summer, seeking to soothe their concerns and coalesce their support, he was hammered with a constant refrain: He needed a conservative, pro-life running mate to offset the right’s reservations about him.
The problem was, none of the conventional “short list” choices was appealing to McCain. He didn’t care for Romney. He couldn’t relate to Huckabee. He thought Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and Florida governor Charlie Crist were boring. In a contest against Barack Obama, the dynamic young Illinois senator who had outlasted Hillary Clinton and was marching toward history as the nation’s first black president, McCain would not win by being conventional.
What McCain wanted to do—what he told senior aides he would do—was pick his close friend Joe Lieberman.
A former Democrat turned independent who shared McCain’s hawkish foreign policy views, Lieberman would accentuate the Republican nominee’s strengths: independent-minded, muscular on national security matters, experienced, and ready to govern on day one.
It wouldn’t be that simple, however. Lieberman was pro-choice, an apostasy that McCain’s advisers warned could shatter his uneasy alliance with the GOP base. McCain learned this lesson for himself in mid-August after suggesting to the Weekly Standard that former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge was under consideration, noting that Ridge’s pro-choice position wasn’t a deal breaker.9 If this were a trial balloon, its pop registered on the Richter scale. The blowback—delegates threatening to defeat his choice at the convention, activist leaders saying their constituencies might sit out the election entirely—convinced McCain to heed the advice of his brain trust. Lieberman could not join the ticket.
It was time to panic. With the convention weeks away, the presumptive Republican nominee had no clue whom to choose as his running mate. Obama was consistently leading in the polls, and all the fundamentals—unpopular president, dragging economy, change election—were in his favor. The circumstances called for a bold stroke, a daring maneuver from the maverick. But the base would revolt over Lieberman. McCain felt helpless, irritated by the quandary and underwhelmed by his options. Who could possibly shake up the race and excite conservatives?
CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS SPENT THE SUMMER ATTEMPTING TO shift the national argument from two wars and a looming recession to friendlier terrain: energy. With gas prices soaring and Democrats opposing new means of exploration, the GOP tried to frame an exaggerated contrast between the parties: one looking out for the far-left environmental lobby, one looking out for working families struggling to fill their tanks.
As part of the initiative, Ohio congressman John Boehner, who after the 2006 election had succeeded Hastert as the top House Republican, led a delegation of GOP legislators to tour energy sites in Colorado and Alaska. When the group arrived on the remote North Slope, they were met by a forty-four-year-old first-term governor most had never heard of. By the time they left, the men in the group were remarking to one another: Sarah Palin had a great physique.
Nobody returned to Washington raving about Palin as a prodigy. To the extent that she was recalled by the congressmen to their friends and staff members, it was that governor of Alaska is a knockout. The thought of Palin as national timber simply did not compute. She had spunk and self-confidence by the barrelful, but was far removed, physically and intellectually, from the debates driving Washington policymaking. The only prominent Republican hawking Palin for VP was Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who had met her on his own trip to Alaska. When Kristol called Palin his vice-presidential “heartthrob” on Fox News Sunday, just days after the delegation trip concluded, the congressmen sneered at the prospect of a pinup following in the footsteps of Dick Cheney, Nelson Rockefeller, and Hubert Humphrey.
What they didn’t know was that McCain’s campaign had been in contact with Palin.
It seemed unserious at first; McCain had met Governor Palin just once, and briefly, at a meeting of the National Governors Association. But with time running out, and the door suddenly slammed on the prospect of either Lieberman or Ridge, McCain’s team flagged Palin as a last-second Hail Mary.
Intrigued, McCain spoke with Palin by phone on August 24—eight days before the GOP convention was set to convene in the Twin Cities of Minnesota.10 The call was ostensibly to quiz the Alaska governor on her answers to McCain’s vetting questionnaire. But for Steve Schmidt, the campaign’s pugilistic senior strategist and its staunchest pro-Palin advocate, it was meant to get McCain comfortable with the only checks-all-the-boxes option available. Four days later, after a last-ditch plea from McCain to his staff to let him