with the pick of Sarah Palin, John McCain just lost a voter that should have been a guaranteed vote for him.
(Under the link)
My mother-in-law is a low information voter, but has a strong sense of civic responsibility. That has translated to her voting Republican in every single election she's ever been old enough to vote in. Her life experiences fit in very well with the traditionalist, God and country, fiscally conservative, anti-abortion Republican propaganda of the last 30 years, and she's only recently become sophisticated enough to question that.
She grew up in a community of old-country Eastern European immigrants, and she and the family are devout Catholics. Her father was a small business owner, and she was raised to be frugal to an extreme. She never went to college, and was a stay-at-home wife and mom for the first 15-16 years of her marriage. Her father was a vocal Republican, and her husband, my FiL, is a sarcastic, slightly misogynistic old-school traditionalist who thinks anyone who doesn't vote Republican is stupid and has no qualms about telling them so. She also believes in highly traditional roles for husbands and wives. She is constantly amazed that her son, my husband, cooks and cleans and takes care of our child, and considers me quite strange that I work as much as I do and let him into the kitchen.
She is truly a naive woman, despite having raised four children. She really hasn't had or taken the opportunity to broaden her horizons. At times, this is sad, because she refuses to travel with her husband and misses out on family experiences because "she's a homebody." Other times, this naivete borders on the ridiculous - as a case in point, my husband once had the uncomfortable experience of having her ask him " What's a blow job?" when they were watching a video of Good Morning Vietnam. he was a college freshman at the time, and the best he could manage was a strangled "Go ask Dad."
I've known her for close to 20 years, and she's become slightly more worldly in that time, but it's taken three of the four kids moving to far points of the globe and her discovery of the internet to get her to where she is today. She showed some slight interest in Hillary because she was a woman of her own generation, but really more because she wanted to learn more about her. She does live in an area that's been hard-hit in the last 8 years, so she might have been more receptive to voting against McCain, but I'm not sure that even that would have been enough, even if Hillary had been on the ticket.
Then McCain picked Sarah Palin.
My MiL called us up today and unprompted, told us that she planned to vote for a Democrat for the first time in her life, because "McCain is old, and Sarah Palin has absolutely no experience. I can't in good faith vote for that ticket."
Well done, McCain - you've provided a growing experience for my MiL.