With McCain As Nominee, Does It Matter That Palin Backed Buchanan?
08/31/2008
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Our Alaskan friend Ryan Kennedy writes to note that GOP VP-designate Sarah Palin was a member of the "Buchanan Brigades" that carried the state's straw poll for Pat Buchanan in 1996.

Of course, this is very interesting. (Did McCain know? Is the GOP Establishment now prepared to admit that Buchanan was not the Devil Incarnate? - because the MSM will want to know.)

But it doesn't obviate Patrick Cleburne's points that (a) we don't know Palin's views on immigration and (b) Palin is, undeniably, an affirmative action hire. (Heather Mac Donald makes the same point here, so it must be respectable).

Unfortunately, picking Palin is going to make it difficult for McCain to campaign against affirmative action/ quotas although this devastating wedge issue has actually presented itself to him in 2008, by getting itself on several state ballots.

But even the quota issue is nothing compared to the potential power of the immigration issue, as witness yet another account of American workers spontaneously applauding as illegal aliens were rounded up and led away in the Howard Industries raid this week:

Immigrant raid divides a Mississippi town Many black and white residents of Laurel applaud the crackdown; it sends fear through the Latino community. Political change may end such raids, by Miguel Bustillo and Richard Fausett, Los Angeles Times, August 31, 2008)

"They need to go and do this in every little town," Tonya Jackson said.

Jackson, who is black, said that over the years she had applied numerous times for a job at the locally owned manufacturer, which employs about 4,000 workers. Jackson, 30, said she never received a callback. The raid, she said, was a welcome purge of illegal Latino laborers who had taken jobs they didn't deserve.

"We've been here all our lives," she said. "And it seems like they have just arrived and are getting the nice cars and the good homes."

Her stance puts her at odds with Obama. The Democratic presidential nominee's website describes such raids as "ineffective" measures that have "placed all the burdens of a broken system onto immigrant families."

McCain staffers are justifying the Palin pick in terms of staggeringly conventional stupidity:

As one McCain aide put it: "We either get Hillary's voters and we win, or we don't. It's not a mystery." Said another: "This campaign is all about the middle."
McCain's New Palin McCain's decision prompts one important question: Huh?, by John Dickerson, Slate, August 29, 2008.

Too bad McCain's campaign is not about America. Then it might even win.

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