Remember in 2000 when commentators complimented the choice of Dick Cheney to be Bush’s VP because they felt he added gravitas to a ticket with a two-term governor at the head? Yeah, hindsight is hilarious.
If the Grand Island Independent wanted to catch my eye, well they certainly succeeded. Today’s editorial entitled “Alaska’s Sarah Palin adds gravity to Republican ticket” even made me do a double-take. Apparently the editorial writers felt that if you’re going to stretch the truth, you shouldn’t do a half-assed job of it. The first whopper comes in the second paragraph:
Gov. Palin was thoroughly vetted by the McCain camp prior to the decision and now every aspect of her personal and public life is being scrutinized, dissected and hyper analyzed the by the press, politicos and the electorate, as expected and, in fact, the custom throughout the history of this republic.
Really? Because it sounds like the vetting started just a day before he made the announcement. If McCain really knew about all the stuff to begin with then he’s done a piss-poor job of damage control. But the real doozy has to deal with experience:
On the issue of experience, a strong case can be made that she possesses better credentials than Sen. Obama. Certainly Sen. Obama is a gifted, charismatic and deserving contender for the nation’s highest office. He has shattered the race barrier and clearly exceeded the tests for political, oratorical, diplomatic, intellectual and leadership capacities. He is a proud man of impeccable character.
However, Sen. Obama lacks the executive level leadership experience that Gov. Palin has gained as Governor of Alaska.
Of course, that case depends on saying “executive” before “experience.” Using that criteria, Palin has more experience that Obama, Biden and McCain combined. Now, I am partial to governors running for higher office. But the reason I think they do better is because they don’t have to vote on bills with numerous subjects clumped together. A senator has such a long voting history that you can say all sorts of nasty things with half-truths. The United States hasn’t elected a sitting senator since 1964 1960, with JFK. Instead, we’ve gone with two-term governors. (Two terms is considered a pre-requisite to run for president, which is why George Bush ran in 2000 instead of his one-term brother Jeb.)
Bit of trivia: the first Republican woman to win a governorship was Kay Orr in Nebraska in 1986. The election was unusual because her opponent was also female, leading to the first all-female gubernatorial race in the country and a definite assurance that Nebraska would have its first–and as of yet, only–female governor. The first female governor was Nellie T. Ross of Wyoming elected in 1924.
Finally, the editorial gets to the most important strategic reason behind the choice:
What Sen. Obama has done to remove race as an obstacle, Gov. Palin will do for the status of women. She picks up where Sen. Clinton left off in advancing the acceptance of a female leader in the White House.
Actually, I’m pretty sure that Clinton has already shown that the electorate is willing to accept a female candidate for president, much less VP, just as Obama has burst open that door for mixed race candidates. And I’d much rather have a female president by election than because McCain died. Besides, Palin is 24 years too late to make history since the whole picking a woman to get a boost of energy has already been done by the Democrats. Here’s hoping it fails just as badly for the Republicans.
You might wanna check out your facts about the last sitting senator; JFK died in 1963 so I’m guessing you meant that the election was the 1960 one. About the vetting, if nothing else convinces you that John McCain will act with poor judgment in a time of crisis, then this hopefully is it. I just hope he doesn’t get his fingers on an atomic bomb. I just hope the dirt that the McCain campaign passed over continues to roll on out.
Just check this out. If she’s nutty enough to get a Jesus-freak pastor excited about her faith, god help us.
http://richarddawkins.net/article,3068,Palin-average-isnt-good-enough,Sam-Harris-Los-Angeles-Times
Holy crap, I can’t believe I got the dates wrong on JFK. Thank you for pointing that out. JFK was good, but not so good as to get re-elected after he died.
And I should probably clarify that am strongly in the Obama camp. I didn’t need the Palin pick to show that a pro-war, anti-environment, pro-Bush tax cuts candidate wasn’t the politician for me. I have a slight bias towards governors, which would never, ever be enough to make up for that fact that she’s pure crazy.
Thanks for the link. I’ve been reading about her dominionist views. It’s almost insane beyond description (and you’d think I’d get used to these sorts of things in Nebraska) but she really wants a Christian Taliban in charge of the United States. And I thought Bush had already set the bar as low as it would go.
I hear you on the crazy Nebraska views. (Where do you live by the way) I work in a hospital in Omaha, which by-and-large tend to be filled with religious folk, which I attribute to a number of things. (I work near a lot of nurses, but physicians, despite their presumptive higher intelligence, still tend to be credulous moreso than not) First, the nature of the biz makes one want to believe that everyone has somebody better to look after them, because really we still don’t know shit about medicine. We’ve made advances clearly, and I’d rather be alive today than even 100 years ago, but hey it’s still called a practice, and is ultimately educated guessing half of the time. Second, many people who go into health fields know what they’re going into sooner than others, and therefore they go through a more tunnel-visioned, uncritical, extended job-training programs. When they’re in school they don’t have time to study literature or philosophy, because their livelihood depends only on their major courses. There are more reasons, but I didn’t even really elucidate these ones too well being that I’d tired, so I won’t try to confuse with any more.
That’s okay, I can coexist with religious people. I know that they generally mean no harm, although it’s disconcerting to notice how imperceptive they are to any other ways of perceiving the world. For example, in the break room amongst a group of female nurses, somebody was talking about country music, and asked me my opinion. I said I wasn’t a big fan, to which a nurse responded “What do you like? I could see you being a gospel singer, singing on Sundays.” To which I responded “You’re doubly wrong: I can’t sing and I’m not religious”. She had nothing to say but “So you’re a Satan-worshiper?”
I sighed, and passively challenged her. “Wouldn’t believing in Satan be believing in a God?” Sadly, many people in this fine state associate secularism with satanism. Just today a nurse was convinced that we are a Christian Nation, a theocracy, and that it’s mentioned in the constitution and I need to check my facts.
I went to California for college, although I was raised here. Still, when I have political discussions with people, they dismiss my views completely, saying “Oh, I know you lived in California…” as if I am some robot whose philosophy is merely a function of my latitude and longitude. Does that strike you as condescending? I then counter that I lived here 18 years before I moved there, and was not part of any political movements. The major movement that happened while I was there was the recall of Gov. Grey Davis for the repub Governator. Their sense of righteousness disallows them to realize that there are people just as zealoutous as them who might dismiss their views in the same breath “Oh, you’re from Nebraska”. I think I can end here. Cheers!
I live in Lincoln, the liberal capital of Nebraska… for a given value of liberal. This probably explains why no one has ever called me a satan-worshiper. Bit of a pity, I think it would give me some automatic atheist street-cred, no? I do enjoy the “not religious” line myself. Unless I know someone reasonably well, if religion comes up I’ll identify myself as “not religious” instead of as an atheist. I’m not sure if this is cowardice or pragmatism.
It strikes me as extremely condescending to think that a person’s politics are defined by their state. I dislike the red state/blue state rhetoric because it forgets to mention that there are liberals in Nebraska and conservatives in California. Perhaps the people who dismiss your “California” views would benefit from visiting Lincoln, CA and meeting the people in the Central Valley. (“You think homosexuality is a sin too?! But you’re from California! My entire, simplistic world view is shaken!”)
The people who believe the US is a “Christian Nation” aren’t very good at their history. Look at Palin, who said that if the pledge was “good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me” in a 2006 political questionnaire. Never mind that it wasn’t written until 1982 and the words “under God” weren’t added until 1954. (I’m not always the best on dates myself, but I pride myself on always being within a century of the right date, a standard Palin would benefit from adopting). And it’s odd, I think I’ve read through the Constitution pretty carefully, but all I can find with relation to whether this government is religious or secular is the very last sentence of Article VI. Now what sort of Californian satan-worshiping commies would write something like that? ; )