The New York Times' Jonathan Martin reports, based on receiving a prepublication copy of his book, that Sen. John McCain regrets selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. McCain is said to believe he should have gone with his gut instinct to select Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Democrat turned Independent.
I figure he'd have lost either way and the last thing I want to contemplate is how badly a McCain presidency would have turned out. Instead this mention has me thinking about Gov. Sarah Palin, stylistically and otherwise.
It occurs to me Gov. Palin was a leading indicator of the groundswell movement that elected Donald Trump. Like Trump, she was intuitive, free-wheeling, unpolished and populist/conservative.
Timing, they say, is everything. There was clearly in 2008 a substantial market for what Palin was selling, but it wasn't yet large enough to take someone to the White House. Plus, she didn't have the billions needed to self-fund a primary campaign.
Still, had we of the pundit class been wise enough to read the tea leaves, her popularity signaled a growing receptivity that Donald Trump exploited when it reached critical mass. Honestly, I don't think anybody understood what her popularity meant, at the time.
