How Does this work?

I just heard Cindy McCain’s speech. She appeared to be a very smart, articulate, very well travelled, compassionate woman. She studied at USC, California and has done a lot of charitable work. Her views while being conservative are reasonable. A lot of this must have, at some stage, rubbed off on John McCain. How does he then go out to pick Sarah Palin, a book banning, religious zealot who thinks Iraq war is a mission from God, that the solution to America’s energy problems is to drill bay drill and then drill some more, that just because she sold a symbol of excesses of her own party on Ebay it some how makes her a maverick and a reformer.  

I am beginning to think Karl Rove may have been right, this is a political choice rather then governing one.