Dreams made manifest

Got a little afterglow going on? Me too.

What a week! The sheer stagecraft of this Democratic event has been stunning, the events building on one another like layers of music in a symphony. There was a good deal of parsing over whether it started too softly … over whether Obama had given the Clinton’s too much — over the use of persuasion rather than a big stick to clobber the Pubs and McRib. Each improbable moment was anticipated with angst, and a wary eye to the response of the listener, yet each improved the mood and built toward crescendo.

Me? I just appreciated the subtlety and nuance of the growing strains, finding no false notes excepting those moments when the pundits interrupted with their constant braying. Much like the tight-as-a-tick campaign machine Obama has built, this four-day event was perfectly orchestrated, beautifully phrased, moment by moment, leading us forward … taking us somewhere. Remember: this is not a campaign, my dears — this is a MOVEMENT … underscored by sincerity and intelligence and appeal to our Higher Angels.

It started with Michelle — then Hillary and Bill — then Joe and a legion of prominent Dems that provided their bits and pieces to amp up the volume. And last night, a stunning achievement from Obama, who stood, fire in his eye and comfortable in his skin before 80,000 in-flesh supporters and a world that was waiting to hear about hope — and he delivered … oh my, yes he did. Even the conservative pundits stood back in awe; consider, if you will, that religious-Righty Pat Buchanan could find nothing to criticize and everything to admire.

Barack had to do the impossible in that speech — address so many issues and relieve so many doubts that even the nation’s speechwriters were worried it couldn’t possibly happen in 45 minutes … but it did. He covered every question, and gracefully. If he can achieve in a presidency what he has given us as a candidate, we’ll turn this dark American page quickly.

Everything about this convention, this moment, has been historic — but that only seems an afterthought to me. This wasn’t simply a victory for civil rights and people of color … it is victory for all Americans. This was victory for a waiting world. This is heart stuff, plain and simple. If you didn’t hear the music, your heart is closed; and we can’t wait for you to catch up. We will just have to drag you along with us.

I watched the speech at a Dem party — and before the confetti finished dropping, I said, “OK, now let’s get to work.” My buddy down the street, Fishin’ Jim, is housing an Obama organizer in his spare room, a bright young man from Pennsylvania who is attempting to cover two counties in the red-leaning Pea Patch. In the coming weeks, I will be giving time to this project; helping out where I can.

There are a few reads below, including Garrison Keilor — the best, I think, is from conservative Andrew Sullivan, whose disenchantment with Bush has opened him bit by bit over the last years. The last piece is … gasp … breaking news from the opposition regarding a moment of risk that looks so desperate as to be befuddling.

Johnny McSame has just selected Alaska Governor Sara Palin as his Veep; in the last weeks, Obama has gotten hard-earned points for selecting Biden as an indication of both his seriousness and his political savvy. Selection of Veep is the first “presidential” call a candidate makes. And …

John chose … Sara; conservative Christian and soccer Mom. Dark horse choice … or maybe, more cynically, My Little Pony, and a new gal John can suggest enter a biker beauty contest. This may put Joe at a courtly disadvantage, and require him to take on a coloration of non-sexist skill not typical of his generation. Wouldn’t it be funny to see the Pub’s coming down on the Dem’s for sexism!? Yes … and no, with so much at stake. But … seriously … Sara can stand up against Joe Biden on foreign policy?

So Johnny’s a “reformer” today, a real maverick — and yet his constituency is misogynistic and ‘old school.’ Hell, strike that – his supporters are just plain old; old in attitude, in vision and in chronology. His Christocrats will be marginally pleased, but no actual cigar. And carrying Alaska is hardly worth the gamble. This feels a lot like drinking the hemlock, doesn’t it? It also undercuts the “ready for leadership” question — Mac’s no spring chicken and that’s a national concern.

Sara’s ready to lead the free world, is she??? I can only wonder what’s going through my Dad’s head right this moment … how he’s trying to reconcile this news with all that comforts him about his flailing party and his fading paradigm.

Here’s your mantra for the next few weeks, when talking politics:

Sara … who, again??

Everything will turn even more interesting now … but no less challenging. And it’s vital to remember that nothing here is a done deal. This Democratic campaign is Martin-esque, in its dream — Kennedy-esque, in its vision. Only WE can make that happen in real time … and, given todays news, we’ve got everything going for us.

As Obama pointed out so profoundly, this is about US. People are newly willing to listen; arm yourself with facts and a renewed sense of diplomacy … and let’s get to work!

You’ll find the web edition of a heckava Weekly, here — share this with your friends. It helps us … and it will lift them.

Jude

America’s Promise
Acceptance speech by Barack Obama
YouTube

The Hope We Confess
Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish
28 Aug 2008 11:18 pm

It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety. It was a liberal speech, more unabashedly, unashamedly liberal than any Democratic acceptance speech since the great era of American liberalism. But it made the case for that liberalism - in the context of the decline of the American dream, and the rise of cynicism and the collapse of cultural unity. His ability to portray that liberalism as a patriotic, unifying, ennobling tradition makes him the most lethal and remarkable Democratic figure since John F Kennedy.

What he didn’t do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism. And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again … and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check.

He took every assault on him and turned them around. He showed not just that he understood the experience of many middle class Americans, but that he understood how the Republicans have succeeded in smearing him. And he didn’t shrink from the personal charges; he rebutted them. Whoever else this was, it was not Adlai Stevenson. It was not Jimmy Carter. And it was less afraid and less calculating than Bill Clinton.

Above all, he took on national security - face on, full-throttle, enraged, as we should all be, at how disastrously American power has been handled these past eight years. He owned this issue in a way that no Democrat has owned it since Kennedy. That’s a transformative event. To my mind, it is vital that both parties get to own the war on Jihadist terror and that we escape this awful Rove-Morris trap that poisons the discourse into narrow and petty partisan abuse of patriotism. Obama did this tonight. We are in his debt.

Look: I’m biased at this point. I’m one of those people, deeply distressed at what has happened to America, deeply ashamed of my own misjudgments, who has shifted out of my ideological comfort zone because this man seems different to me, and this moment in history seems different to me. I’m not sure we have many more chances to get off the addiction to foreign oil, to prevent a calamitous terrorist attack, to restore constitutional balance in the hurricane of a terror war.

I’ve said it before - months and months ago. I should say it again tonight. This is a remarkable man at a vital moment. America would be crazy to throw this opportunity away. America must not throw this opportunity away.

Know hope. ++

This Is Our Last Time
Bob Fertik, Democrats.com
August 28, 2008

Last night the Democratic Party made history by nominating the first major-party African-American candidate for President, Barack Obama.

Tonight, Barack Obama will accept our nomination. It is fitting that a 20,000 seat arena isn’t remotely large enough to mark this moment. Even a 75,000 seat stadium will be too small and many will be turned away.

Rightwingers will mock the white columns. Everyone else in America and the world will marvel at the black man who stands before them.

Incredibly, it was the first viable feminist candidate, Hillary Clinton, who put him over the top. In that single act, the parallel lines of the civil rights and feminist movements met to transform American history.

And we did it through the oldest and largest political party in the world - the party that once fought civil rights - our party, the Democratic Party.

Barack Obama will stand firmly on the ground, but really he stands on the shoulders of giants. Traveling back in time we must recognize those who made his candidacy possible: presidential candidates Rev. Jesse Jackson and Shirley Chisholm, who broke the race and sex barriers to the presidency; presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, who put powerful blacks and women in their cabinets; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose vivid dream (45 years ago today, also in front of Greek columns) we are finally trying to realize; Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Marion Anderson (who sang in front of Greek columns); presidents Lyndon Johnson (born 100 years ago today), John Kennedy, Harry Truman, and Franklin Roosevelt, who dismantled American apartheid; Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who struggled for 72 years so women could vote; Harriett Tubman (quoted by Hillary Clinton) and Frederick Douglass, who were born into slavery and freed America’s slaves; and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who gave us the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution with the Bill of Rights, the Democratic Party, and lots of beautiful Greek columns.

Of course none of those giants stood alone. Each rose to fame and power with popular movements, who fought in the streets and the battlefields, the voter registration offices and the voting booths for their controversial causes.

And to elect Barack Obama as our first African-American President, we who are alive today must do the same.

We Democrats were never really divided. But the Corporate Media wanted to make us look divided, and they had the power to project their Bie Lie into every American home. America’s shared “reality” is nothing more than the image projected by the Wizards of Oz, the scheming profiteers at who hide behind their corporate curtains with the logos of FOX, NBC, and CNN.

Our truth-sniffing Toto’s work in progressive media and blogs. They can pull back the curtains to expose the fraudulent Wizards, but it takes Dorothy’s with brains, heart, and courage to find our way home. That means us - all of us.

So Barack Obama is our nominee, but this is our campaign. And we must understand the opposition we face.

We are up against the Republican Party, their corporate allies, and the Bush-Cheney-Rove White House, who will stop at nothing to keep progressive Democrats out of power, and hold them accountable for the crimes they committed over the past 8 years, including war crimes.

And we are up against the enduring emotional power of racism, which will stop at nothing to keep an African-American family out of the Master Bedroom in the All-White House.

Like the suffragists and civil rights leaders, we must lock arms and march forward, and urge our fellow citizens to support us and even join us in our historic cause.

They will be inundated with lies, but we must clearly repeat the truth.

The Republican plan is more disastrous war with Iran or Russia; less health care, education, justice and jobs; and environmental catastrophe. The Democratic plan is the opposite: ending war, more health care, education, justice and jobs; and saving the planet before it is too late. That is our choice, and it leaves us no choice.

In Berlin Barack Obama declared, “This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. Let us resolve that all nations - including my own - will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere. This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one.”

He concluded, “People of the world, this is our moment. This is our time.”

But in reality, it may be our last time. So from now until the last vote is counted and re-counted by hand if need be, we must keep our eyes on the prize and do everything we can to win. ++

Johnson’s Dream, Obama’s Speech
ROBERT A. CARO, NYT
August 28, 2008

AS I watch Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic convention tonight, I will be remembering another speech: the one that made Martin Luther King cry. And I will be thinking: Mr. Obama’s speech — and in a way his whole candidacy — might not have been possible had that other speech not been given.

That speech was President Lyndon Johnson’s address to Congress in 1965 announcing that he was about to introduce a voting rights act, and in some respects Mr. Obama’s candidacy is the climax — at least thus far — of a movement based not only on the sacrifices and heroism of the Rev. Dr. King and generations of black fighters for civil rights but also on the political genius of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who as it happens was born 100 years ago yesterday.

When, on the night of March 15, 1965, the long motorcade drove away from the White House, heading for Capitol Hill, where President Johnson would give his speech to a joint session of Congress, pickets were standing outside the gates, as they had been for weeks, and as the presidential limousine passed, they were singing the same song that was being sung that week in Selma, Ala.: “We Shall Overcome.” They were singing it in defiance of Johnson, because they didn’t trust him.

They had reasons not to trust him.

In March 1965, black Americans in the 11 Southern states were still largely unable to vote. When they tried to register, they faced not only questions impossible to answer — like the infamous “how many bubbles in a bar of soap?” — but also the humiliation of trying to answer them in front of registrars who didn’t bother to conceal their scorn. Out of six million blacks old enough to vote in those 11 states in 1965, only a small percentage — 27 percent in Georgia, 19 percent in Alabama, 6 percent in Mississippi — were registered.

What’s more, those who were registered faced not only beatings and worse but economic retaliation as well if they tried to actually cast a ballot. Black men who registered might be told by their employer that they no longer had a job; black farmers who went to the bank to renew their annual “crop loan” were turned down, and lost their farms. Some, as I have written, “had to load their wives and children into their rundown cars and drive away, sometimes with no place to go.”

So the number of black men and women in the South who actually cast a vote was far smaller than the number registered; in no way were black Americans realizing their political potential.

More important, many civil rights leaders felt that President Johnson wasn’t helping them nearly as much as he could have — and that in fact he never had. He had passed a civil rights bill in 1964, but it hadn’t been a voting rights bill.

And they remembered his record, a long record. It was not merely that during his first 20 years, 1937 through 1956, in the House and Senate, he had voted against every civil rights bill — even bills aimed at ending lynching.

Leaders of the civil rights movement who had watched their bills die, year after year, in Congress — not a single civil rights bill had been enacted since 1870 — knew that Johnson had been not merely a voter but a strategist against civil rights, a tactician so successful that Richard Russell of Georgia, the leader of the Senate’s mighty “Southern caucus,” had raised him to power in the Senate, had, in fact, made him his anointed successor as the South’s legislative leader, the young hope of the elderly Southern senators in their desperate battle to maintain racial segregation.

In 1956, by which time Lyndon Johnson was majority leader, he devised and carried out the strategy that had not only crushed a civil rights bill in the Senate by a majority greater than ever before, but had done so in a way that humiliated, in a particularly vicious manner, the liberal senator who refused to bow to his wishes, Paul Douglas of Illinois.

In 1957 he had engineered the passage of a civil rights bill. The mere fact of its passage in the face of Southern senatorial power — it was the first civil rights bill to be enacted in 87 years — made it a significant benchmark in the history of American government, and the guile and determination with which Johnson drove it to passage made it a landmark of legislative mastery as well. But he was forced to weaken it to get it through, and liberals, not understanding the obstacles he had surmounted, blamed him for not making it stronger.

Some civil rights leaders who had been talking to Lyndon Johnson since he became president were now, by the spring of 1965, convinced of his good faith, but most were not, and the mass of the movement, symbolized by those protesters outside the White House gates, still distrusted him.

Men and women who knew Lyndon Johnson, however, felt there was another element to the story. They included the Mexican-American children of impoverished migrant workers he had taught as a 21-year-old schoolteacher in the little town of Cotulla, Tex.; to the ends of their lives they would talk about how hard he had worked to teach and inspire them. “He used to tell us this country was so free that anyone could become president who was willing to work hard enough,” one student said.

Others remember what one calls the story about the “little baby in the cradle.” As one student recalled, “He would tell us that one day we might say the baby would be a teacher. Maybe the next day we’d say the baby would be a doctor. And one day we might say the baby — any baby — might grow up to be president of the United States.”

His former students weren’t alone. Men and women at Georgetown dinner tables were also convinced of the sincerity of Johnson’s intentions. “I remember at this dinner party, Johnson talking about teaching the Mexican-American kids in Cotulla, and his frustration that they had no books,” recalls Bethine Church, the wife of Senator Frank Church of Idaho. “I remember it as one of the most passionate evenings I’ve ever spent.”

These men and women felt Johnson truly wanted to help poor people and particularly people of color, and that he was held back only by his ambition: his desire to be president, and because he was a senator from a Southern state. But when, in 1957, ambition and compassion were finally pointing in the same direction — when he realized that he would never become president unless he removed the “magnolia scent” of the South — he set out to pass a civil rights bill, he did it with a passion that showed how deeply he believed in what he was doing.

The bill he got was the weak one, and civil rights leaders blamed him because the advances it made were meager. Only a week before the March 1965 speech, Dr. King had said that at the rate voter registration was going, it would take 135 years before even half the blacks in Mississippi were registered. And as the limousines were pulling through the gates that night in March, the protesters were singing “We Shall Overcome,” as if to tell Lyndon Johnson, we’ll do it without you.

But they didn’t have to.

When Johnson stepped to the lectern on Capitol Hill that night, he adopted the great anthem of the civil rights movement as his own.

“Even if we pass this bill,” he said, “the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.”

And, Lyndon Johnson said, “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”

He paused, and then he said, “And we shall overcome.”

Martin Luther King was watching the speech at the home of a family in Selma with some of his aides, none of whom had ever, during all the hard years, seen Dr. King cry. But Lyndon Johnson said, “We shall overcome” — and they saw him cry then.

And there was another indication of the power of that speech. When the motorcade returned to the White House, the protesters were gone.

Another significant moment had occurred in the Capitol after the speech, as Johnson was coming down the aisle accepting congratulations.

It wasn’t just congratulations he wanted. One of the congressmen on the aisle was Emanuel Celler, the 76-year-old chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which handled civil rights legislation. Long a rights champion but now an elderly man, Celler said he would start hearings on the bill the following week, but “I can’t push that committee or it might get out of hand.”

Suddenly, Johnson wasn’t smiling. His eyes narrowed and his face turned cold. He was still shaking Celler’s hand, but with his other hand he was jabbing at the old man. “Start them this week, Manny,” he said. “And hold night sessions, too.”

Celler did. The heroism of the march at Selma, the heroism all across the South, the almost unbelievable bravery of black men and women — and children, so many children — who marched, and were beaten, and marched again, for the right to vote, created the rising tide of national feeling behind the passage of civil rights legislation, the legislation not only of 1965 but of 1964 and 1957. That feeling did so much to make the legislation possible. It has taken me scores of pages in my books to try to describe that heroism, and all of them inadequate. But it also took Lyndon Johnson, whom the black leader James Farmer, sitting in the Oval Office, heard “cajoling, threatening, everything else, whatever was necessary” to get the 1965 bill passed and who, with his legislative genius and savage will, broke, piece by piece, in 1957 and 1964 and 1965, the long unbreakable power of the Southern bloc.

“Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans,” I have written, “but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.”

LOOK what has been wrought! Forty-three years ago, a mere blink in history’s eye, many black Americans were unable to vote. Tonight, a black American ascends a stage as nominee for president. “Just give Negroes the vote and many of these problems will get better,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Just give them the vote,” and they can do the rest for themselves.

All during this long primary campaign, after reading, first thing every morning, newspaper articles about Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency, I would turn, as part of the research for my next book, to newspaper articles from 1965 about Lyndon Johnson’s campaign to win for black people the right to vote.

And I would think about Johnson’s great speech, when he adopted the rallying cry of black protest as his own, when he joined his voice to the voices of all the men and women who had sung the mighty hymn of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King cried when he heard that speech. Since I am not black, I cannot know — cannot even imagine — Dr. King’s feelings. I know mine, however. To me, Barack Obama is the inheritor of Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legacy. As I sit listening to Mr. Obama tonight, I will be hearing other words as well. I will be hearing Lyndon Johnson saying, “We shall overcome.” ++

Robert A. Caro, who has won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, is at work on the fourth and final volume of his Johnson biography.

Rolling with the punches
Californians remind me of Londoners. They’re less jittery than the rest of us, and disaster doesn’t terrify them.
Garrison Keillor, Salon
Aug. 27, 2008

California is another country. You wake up in the morning and New York is already on its first coffee, and the first scandal has broken in Washington, one more Republican crony caught with his hand in the honey pot. It all feels very far away.

You wake up, your laptop is full of e-mails but you’re in California so you don’t have to reply to them. Your e-mailers imagine that you are busy attending some sort of Mayan fertility ceremony on a beach, bare-chested men whanging on little drums, dinging bells, naked children strewing blossoms in the surf, a priestess in a white caftan playing a Peruvian flute. Stereotypes live forever: Minnesota is cold, California is ditzy. Whereas the California I know is a land of gorgeously normal people, serious, reverent, clean, agile men and women, athletic nerds who love to surf and hike and shoot hoops and also read Frederick Buechner, listen to Bach. I grew up thinking you had to choose between smart and sexy; in California they think you can have it all.

They are less jittery than us flatlanders: Disaster does not terrify them. They roll with earthquakes, the landscape ripples, the china clinks, and so what, it’s only an earthquake. Giant mudslides and brush fires — you ride them out and you move on.

They remind me of Londoners, who are famous for rolling with the punches. The night of the horrible bombing in the Underground, the streets of London were full of people who came out to show each other and themselves that they would not be intimidated by a bunch of suicidal maniacs. And even though the danger of terrorism is very real in London, much more so than in Omaha, Neb., or Kenosha, Wis., or Tuscaloosa, Ala., the English have been stubborn in defending their freedom. You cannot be required to carry a photo ID in the U.K. The police still don’t walk around with pistols on their belts.

In this country, the attacks by terrorists opened the doors to the darkness of Dick Cheney and furtive vicious men just like him who unleashed an assault on constitutional law, hoping to turn a traumatic occasion — the twin towers burning, smoke billowing over Manhattan — into a permanent Republican majority. As so often happens, vicious men were in the saddle for a time while decent men blithered and dithered. But the ignominious fall of Mr. Giuliani was evidence that Americans have gotten over it. You can’t wave the bloody shirt anymore and expect people to fall into line.

And that’s a problem for John McCain. A great candidate for hustling neocons and owners of five or more homes, he is dead wrong about Iraq, dead wrong about the economy, and he was born 20 years too soon. But Republicans feel sorry for how he was savaged eight years ago and so they will prop the old man up, retrain him as best they can, keep him on message, stuff a rag in him when he starts kidding around.

People have lots of questions about Barack Obama and that’s as it should be. The man inspires curiosity. The problem for McCain is that Barack explains himself so well. Those people jamming basketball arenas aren’t going there to look at his shoes. If you listen to the man speak, you’re likely to vote for him. If you listen to McCain, you’re reminded of your great-uncle Elmer hashing over the injustice of MacArthur getting canned by Harry Truman. Who cares?

And then there is the Current Occupant. He’s kept quiet for a while, cutting brush, playing speed golf, treadmilling, but he’s bound to emerge in the fall, make a speech, issue a statement, do something, and this will not be good for McCain.

America has paid a terrible price for one family’s decision to take a boy out of the public schools of Midland, Texas, and send him off to Chutney or Amway or whatever his prep school was called, and then to Yale, where he picked up a permanent grudge against people who were smarter than he. A Yalie who learned to pass for redneck, a Methodist who learned to pass for evangelical, he was cut out for politics, but what a lousy administrator and what a dull, uninspiring leader.

Fewer people want more bushiness than want to see the return of infantile paralysis. And the truth is marching on. ++

bonus

McCain Chooses Palin as Running Mate
MICHAEL COOPER and ELISABETH BUMILLER
August 29, 2008

DAYTON, Ohio — In a surprise move, Senator John McCain chose Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate on Friday, shaking up the political world at a time when his campaign has been trying to attract women, especially disaffected supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, McCain officials confirmed.

In choosing Ms. Palin — a 44-year-old conservative Christian and self-described “hockey mom” who has been governor for less than two years — the McCain campaign reached far outside the Washington Beltway in an election in which the Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama, is running on a platform of change.

Ms. Palin, a former mayor of the small town of Wasilla and beauty pageant queen, first rose to prominence as a whistle-blower uncovering ethical misconduct in state government.

The selection amounted to a gamble that an infusion of new leadership — and the novelty of the Republican Party’s first female candidate for vice president — would more than compensate for the risk that Ms. Palin could undercut one of the McCain campaign’s central arguments, its claim that Mr. Obama is too inexperienced to be president.

Moreover, the choice of Ms. Palin is in stark contrast to the recent selection of the Democratic vice presidential nominee Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, a veteran lawmaker who is chairman of Foreign Relations Committee.

But Ms. Palin ran as a change agent when she was elected as governor of Alaska in 2006, and in a move that might have appealed to Mr. McCain, she took intense criticism from members of her own party for turning the spotlight on the failures of Alaska Republicans, some of whom had been beset by corruption scandals.

She opposes abortion rights, which could help pacify social conservatives in a party whose members were wary as rumors swirled that Mr. McCain might pick a running mate who supports those rights. But she differs with Mr. McCain on a controversial environmental issue that centers on her home state: she supports drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. Mr. McCain’s opposition to drilling — even after he changed positions and began advocating for off-shore oil drilling — has upset many Republicans.

The choice of Ms. Palin was a closely guarded secret, and she flew under the political radar for months as Mr. McCain searched for a running mate. Much of the public discussion in recent days had focused on Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and Mr. McCain’s one-time rival for the Republican nomination; Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota; Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania and Homeland Security secretary, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democrat-turned-independent who was former Vice President Al Gore’s running mate in 2000. Social conservatives were relieved and highly pleased.

“They’re beyond ecstatic,” said Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition. “This is a home run. She is a reformer governor who is solidly pro-life and a person of deep Christian faith. And she is really one of the bright shining new stars in the Republican firmament.”

Ms. Palin is known to conservatives for choosing not to have an abortion after learning two years ago that she was carrying a child with Down’s syndrome. “It is almost impossible to exaggerate how important that is to the conservative faith community,” Mr. Reed said.

Whether her selection will improve Mr. McCain’s appeal to women who had supported Mrs. Clinton is unclear. Both Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin oppose abortion rights, an important issue for some women. And a major theme of the Democratic convention that just concluded in Denver was both Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Bill Clinton urging supporters to unite behind Mr. Obama.

The choice of Ms. Palin was reminiscent of George H. W. Bush’s selection of Dan Quayle, a young United States senator, as his running mate in 1988. The media and most in the Republican Party were caught unaware by the announcement of a figure relatively unknown outside Indiana.

Similarly, several of Mr. McCain’s outside advisers reacted with bewilderment that Ms. Palin was the choice, and one said that it would undercut one of Mr. McCain’s central criticisms of Senator Obama — that he is too inexperienced to be commander in chief.

“While it’s a dramatic and interesting choice, it would make the argument he’s making difficult to make,” said the adviser, who is close to the campaign.

The confirmation of Mr. McCain’s selection of Ms. Palin came barely an hour before he was to introduce her to the nation here and at the end of a chaotic and at times comic morning of media reports that veered from possibility to possibility.

The two men who been widely reported as recently as Thursday evening to be on Mr. McCain’s short list — Mr. Romney and Governor Pawlenty — were eliminated by mid-morning Friday.

Attention then turned to reports that a chartered Gulfstream jet had arrived near Dayton from Anchorage late Thursday, suggesting that Ms. Palin was on it. ++

Mitchell L. Blumenthal and Michael Grynbaum contributed reporting from New York.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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