"As an 80-year-old cancer survivor, I know about life's uncertainties. I'm sure John McCain, a 72-year-old cancer survivor, does too. I'm an optimist and look forward to many more good years. I wish the same for Senator McCain.

But he knows, as I know, that one cannot be certain. For that reason, he is obliged to choose as his vice presidential running mate someone he is confident would make a good president. All other factors influencing his choice (and our reaction to it) must be secondary, tertiary, or irrelevant. Sarah Palin, he tells us, is someone we can trust with the presidency of the United States.

For most Americans, the announcement of his choice was met with a universal question: Sarah who?

Like others, I have more to learn about Ms. Palin. But, with the magic of the internet, the ubiquity of cable television and radio talk shows, the more sober reporting of public television and radio, and the avalanche of magazine and newspaper commentary, we can pick our way through the maze of information and misinformation to form a picture of the experience and beliefs she would bring to the White House.

With her two years in the state legislature, mayor of a small town (6,715, according to its web site), and Alaska's governor for the past 18 months, she could hardly have been McCain's pick because of her experience in public life. The little she has had gives her almost no insights into either national or world affairs. What she would bring to the presidency, in place of informing experience, is a set of strongly-held beliefs with shallow roots in reading, reflection, and life experience.

As president, if she acted on her known beliefs, she would deny abortion to victims of rape and incest; favor creationism as the equal of evolution in public education; encourage skepticism about global warming; favor oil interests over saving the environment; oppose gun ownership legislation designed to thwart mayhem and murder in the cities; and much else that makes the possibility of her as president frightening to contemplate, shameful to advocate.

Senator McCain is too smart not to know this. Yet he chose her. Why?

Virtually all of the pundits put it down to a strategic decision to improve his chances of winning-- choosing a woman, perhaps to entice Hillary defectors, and assuring support from right-wing evangelical Christians long suspicious of him. It was their hostility to his pro-choice friends Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge that caused him to abandon them and move to her.

That surprise move took the spotlight off Obama and set off a flurry of speculation and rumors about her. Two University of Virginia political scientists, featured in an August 30 front-page Daily Progress story, found the choice "brilliant" and "without a downside to it."

Republicans generally, and the so-called base, especially, are buoyed with new hope.

Senator McCain has often been praised as a risk-taking maverick. Selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate is the greatest risk of his political life. For the sake of winning an election, he risks providing a road to the White House for a person wholly lacking in qualifications for being there. And this at a time when our nation faces one of the most challenging and dangerous moments in its history.

In so doing, he confirms his risk-taking character but fatally undermines his claim to sound judgment and, some would say, commitment to the best interests of his country.

(Paul Gaston, The Hook, September 4, 2008)

Paul M. Gaston is professor emeritus of Southern and Civil Rights history at the University of Virginia. This is his first essay for the Hook.