Like Ian, I was overjoyed to learn that Sarah Palin was McCain’s pick to be his running mate.
She so obviously undermines the storyline McCain has been telling about Obama–that he is not experienced enough, specifically on foreign policy, to be President–and so exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of his campaign, that I can’t imagine what he must have been thinking. All evidence suggests that he wasn’t thinking very much, but going with his gut. Some people call this being a maverick; I call it being reckless and impulsive when making a hugely serious decision.
Like the rest of this country, I know next to nothing about Palin. The little I’ve read suggests that as recently as 2007 she had very little to say about foreign affairs and Iraq, far far less than Obama, who publicly expressed his opinions on the war before it even began with his 2002 speech. I am a bit unhappy with some of the nastier attacks by liberals and those on the left–and also by self-professed conservatives like Andrew Sullivan–who seem to think it’s fair to mock Palin for once having been a beauty queen, who claim that Palin is putting politics “before” raising her own five children, who are investigating the question of whether she faked her fifth pregnancy, etc.
You need not personally smear Palin or even bring up her personal life to expose the fundamental unreliability of McCain’s character and the utter ridiculousness of his choice. The facts almost speak for themselves.
To get a sense of the problem with the Palin pack, I refer you to the Weekly Standard blog. In an email to Bill Kristol, Newt Gingrich performs his propaganda duty by praising Palin like so:
Authenticity is the one word threat to the Obama-Biden ticket.
There is something going on this weekend which traditional pundits, traditional consultants and traditional politicians are simply missing. All of the normal biography-oriented and issue-oriented analysis misses an emotional gestalt event comparable to when Ronald Reagan in 1980 crystalized his leadership in New Hampshire when he seized control of the GOP debate.
In one sudden moment Friday, John McCain fundamentally changed American politics in a manner that transcends issues and details.
I don’t know about you, but I for one think that “issues and details” kind of, uh, matter a lot. When there is an international crisis, I care less about the “authenticity” of the president who confronts this crisis than about whether or not this person knows a whole lot about the “issues and details” of the situation, or has a machine in place to learn about the “issues and details,” fast. But Gingrich seems to agree with Robert Kagan, who believes that the “details of who did what” when Russia invaded Georgia “are not very important.”
For neoconservatives like Gingrich and Kagan, the “issues and details” of how to save a city threatened by a giant hurricane maybe also don’t matter (they therefore approve of appointing unqualified hacks to run FEMA); nor do the “issues and details” related to the question of whether a country actually poses a threat to us (they’ll invade a country when it suits the narrative they want to tell); nor do the minor “issues and details” of what the Geneva Convention says (they’ll torture who they want, when they want); nor do the “issues and details” related to a host of other serious issues from climate change to our national healthcare crisis (don’t even think about questioning the market, Commie!).
Again and again for so-called conservatives, authenticity–the brush-clearing ways of George W. Bush, for example–trumps the ability to govern. Authenticity, often of a hypocritical and fabricated sort, is always the selling proposition behind their candidates, usually at the expense of competence.
More damningly, as I mentioned in the comments section to Ian’s post, this decision does much more to undermine McCain than it does Palin. McCain is the person who made the bad decision here, not Palin. Forget her being a heartbeat away from the presidency. I’m much more concerned about McCain’s being the president. Who is to say he won’t take us to war on a whim–say with Iran or Russia–convinced that the “issues and details” of “who did what” simply don’t matter?