Only hours after Barack Obama's brilliant nomination acceptance speech in Denver last year, John McCain sent home Tim Pawlenty, Tom Ridge, and Mitt Romney -- all of whom were waiting with him for the possibility of picking up his VP nod -- and at 3AM, McCain instead selected Sarah Palin. She wasn't there with him that night, she hadn't even been properly vetted, and she had met McCain only once. So WHY did he pick her???
NY-23 is why.
Reconstruction in the late 1800's may have restored the Union politically, but not culturally. Southern Conservatism -- with its racist bent -- was never defeated in the hearts and minds of the Southern people. The KKK was born, lynchings and Jim Crow abounded, not only in the South, but mostly.
In the 1940's, Harry Truman -- who we here at dKos don't talk about enough -- picked up on some of Franklin Roosevelt's unfulfilled wishes to improve race relations in this country in the early 1900's and ordered the racial integation America's Armed Forces.
In the 1960's, Lyndon Johnson gave the Republican Party our Democratic Southern Conservative racists with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan winked and nodded their assent in the 1970's and 1980's as they employed "The Southern Strategy". In 1994, Newt Gingrich used them once again to initiate his takeover of Congress, and in the 2000 Primary in South Carolina, Southern Conservatives in the GOP destroyed McCain's presidential campaign and destroyed it again in 2008 by refusing to support him if he dared to pick a moderate to be his VP.
Thanks to Southern Conservatives, there would never be a "President McCain", and surely he came to feel it in his bones on the night of Obama's speech in Denver.
So perhaps in a silent fit of rage that he is famous for -- or perhaps quite calculatedly -- Senator McCain decided to do our country another great service by using then-Governor Palin to destroy the very Southern Conservatives who had destroyed him.
Senator McCain had to know that, however brainless she might be, with her charisma and good looks, she would become an idol to Southern Conservatives hoping to launch a complete takeover of the GOP with a purge of all its moderates. By making Sarah Palin their Siren, he knew that she would lead Southern Conservatives to their final political ruination.
The demise of Southern Conservatives as a significant political force in America is imminent, and we owe it to Presidents Lincoln, Truman, and Johnson, and now to close the circle, I add to that list of distinguished American political leaders another Republican -- Senator John McCain -- and I say quite sincerely, THANK YOU, JOHN McCAIN for performing that act of service to our country.
Thank you, for sacrificing whatever last shred of hope you had of winning the presidency, and choosing instead to use your political power to destroy Southern Conservatism.
Let it be said that in 2008, YOU, Senator McCain, took the final political step necessary to close out the American Civil War, the endgame of which is finally being played out this very Election Day in NY-23.