My worry about Palin is that she shares McCain’s primary weakness — that she has a tendency to substitute a moral philosophy for a political philosophy.
The pundit, having defined the problem, proceeds to prescribe the antidote to the hypothetical:
If McCain is elected ... [h]e really needs someone to impose a policy structure on his moral intuitions. He needs a very senior person who can organize a vast administration and insist that he tame his lone-pilot tendencies and work through the established corridors — the National Security Council, the Domestic Policy Council. He needs a near-equal who can turn his instincts, which are great, into a doctrine that everybody else can predict and understand.
Kind of like what the 43rd president has in Dick Cheney, except (to paraphrase Brooks):
Once GWB was elected, everyone knew he really needed someone to structure his photo ops to hide a policy structure dictated by the energy industry, wall street, the neo-cons, AIPAC, and the theo-cons. He needed a very senior person to fill a vast administration with ideologically pure loyalists and insist that policy be carried out behind closed doors always "for reasons of national security." He needed a low profile puppet-master pulling the strings, who could turn Bush's talents for winning elections and bamboozling the media and the public, which were great, into a messianic cult of personality and war propaganda aimed at desensitizing the population into oblvious acceptance of a permanent state of war, never-ending tax cuts for the wealthy (and the media elites), and a gutting of the government's ability in providing services or money for any except the wealthy and the war machine.
None have, or likely ever will again, so perfectly matched a president suited for nothing more than photo ops, hyping propaganda, and running a permanent campaign, with the ability to implement policy so secretly and wage war so openly.
