Say goodbye to Gutav. But say hello to Sarah, who has been upgraded to a tropical storm.
When a presidential candidate chooses a running mate, he reveals something important about himself. The VP announcement is the first golden opportunity for the electorate to assess the candidate's thinking, and the process by which he makes decisions that could substantively affect the nation.
Yet, at such a crucial juncture, who did John McCain come up with? Sarah Palin, who is so problematical that the McCain campaign had to spend most of Labor Day releasing odd little factoids about her, while being forced to defend her on several other fronts. In the words of one McCain spokesman (and he actually said this), "We are going to flush the toilet," which strikes me as a distinctly unflattering way of saying that the Palin nomination has not yet passed the sniff test.
-- DICK POLMAN
To my mind, this pick is not about Palin's unreadiness to be president. It's about McCain's unreadiness to be president. This act of judgment - a blend of ignorance, gut, cynicism, and pure egotism - makes him seem like a worse potential presdent than even George W. Bush. This is McCain's first real executive decision. And it is unbelievably shallow, incompetent and reckless.
How seriously does he take service to his country when he make a decision this important this crazily?
Palin as #2 represents the triumph of Apolitical America in Presidential politics in extremis. Elitists on both sides are asking "Who is this woman?" To them, Palin is the ultimate arriviste, having leapfrogged several more-pedigreed candidates on the Republican side, and offending the Democratic sensibility that the Presidency is something you arrive at mostly through long study in Senate hearing rooms and law libraries.
This is why I ultimately think the attacks on Palin will backfire. As the Politico notes, everything about her life experience reinforces the narrative that she is not an all-consumming political animal, and has an active family life. That is not a bad place to be with the electorate.
One of the great sights of American political life -- a YouTube moment if ever there was one -- was to see the doughboy face of Newt Gingrich as he extolled the virtues of Sarah Palin, a sitcom of a vice presidential choice and a disaster movie if she moves up to the presidency: "She's the first journalist ever to be nominated, I think, for the president or vice president, and she was a sportscaster on local television," Gingrich said on the "Today" show. "So she has a lot of interesting background. And she has a lot of experience. Remember that, when people worry about how inexperienced she is, for two years she's been in charge of the Alaska National Guard."
It's a pity Gingrich was not around when the Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known by his nickname Caligula, reputedly named Incitatus as a consul and a priest. Incitatus was his horse.
John McCain's selection of Palin, which I first viewed with horror, could now be seen in a different light. Based on various television interviews over the Labor Day weekend -- and a careful reading of the transcripts -- it is possible that this is McCain's attempt to make fools of his fellow Republicans. He has succeeded beyond all expectations.
Yet another scandalous revelation involving Sarah Palin, perhaps the most damaging yet: another woman claims that she, not Palin won the Miss Congeniality in the 1984 Miss Wasilla competition.
-- SEBASTIAN
The tsunami of mud dredged up and thrown in the direction of Sarah Palin and her family over the long weekend is, I think, unprecedented. The size of the wave of filth is only exceeded by its velocity. Overall the volume of mud represents just how much Palin is feared by those for whom nothing less than an Obama victory is required for them to keep breathing on Earth.
One of the few other places we see this sort of behavior in nature is when, threatened, a tribe of primates joins together in a hooting display that quickly escalates into the flinging of feces in all directions. As a result we also note that rising above the mud is the unmistakable odor of fear. But there are, as many have noted, deeper foundations of filth on which the rumors and the ranting rests.
Have you noticed that whenever repugs have a chance to elevate a woman to high office, they go out of their way to choose one who is manifestly unqualified and/or grossly incompetent?
Condi Rice, Harriet Meyers, Sarah Palin.
All three are pretty obvious proof that repugs don't really consider female human beings to be anything other than ornaments. "See? We've got some smart bitc - um, girls - er, women in our party!"
-- YELLOW DOG
Would Sarah Palin, given her breadth of experience, history, views and issues, been selected by Sen. John McCain as his running mate if she were a man?
-- JAZZ SHAW
John McCain picked Sarah Palin to get the enthusiastic support of the evangelical, radical right. He didn't think it would matter that she has no national experience because he perceived he could argue Obama didn't either.
A big miscalculation. Obama presented himself for 17 months to the American people, they heard him debate more than a dozen times, they made their own decision that he was ready for the job and the Democrats voted him their nominee.
Obama wasn't unilaterally appointed by a party's nominee in a transparent play for the evangelical and female vote. As if Sarah Palin could fill Hillary Clinton's shoes by virtue of her gender. As if women wouldn't see that Sarah Palin is the antithesis of Hillary Clinton on issues. As if anything would evoke Palin's lack of qualifications more than to compare them to Hillary's.
-- JERALYN
There is one biographical fact about Palin's life that the critics . . . are hardly touching upon. I mean her decision to have a Downs child instead of an abortion. This is the fact about her life and it will be viewed as such from now through November and perhaps beyond.
-- TYLER COWAN
I wish that the news about Palin's daughter had been released the first day — the day Palin was announced. I wish it had been part of the general news about her and her family — the introduction. Why? Because the dribbling out of the news a few days later . . . makes the ticket look somehow sneaky. Deceptive. The news taints the whole Palin roll-out, just a bit. It takes the bloom off the rose, just a bit. Plus, many people don’t believe that the McCain team knew about the pregnancy, in advance. And, frankly, I don’t blame them. That said, Palin is a sensation — something that the Republican party has not seen much of in a long time.
-- JAY NORDLINGER
Sarah Palin sure is an exciting candidate—to you, to me, and maybe even to John McCain. Monday we learned that Palin's 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. The news probably won't change the political landscape—especially since Barack Obama declared it out of bounds —but the pregnancy is a fitting metaphor for the gestating and growing surprises associated with the Palin candidacy.
Each new fact we learn about Sarah Palin—her reversal on the bridge to nowhere, her disagreements with McCain on issues from windfall profits to global warming, emerging facts about troopergate—contribute to the feeling that this whole Palin thing is being made up as we go along. It may be fun to read about, and it sure is fun to cover, but it also supports the judgment of the Palin pick that I first heard from a Republican veteran shortly after the announcement: "Reckless."
If a small-town mayor ever ruled with an iron fist — it was Palin.-- LAURA McGANN
Governor Pallin managed to secure $27 million (as in 27 Woodstock museums) in earmarks for her little town of 6,700 back when she was mayor. That comes to more than $4000 per person. . . .
If every mayor was as successful at taking in federal largess as Governor Palin was for her little town, the tab would be $1.2 trillion, well over one-third of the federal budget. That is serious cash. (In fairness, Governor Palin collected her haul over several years, so the comparison to single year's budget is not entirely appropriate.)
-- DEAN BAKER
She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president? Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?-- LYDA GREEN
A review of recorded sermons by Ed Kalnins, the senior pastor of Wasilla Assembly of God since 1999, offers a provocative and, for some, eyebrow-raising sketch of Palin's longtime spiritual home.
The church runs a number of ministries providing help to poor neighborhoods, care for children in need, and general community services. But Pastor Kalnins has also preached that critics of President Bush will be banished to hell; questioned whether people who voted for Sen. John Kerry in 2004 would be accepted to heaven; charged that the 9/11 terrorist attacks and war in Iraq were part of a war "contending for your faith;" and said that Jesus "operated from that position of war mode."
Wow. I have been learning so much in the last four days. The McCain campaign has mostly been teaching me about foreign policy, cause it turns out I am pretty good already on domestic issues like talking to angry school board presidents, figuring out how much of a raise to give to the highway superintendent, and of course I am basically Alaska's expert on dealing with fishing permits.-- PALINDROME
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