BlogWonks

While the Obama supporters are fairly delusional in their thinking that Sarah Palin was a last minute desperation pick in response to their sensational convention, the reality isn’t even close. Sarah Palin has been under consideration for months to be John McCains’s running mate, and was even the front runner for most of that time.

Far from being a last-minute tactical move or a second choice when better known alternatives were eliminated, Palin was very much in McCain’s thinking from the beginning of the selection process, according to McCain’s advisers. The 44-year-old governor made every cut as the first list of candidates assembled last spring was slowly winnowed. The more McCain learned about her, the more attracted he was to her as someone who shared his maverick, anti-establishment instincts.

“He looked at her like a kindred spirit,” said one close adviser, who declined to be identified in order to speak more freely. “Someone who wasn’t afraid to take tough positions.”

Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager and the person at the point of the vice presidential process, said there was no abrupt change of course in the final hours. Nor, he said, was Palin selected without having gone through the full vetting process that was done for other finalists. That process included reviews of financial and other personal data, an FBI background check and considerable discussion among the handful of McCain advisers involved in the deliberations.

“Nobody was vetted less or more than anyone in the final stages, and John had access to all that information and made the decision,” Davis said. “It’s really not much more complicated than that.”

In part to blunt criticism that McCain had pulled a last-minute switch and turned to Palin without all the information he may have needed to make a decision, some of those advisers shared details yesterday about the steps that led to McCain’s choice, mostly on a not-for-attribution basis.

Six people were involved in the secretive deliberations that led to Palin’s selection: McCain; his wife, Cindy; campaign manager Davis; longtime confidant Mark Salter; senior adviser Steve Schmidt; and key strategist Charlie Black. In addition, Washington lawyer A.B. Culvahouse oversaw the vetting.

Starting last spring, the inner circle met regularly with McCain to review and discuss an initial list of about three dozen possible choices. “He and several of us had multiple meetings,” one adviser said. “Discussions, strengths and weaknesses of all the candidates. He asked a lot of questions and listened — didn’t tip his hand to too many of us. He was very insistent that this process often wounds people, and we were to stay very quiet.”

The desperation pick was Obama choosing Joe Biden to add foreign policy experience, even though Biden has been wrong about many major foreign policy issues during his Senate tenure, such as opposing the troop surge in Iraq and favoring splitting Iraq into three different regions rather than having it remain a unified country. Picking Biden demolished Obama’s claim that his campaign was about “change” since Biden’s been in the Senate for 35 years. On the other hand, Palin fosters McCain’s maverick image very well. They are very much complementary, and rather than a desperation choice, Palin was an aggressive choice by a  candidate wanting to play offense rather than defense.