Hills, they booed when Obama first mentioned her name and laughed dismissively when he said she had a compelling biography. “Whatever,” an audience member shouted.

In Dayton, Ohio, Tuesday, the crowd waiting for Obama to take the stage chanted “No pit bulls! No pit bulls!” — a reference to Palin’s joke that lipstick is the only thing that sets hockey moms like her apart from the dogs.

I’m that rhetoric like that makes the supporters happy, just like it made Republicans in the `90’s happy when people made snide remarks about the Clintons, but stuff like that doesn’t win elections.

It’s clear, though, that McCain’s selection of Palin came as a surprise both to the Obama campaign and their supports in the blogosphere. For the first week, in addition to focusing on rumors that later proved to be baseless, there was an almost obsessive devotion to the question of whether or not Sarah Palin had been properly vetted by the McCain campaign and whether she was qualified to be Vice-President, whatever that means. While I agree that these are important questions, and said so at the time, the fact of the matter is that the response to Palin’s speech and the bounce that the Republican ticket has received in the polls pretty much establish definitively that Sarah Palin is no Dan Quayle and, at the very least, she will not have a negative impact on McCain’s chances in November.

And yet, the Democrats continue to focus on Palin.

It’s understandable for several reasons. First of all, she has helped McCain steal the initiative from Obama in a way that nobody ever thought he’d be able to accomplish — McCain has even managed to take Obama’s “change” message from him successfully. Second, the focus by her critics on experience issues has only served to highlight Obama’s own lack of experience; the illogic of saying that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be Vice-President while at the same time arguing that Barack Obama is qualified to be President is so apparent that it’s a wonder that any of Obama’s allies are continuing to make the argument. The final reason that the Obama campaign has found itself focusing so much on Palin is because everyone else has; she’s all over the media, she’s helping McCain draw record crowds in Pennsylvania and, apparently, tomorrow in Fairfax, Virginia, she is new and, because of that, she’s interesting to the reporters covering the race.

As Carl notes, this may be what McCain was planning all along:

This is one of the big reasons why McCain gambled on his VP choice. To mix things up and throw Obama off his game. So far, it seems to be working.

I don’t know if McCain really did anticipate that this would be the result of picking Palin, but, if he did, he’s much more politically astute than I’ve given him credit for.