Sarah Palin and identity politics

I was in the shower this morning -- where I do some of my best thinking, probably to the detriment of my actual hygene -- when I had a moment of insight: If John McCain loses this election, you can expect certain conservatives to eventually use it as a reason to condemn affirmative action, "identity politics" and any other effort to help women or minorities get ahead.

Follow me here. I think we can largely agree that McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate mostly for reasons of identity politics: McCain wanted to stick a thumb in Barack Obama's eye -- and maybe pick up a few Hillary Clinton fans along the way -- by picking a female running mate. Sarah Palin had the social conservative bona fides, so -- presto! -- she was picked. And Republicans were gleeful about turning the ol' identity game (one that they'd long decried) back on Democrats.

And then Palin started visiting the media. And in nearly every case -- with the exceptions of visits to friendly "journalists" such as Hugh Hewitt or Sean Hannity -- proved herself woefully unprepared for the job she sought. It's hard to imagine a scenario unfolding in the next few weeks in which she undoes that impression, or the damage it has created.

So if McCain loses, I think we can expect to see my predicted attacks. "See?" we'll hear -- I'm guessing at The Corner. "Promoting somebody just because they're a woman or black only does damage."

And to an extent, I suppose, they'll be right.

Conservatives would contend otherwise, but I've always thought that (for example) affirmative action -- at its best -- creates a more meritocratic society. In education, it provides opportunities for people to obtain qualifications that would've been difficult for them to otherwise obtain. And in the professional world (in which your ability to do a job is only part of the reason you get hired; often, it also includes who you know), it provided opportunities to break through the network of "good ol' boy" defenses to allow qualified people -- people from outside the GOB network -- and chance to penetrate the inner circle.

Has this system been perfect? Of course not. And those imperfections have allowed conservative critics to paint affirmative action, identity politics, etc., as the precise opposite of a meritocratic system. And because they saw those efforts in caricatured terms -- "Give a minority a job, regardless of other qualifications." -- they stumbled badly when they used Palin to try to play the game.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both the fruits of a Democratic Party system that has made real efforts to reach out to women and minorities. In other words: Yes, they got to where they were in large part because they were a woman and black, respectively. And yet: I think it's established by now that -- whatever you think of their politics -- they're both familiar with the issues facing this country and the political landscape it's played on. They're qualified for the job, in other words.

Sarah Palin isn't. But that will be ignored in the campaign aftermath -- assuming, again, that McCain loses. There's a joke that Republicans have proved the inefficacy of government by their own ineptness at running it. I think we're about to see a similar dynamic with identity issues.