Prescient Marshall student predicted Palin candidacy

Caricatures of presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain appear to eye Maria Toliver warily. And well they should. The Marshall High School senior predicted correctly last spring who would be selected by both major parties for their vice presidential candidates.
(Eric Crump/Democrat-News)

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Politicians of both parties were astounded.

Even her parents were surprised when Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain announced he'd chosen Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

They could have asked Marshall teen Maria Toliver, who had it figured out last spring.

Toliver, daughter of Shawn and Tatiana Toliver and now a senior at Marshall High School, was in Paul Gieringer's Contemporary Issues class during the spring semester.

Gieringer provided students with lists of rumored VP choices and asked students to predict who they thought would be chosen and write papers in which they defended their predictions.

Toliver predicted Sen. Joe Biden would be the VP candidate for the Democratic Party, which turned out to be correct, but Biden is a well-known politician and former presidential candidate himself.

Choosing Palin was not so obvious.

"I remember Maria picking her and being excited," Gieringer said. "She would say, 'Mr. Gieringer, you need to look at her more closely.' So I talked with Maria. I found Palin interesting, but did not think McCain would take such an unknown."

He said several of his students picked Biden, but only Toliver chose both eventual candidates.

Toliver said she was impressed with Palin's characteristics, including her looks.

"I wanted a woman with coast-to-coast appeal," she said, noting Palin's youth and family would increase her connection with voters. "I heard a lot of good things about her. And why not have a pretty candidate?"

Toliver's research suggested Palin is confident, a good speaker and a good executive, she said, someone good at "keeping things together."

"And that's what we need in America," she said.

Toliver said she likes following politics and avidly watches the news so she'll know what's going on. Of course, with knowledge comes an understanding of political nuance and that complicates choices.

Asked who she likes in the fall election, Toliver didn't express strong support for either party's candidates. She likes Palin and is glad to see a woman in the race, but she's leery of McCain, especially his apparent lack of reluctance to keep the country involved in wars.

She said she isn't wild about Biden but is impressed by Democratic candidate Barack Obama and would probably lean in his direction if she could vote this fall, in part because of his stance against the Iraq war. She won't quite be old enough, however.

"He's very convincing. You actually have hope in him," she said.

In spite of her interest in current events and politics, Toliver isn't aiming for a career in that direction. She's more interested in graphic design, animal grooming and hairstyling.

But she plans to remain well-informed and recommends to fellow students that they take courses like Gieringer's in order to broaden their perspectives.

"It was a good project," Gieringer said. "The students were exposed to the process of picking a VP and historically good and fatal choices," noting as examples Lydon Johnson's positive effect on John Kennedy's campaign in 1960 but Thomas Eagleton's negative influence on George McGovern's chances in 1972.

Contact Eric Crump at marshalleditor@socket.net