Kevin Drum

RUSSIA'S SPHERE OF INFLUENCE....Today brings news that Russia is happily playing the neo-Cold War game too:

President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia on Sunday laid out what he said would become his government's guiding principles of foreign policy after its landmark conflict with Georgia — notably including a claim to a "privileged" sphere of influence in the world.

....In his unabashed claim to a renewed Russian sphere of influence, Mr. Medvedev said: "Russia, like other countries in the world, has regions where it has privileged interests. These are regions where countries with which we have friendly relations are located."

Asked whether this sphere of influence would be the border states around Russia, he answered, "It is the border region, but not only."

Noted without comment, except to say that this is exactly the kind of time when you'd like to have a steady hand on the foreign policy tiller. John McCain, who apparently gives these kinds of situations about five minutes thought before tossing off a depth charge just to see how it sounds on the evening news, is not that kind of guy.

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GRANDMA SARAH....The latest from the campaign trail:

The 17-year-old daughter of Gov. Sarah Palin, John McCain's running mate, is five months pregnant, Senator McCain's campaign advisers announced today.

The daughter, Bristol, plans to marry the father, the campaign said.

In a statement, Mrs. Palin said: "Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows that she has our unconditional love and support."

....The campaign intends to cast this as the kind of situation that ordinary American families face.

Best wishes to Bristol. I hope, however, that the McCain campaign won't actually cast this as anything, and I also hope the national media manages to restrain itself covering this story. Sure, it's news, but report it and then let it go.

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FOCUS GROUP HELL....I confess that I've always been sort of weirdly fascinated with Joe Klein's periodic reports on Frank Luntz's focus groups. I can't really say why, since I don't have any idea whether the data they produce is at all reliable, but the fascination persists. Today, Klein reports that Luntz's latest batch of independents was deeply unimpressed with prospective vice president Sarah Palin:

Only one person said Palin made him more likely to vote for McCain; about half the 25-member group raised their hands when asked if Palin made them less likely to vote for McCain. They had a negative impression of Palin by a 2-1 margin...a fact that was reinforced when they were given hand-dials and asked to react to Palin's speech at her first appearance with McCain on Friday — the dials remained totally neutral as Palin went through her heart-warming(?) biography, and only blipped upwards when she said she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere — which wasn't quite the truth, as we now know.

Klein also reports that far from neutralizing McCain's age issue, his choice of Palin actually intensifies it — something I anticipated months ago when people were talking up the even younger Bobby Jindal as a potential running mate. Luntz apparently thinks this debacle can be salvaged with a good convention speech, but I think Klein's take is the more clear-eyed one: "They really saw this pick as a gimmick — and one that reflected badly on John McCain's judgment."

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THE RETURN OF THE MAYBERRY MACHIAVELLIS....Marc Ambinder reports this morning about the vetting — or, rather, lack of vetting — that John McCain and his team carried out on Sarah Palin before announcing her to the world on Friday. Despite the fact that legions of bloggers figured this stuff out within 48 hours, apparently they didn't know that Palin had actually supported, not opposed, the Bridge to Nowhere; that the true scope of the "Troopergate" scandal she's enmeshed in is a wee bit larger than she fessed up to; that she raised taxes and public debt substantially as mayor of Wasilla; that she supported a windfall profits tax on oil companies as governor of Alaska; and that she's skeptical about human contributions to global warming. McCain's team talked to very few people in Alaska who knew Palin, didn't do much (any?) archival research on her, and McCain himself had barely even met her before he offered her the job.

So why did she get the nod? Hard to say. George Bush met with Vladimir Putin for a couple of hours back in 2001 and immediately announced that "I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul." McCain, likewise, after campaigning with Sarah Palin for a few hours on Saturday, went on TV the next day to announce, "She's a partner and a soulmate."

So sure: this is vintage McCain at work. His choice of Palin was naive, cynical, reckless, and impulsive. But what about his staff? Why did they go along?

Well, in case you've ever wondered what John DiIulio meant when he described the Bush White House as "the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis," I think this is it. DiIulio was talking about an executive staff that cared almost nothing for substantive policy, and was instead obsessed with junior high school levels of political cleverness. How will this play with the base? How will it put Democrats into a corner? How can we twist the real intent of legislation so that nobody knows what's really going on? What are the political angles? What congressional districts will this put in play?

I'd guess that the same thing is going on here. You can almost hear the McCain staff cackling in the background, can't you? Palin will draw off disaffected Hillary supporters! Her Down syndrome baby will totally sucker the base into falling in love with McCain! Joe Biden is going to have to walk on eggshells to avoid looking like a bully during the vice presidential debate! If anyone even remotely close to the Obama campaign says anything we can even remotely pretend is sexist, we'll trumpet it to the skies and the press will eat it up! Sure, maybe Palin isn't prepared for the actual job itself, but just look at the box it puts Democrats in! Politically it's genius!

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