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The Palin Pick – What Matters and What Doesn’t
By Brian | September 3, 2008 | Share on Facebook
Weeks ago, when discussing the candidates and their potential vice-presidential picks, a co-worker of mine told me about the female, Republican governor of Alaska, who was smart, articulate, conservative, and attractive. Until last Friday, this was all I had heard about Sarah Palin.
It appears I was not alone.
According to the Washington Post, John McCain first met Governor Palin last February at the National Governors Association meeting in Washington. His next meeting with her was last Thursday, when he offerred her the nomination for Vice President of the United States.
This disturbs me greatly. Not because of of Sarah Palin’s relative inexperience or qualification for the job, not because of some local dispute over a fired state trooper, not because of a DUI conviction twenty-two years ago, and certainly not because her daughter is 17 years old, unmarried and pregnant. This disturbs me because a reasonable person does not pick, as his closest advisor and planned successor, someone he hardly knows and has never worked with.
The above linked article claims that McCain was impressed with what he heard about Gov. Palin and pleased with what he read and saw coming out of the vetting process. All that is well and good, but it doesn’t top working together to push through a piece of legislation, or sitting together on a committee, or teaming up to advocate for/against a given cause. That kind of exposure to a person tells you whether or not you work well together, whether you can develop a partnering relationship, and how much responsibility you can trust that person to take on in your administration.
John McCain has been in the senate for 26 years. There must be dozens of people to whom he has had this kind of exposure, and yet he chose, instead, to go with someone he’s heard and read good things about.
I’m doing my best to withhold judgement on Sarah Palin as a candidate until I’ve heard her speak. I’ve followed politics enough to know that the media can paint a misleading picture of a person, so I won’t write her off as a bad choice until she’s had a chance to make her case. I’ll admit that her social/religious views are very different than my own, and that I’m mystified by her apparent unmitigated pride over her daughter’s decision to have her baby, without a single comment about the downsides of unprotected sex at the age of seventeen. It doesn’t strike me as congruent with the Christian Family Values that she claims to uphold, but again – I will withhold judgement until I hear about it from her, not the media.
I will not, however, withhold judgement on John McCain’s decision making process. Even if Gov. Palin turns out to be a terrific choice, it seems obvious to me that John McCain chose a person that would get him through November 4th, 2008, not someone who would get him through January of 2013. And that’s a waste and a shame.
Topics: Political Rantings | 6 Comments »
1) I simply don’t understand your distrust of the “media”. The media will be how you get *all* of your information about Sarah Palin, unless you manage to meet her in person at some point; your argument seems to be that you will trust the media that is controlled by her more than the media that is nominally independent.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m in favor of getting in-person views on a candidate. One of my strongest reasons to support Gore was hearing him speak in 1995 (and being mentioned in his speech, well, that didn’t bias me in the slightest, I’m sure). But it seems to me that you are buying into the Right’s attacks on the news far too much.
2) That said — you expect that you disagree with most of what Palin stands for (and I expect that you would, too), but you’re willing to let that pass if she gives a good speech? Or if she doesn’t mention the things that are likely to piss you off? I don’t get that at all.
Well, if by “controlled by her” you mean her speaking directly into a camera, then yes, of course I trust that more. When I say “the media,” I’m not referring here to the physical medium, I’m referring to the punditry that increasingly feel the need to tell me why things are happening, rather than just what is happening.
but you
That said, I didn’t mean to overstate my position here – I definitely read about the candidates as well, but as per usual, I try to read as many sources as I can, until the seemingly nonsensical stories start to make sense.
Good example: I read a dozen times that Wasilla was debt free when Palin took it over, but when she left, it was $20 million in debt. This made no sense to me, given that there are only 9,000 people in Wasilla and she wasn’t there very long. So I kept reading, and eventually learned that the $20 million was for a sports complex that serves the surrounding towns, and that today (four years later), the debt is half paid off and is making payments ahead of schedule.
This is the kind of thing I expect to hear her say when questioned about Wasilla’s debt on some Sunday morning talk show…
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