David Frum:
2) From the beginning, the internal controversy (such as it is) over Sarah Palin has been a controversy not about Palin herself, but about John McCain. What kind of a decision-maker is he? How much information and consideration does he bring to bear?
If John McCain gambled on Palin without adequate research and preparation, the fact that he won his gamble does not reassure me very much. Gamblers sometimes do win. But the longer they play, the more they lose.
When I think of gambling, I think of two people, a family member and my friend, whom we’ll call Bill. The family member used to go to casinos occaisionally and play slot machines. She did this to amuse herself, and, win or lose, it generally worked. Almost certainly the long-term trend was losing, but that wasn’t really the point.
My friend Bill, on the other hand, is an actor and a math savant who played poker at casinos for spending money throughout college. When he’d get close to broke, he’d use the last of his money to buy a train ticket to a casino and a few chips to start himself off. And the next morning he’d leave with $500 in his pocket. True, even great poker players have bad nights. Luck is still a factor, but it’s not a very big one, and the definite long-term trend is winning
So when people off-handedly say that something is “a gamble,” I always ask myself what sort of gamble it is. The later sort, the types of gambles Bill took, are more correctly thought of as calculated risks. I think that accurately describes the Palin pick. She’s the governor of a frickin’ state, so there’s a lot of easily accessible information out there on her; idiots insisting that McCain didn’t know much about her are simply stupid. But she’s never been tested on a national stage, and this is certainly higher pressure than Alaska politics. So there’s a chance she’d fall apart.
Any pick, though, would have been a calculated risk. Picking the “safe” Romney would be betting on his inherent weirdness and stiffness not turning off voters; picking the “safe” Pawlenty would be betting that people would have actually paid attention to him; picking Liebermarn would have been betting that Republicans wouldn’t care that they disagreed with him on almost every issue. I think the Palin pick has both lower risks than all of these, and higher possible rewards. It was a smart risk, with significantly higher upsides than all other possibilities.
Posted by Apollo in Audacity of Hype, Philosophy, Politics