McCain's Alaska Gamble

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - In choosing Sarah Palin, John McCain made the most interesting vice-presidential pick in a generation — and, quite possibly, the most reckless. Both things can be true at once, and by November we will know which one mattered.

The case for the pick is genuine. Palin is a reformer who took on her own party's machine in Alaska and won. She is young, charismatic and unscripted in a cycle dominated by consultants. She gives social conservatives a reason to vote rather than merely a reason to tolerate.

The case against it is just as genuine. The presidency McCain seeks would make him, on Inauguration Day, a 72-year-old cancer survivor — the oldest man ever to assume the office. "A heartbeat away" is not a figure of speech this year; it is an actuarial sentence. Palin has governed a state of 670,000 people for twenty months.

McCain's central argument against Barack Obama has been unreadiness. His own campaign has now elevated a running mate with a fraction of Obama's national experience. Voters may conclude that experience, like patriotism, is invoked selectively.

History offers one certainty: vice-presidential picks rarely win elections, but they have lost them. McCain has bet that Palin will be judged on her story. The country is about to find out, at the speed of modern politics, what the story is.

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