Sarah Palin is giving the left fits. If McCain is wily enough to have foreseen this, he's considerably more voteworthy than I had imagined.
Because the Palin pick was such a surprise (one columnist I read likened it to throwing a dart), everybody's frantically digging up as much dirt as they can, flinging it mindlessly, and hoping some of it sticks. They're wisely omitting the "inexperienced" meme, as--like it or not--Governor Palin does have more experience (albeit limited) than Barack Obama. But the Internet gossipmongers are hard at work rooting out scandal. Here's what they've found so far:
Her daughter's pregnant. Yikes! Sound the alarms!
Except teen pregnancy is all too common in America. Admittedly, this does put an ironic spin on Palin's "abstinence-only" philosophy--gee, that sure worked, didn't it--but she's coping with the situation according to her principles.
She could have disowned Bristol, cast her out, and publicly excoriated her. Not all that long ago, that reaction was so common as to be expected. Instead, she's keeping her daughter close...and insisting on a wedding. A marriage will satisfy those folks who still cling to the concept of bastardy: this 'problem' will soon be forgotten.
One of Sarah's five kids is rumoured to be Bristol's.
That would be the child with Down Syndrome, and those rumours are almost certainly false. Put it this way: it's a little more than twenty times times more likely that child is Sarah's, not Bristol's. It makes for a nice juicy rumour, the kind that lives on the Internet for months, but the facts don't back it up.
As governor, Palin dismissed the Public Safety Commissioner because he wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law.
[Ken interjects: I hit a real mental block on this, probably because I'm an only child. "How the hell", I thought, "can she have an ex-brother-in-law when she's only been married once?" The whole sibling thing sometimes passes me by.]
Except Palin says she dismissed Wooten because of performance-related issues...and the internal police investigation bears this out. Wooten violated policy and state law while out hunting; more troubling, he used a Taser on a 10-year old. I'd fire his ass, too.
Boy, we're scraping the bottom of the barrel here, aren't we?
Okay, let's get a little more substantive.
Palin's first responsibility is to her family and she doesn't have time for the vice-presidency.
and
Palin was picked as a sop to the female vote.
This is a two-sided sword with a razor-sharp edge. If you throw this criticism, you'd better triple-armor-plate yourself against the feminist backlash you're sure to reap. The irony here is that feminists don't know what to make of Palin. She's a very successful career woman who is also a devoted mother of five. She's intensely pro-life. What really makes her inscrutable is that she refuses to be a victim.
Feminism--let's face it--has lost its way over the past decade or two. It was and remains a noble cause, but a victim mythology got grafted on to it somewhere: for every advance in women's rights, the cry of victimhood redoubled. Women deserve equality, the thinking goes, not because they are equal but because they've been oppressed. (You see the same sort of mindset in race relations and gay rights...all over the place, in fact. Give me my rights because others before me were deprived of theirs.)
Palin's worked her way up on her own, and the sense I get is that people both admire her and envy her. What to make of a beauty queen who hunts? I think that Republican women--the ones who don't begrudge a woman her career, but who have always seen the value in being a wife and mother--will eat that up.
At the risk of sounding patriarchal, I believe that Palin should be a mother first and a career woman second. I think women can have it all...just not all at the same time. But then again, I'm married to the kind of multi-tracked woman who could have been a mother with three careers. Perhaps Palin is another such.
Palin is just like McCain.
This is the failing Brooks attributes in the column linked above, and it's something to consider. According to Brooks,
The main axis in McCain's worldview is not left-right. It's public service vs. narrow self-interest.
Palin is much the same: her anti-corruption crusades are well documented and she's not afraid to go after her own. Brooks suggests that this quality, while admirable, makes for a government with no overarching political aim, and he also feels that Palin's tendency to "substitute a moral philosophy for a political philosophy" poses a concern.
I see a little of Paul Martin, our former PM, in that summary--the government with no overarching aim. The spectre of the most powerful country in the world ambling and darting about like a bee after pollen is, I'll admit, disturbing. Yet the Republicans have in this ticket a weapon they can blow Obama/Biden right out of the water with, should they choose to use it. I can see the ad now: "Sure, Obama talks about change. McCain and Palin have done change. Obama says he wants to clean up Washington. McCain's been cleaning up Washington for years. Obama talks about a new kind of politics. Meet the new politicians: John McCain and Sarah Palin."
Obama has to be very, very careful how he plays the next three months. Every step he takes is potentially land-mined. For that, I have to give John McCain credit. Far from being a random pick, Sarah Palin might actually win John McCain the presidency.
2 comments:
In the end, I don't think it was a good pick. Her experience is low and regardless of whether it is more or less than a 4 year US Senator, the Rep's harped that Obama has little experience and then they go and pick someone who has basically the same amount and she is close (McCain is OLD) to being president.
Plus, she is a wacko Christian conservative. ;o)
Rocket, I agree with you, actually. But what you and I think doesn't really matter. I can't vote and I don't think you're considering voting Republican...
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