Why Not Kay Bailey Hutchinson?

If McCain wanted a woman on the ticket, why didn't he choose the senior female in the Senate, Kay Bailey Hutchison? She's been in the Senate 15 years, has been mentioned for years as a potential VP or Presidential candidate, is widely respected among Republicans and checks off all the right boxes:

• She's pro-gun, pro-life, and pro-free trade.
• She's anti-immigration, anti-union, anti-church state separation, anti-social security, anti-taxes, anti-affirmative action, anti-gay rights, anti-public health, anti-environment.

She obviously has serious conservative cred! So why didn't McCain choose Hutchison? I think the answer is fairly simple. Yes, McCain was pandering to women when he chose Sarah Palin. His campaign was just cynical enough to think that supposedly disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters might just slide over and vote for a woman who had nothing besides ovaries in common with Senator Clinton. But being a woman, of course, was only half of the intended pander. The other half of the pander was to choose someone more acceptable to the religious right than McCain. This metric is where Hutchison falls short. Whereas Palin is reputedly a conservative Pentecostal Christian with "no abortion under any circumstances" views, Hutchison is a little less pure in her religious ideology. Hutchison is an Episcopalian (a liberal protestant sect) and is on the record as saying that she does not believe abortion should be made illegal. Abortion is now- and has been for decades- the cornerstone of evangelical politics and Hutchison simply has the wrong opinion on the subject.

So that's it in a nutshell. Standard single issue politics has brought us Sarah Palin instead of innumerable more qualified men and women, including Kay Bailey Hutchison.