Below The Beltway

Just a week or so ago former McCain Campaign strategist Steve Schmidt was saying that Sarah Palin would be a “catastrophe” as the Republican Party’s 2012 nominee, but he’s also defending the decision to make her the 2008 Republican Vice-Presidential nominee:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A top adviser from John McCain’s presidential campaign who has criticized Sarah Palin’s odds as a 2012 presidential candidate defended Wednesday the decision to pick her as McCain’s 2008 running mate.

Steve Schmidt, who was chief strategist for the Republican’s campaign during the 2008 election, said choosing Palin — then a little-known Alaska governor — helped the GOP gain ground against the Democrats and Barack Obama.

“I believe to this day that had she not been picked as a vice presidential candidate, we would have never been ahead, not for one second, not for one minute, not for one hour, not for one day,” Schmidt said during a speech at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service.

“Her candidacy excited the Republican Party,” he added. “There was huge excitement that transformed the race.”

This may come as a surprise considering how critical I was of Palin during the campaign and since then, but I think that Schmidt is largely correct here.

In mid-August 2008, just before the back-to-back Democratic and Republican conventions, Obama held a slim lead over McCain that hadn’t really moved much since he’d gotten back from his European trip. As the Democratic National Convention unfolded, Obama was pulling away in the polls and had a six point lead on the day of his acceptance speech, which continued the next day, which also happened to be the day that McCain announced the choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Initially, the polls seemed to show a positive reaction for McCain to the selection of the Alaska Governor and it even seemed to dampen any bounce that Obama had gotten from the Democratic convention.

There was one CNN poll that showed the race a dead heat on the even of the Republican convention, but that seemed to be an outlier given that tracking polls consistently showed Obama/Biden leading the race.

Then Sarah Palin gave her acceptance speech and the effect was apparent.

By September 8th, the McCain/Palin ticket was in the lead and that bounce continued for nearly two weeks, when it became apparent that the defining issue was the economy, and the reality of Palin’s unpreparedness became obvious.

So, yes, in the short term Palin did provide a boost to the McCain campaign that it desperately needed, and it’s worth wondering what might have happened if the economic crisis had not occurred when it did, an event which clearly made it very unlikely that any Republican could win in 2008.

Nonetheless, it’s also pretty clear that Palin’s negatives were incredibly high for a Vice-Presidential running mate and, she clearly ended up being a drag on the ticket:

A growing number of voters have concluded that Senator John McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, is not qualified to be vice president, weighing down the Republican ticket in the last days of the campaign, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

All told, 59 percent of voters surveyed said Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up nine percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favor Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee.

And in a possible indication that the choice of Ms. Palin has hurt Mr. McCain’s image, voters said they had much more confidence in Mr. Obama to pick qualified people for his administration than they did in Mr. McCain.

That was from October 31st, just five days before Election Day.

And we know what happened on that day.

So, in the end, while Palin may have given the McCain campaign an initial bounce that no other running mate would have, it’s eminently clear that she ended up doing far more harm than good.