The bloggers over at PowerLine are quite negative on the Palin pick. Paul Mirengoff wrote, “I’m very disappointed that John McCain would put someone as inexperienced and lacking in foreign policy and national security background as Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency.” Why, because Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney have so much foreign-policy experience? Guys, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s kinda this big honkin’ landmass in between Alaska and the rest of the US—it’s called Canada, and it’s a foreign country, and it’s one of Alaska’s only two neighbors. The other is a little country called Russia (I think you might have heard of it). I don’t say that Gov. Palin is accustomed to going toe-to-toe with hostile foreign leaders, certainly, but then, it’s not like she’s Mike Huckabee‘s running mate; she’ll be understudying a guy who knows the field pretty well, and she’s a quick study. Trust Sen. McCain to bring her along on that score.Now, could we have done better in that regard from the GOP field? Sure. Six months ago, I wanted Condoleeza Rice on the ticket; you could also have picked someone like Richard Lugar. But you guys aren’t boosting anyone like that—you want a governor, and there are good reasons it should be so. If you get a governor, though, you’re not going to get much in the way of foreign-policy experience. (And incidentally, how much foreign-policy experience did Gov. Reagan have when he was elected 28 years ago, anyway?) In all honesty, I’m not sure how much that matters; it’s not Barack Obama’s foreign-policy inexperience that worries me, it’s his judgment. Where I think experience matters is in the practical details of governing, and having a sense for what works and what doesn’t; and there, though Gov. Palin doesn’t have long experience, she has highly successful experience, having accomplished quite a bit in a difficult political environment, working against her own party’s political machine. Where her inexperience abroad matters is in that sense of what’s possible and reasonable, and though she doesn’t have that, she can develop it.And honestly, given Secretary Rice’s track record over the last couple years, I think I might just prefer inexperience. (For whatever it might be worth, Johnathan Adler thinks much the same.)
Category Archives: Politics
And now the spin begins
as the Democrats try to neutralize the Palin pick. Charles Schumer is already claiming she takes the experience argument against Obama off the table, other Democrats are warning (in appropriately sepulchral tones) that she might be “a disaster”—one even dismissed her as “Geraldine Quayle.” For the latter, I think once America gets its first good look at Sarah Palin, I don’t think anyone will buy that; she’s bright, capable, and a quick study. What’s more, it isn’t quite true that she has no foreign-policy experience—remember, Alaska doesn’t border the US, it borders Canada and Russia. She certainly doesn’t measure up to Joe Biden in that respect, but that’s what the GOP ticket has John McCain for. And with all due respect, Sen. Schumer: don’t just look at the calendar, look at the accomplishments. That’s where the experience differential between Gov. Palin and Sen. Obama is very real.To go one step further, I think the Democrats are making a major mistake here. They’re trying to neutralize her with ridicule as a lightweight, hoping for the quick wipeout right out of the box, instead of treating her seriously; and while that would work if she were a lightweight, she isn’t, and she’s faced worse before. What this means is that, when she comes to the debate with Joe Biden, the expectations for her will be low, because after all, Sen. Biden is a vicious this, that and the other thing—and as George W. Bush found, she will find that low expectations can be a real help. She won’t need to “win” the debate with Sen. Biden to win the debate: all she’ll need to do is look respectable and not make a fool of herself, and the Democratic attack on her will go down like a house of cards. If in fact she stands up to Sen. Biden and performs well—as I’m convinced she will if the campaign staff prepare her properly—then the attacks on her will backfire in a big way. And if Sen. Biden has one of his “Uncle Joe” moments and she handles it well, she could flip him clean off the stage.
YES!!!!!! MCCAIN/PALIN ’08!
All right, I’m breaking my own self-imposed rule, but after all the hijinks played yesterday with http://www.mccainpalin.com/, I’m calling this good enough: it’s now firmly McCain-Palin 2008, declaring, “The Wait Is Over” and reads,
It’s Official!!! Congratulations Sarah Palin! We are pleased to announce that John McCain has chosen Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate! Sarah Heath Palin is currently the Governor of Alaska and assumed office in 2006. In addition to being the first female Governor of Alaska, she has made history again as the first female Republican Vice Presidential running mate. We are confident Sarah Palin will make an excellent Vice Presidential candidate with John McCain, and we congratulate her on her impeccable record of public service and her recent selection as John McCain’s VP!
And indeed, here’s the press release from the McCain campaign confirming his selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate!
WE DID IT!
HE DID IT!
MCCAIN/PALIN ’08!
CNN is reporting . . .
. . . that Gov. Sarah Palin is the pick. I’m going to wait for John McCain to say so himself before I go bonkers, but . . . yeah.Incidentally, I’ve been talking about Palin searches driving my traffic—well, I have half again as many hits already today as my blog’s previous high, and it’s only 11 am. It looks to me like a lot of this is people who’ve never heard of the woman and are now trying to figure out who she is and where she came from. Some of the highlights:
- Scads of people looking for “Sarah Palin church,” or some variant thereof. I told you, I don’t know anything about that.
- Several people looking for “Sarah Palin Seattle Seahawks,” which just made me laugh. My dream January: John McCain and Sarah Palin sworn in in D.C., and the ‘Hawks in the Super Bowl.
- One person looking for “sara palin firefly.” I have no idea what prompted that search, but it landed them here.
- A number of searches on “Sarah Palin Native American.” That’s her husband’s ancestry, not hers (she was born in Idaho), but I’m not surprised at the interest.
- We have people looking for dirt, with a few searches like “Sarah Palin, flaws” and “Sarah Palin skeletons.” There don’t appear to be any skeletons in her closet; you want to know what there is to know, negatively-speaking, read the CNN story—it’s all there.
- Which reminds me, maybe the person looking for “Palin closet” was looking for the same thing; otherwise, that bewilders me.
- I’ve also seen a bunch of people looking for “Sarah Palin wealthy,” or some variant thereof. Umm, no, she isn’t (though she’s not poor, either).
- Whoever’s looking for “Sarah Palin ACU rating” is going to be disappointed, since I don’t think governors have ACU ratings. Aren’t those calculated from congressional votes?
- Someone wanted to check out Gov. Palin’s law school. Just so you know, she’s not a lawyer.
- My favorite search? “Sarah Palin humorous VP”
- Longest search? “how many children has Gov of Alaska, Sarah Palin who cares for her children who is her husband”
Choose your targets carefully
Half the battle in any competition is shooting at the right target. (Remember the US biathlete who lost a gold medal a few years back because he got that wrong?) With the Democratic convention concluded, it’s clear they’ve chosen theirs: George W. Bush. They figure they don’t have to actually attack John McCain, which is not such an easy thing to do; they can just beat up on the easy target, the unpopular departing president, and then say that McCain is just the same. Superficially, it sounds like a good approach—after all, Barack Obama tells us, Sen. McCain voted with the President over 90% of the time! Wow, right?Well, not exactly. Sen. Obama’s dirty little secret here is—so did he. You see, what he knows and most Americans don’t is that some 90% of all Senate votes are unanimous: votes to adjourn (heh!), votes on resolutions to honor the Super Bowl winner, the team that won the NCAA tournament, etc. The political stuff that really matters amounts to less than 10% of the votes. Thus, to say that Sen. McCain voted with President Bush 94% of the time, let’s say, is to say that he opposed him roughly 60% of the time when it counted. That may also be misleading, of course; the great problem with tracking Senate vote totals is that you get multiple votes on different versions of the same bill, and grandstanding votes, and a whole lot of junk that accumulates in the voting record that really doesn’t help you understand anyone’s real positions. It’s still more meaningful than implying that Sen. McCain and President Bush agree on 90% of the major issues in this country, because they clearly don’t.This is why Dick Morris is saying that the Democrats blew their convention on the wrong target, because John McCain isn’t George W. Bush, and he can prove it; Morris even compares it to the GOP’s lousy aim in 1992 and ’96 that was such a help to Bill Clinton, since “McCain is the most unlike Bush of any of the Republican senators.” All Sen. McCain needs to do is to make that case clearly, and the Democratic efforts will be so much hot air. They’re already hard at work doing so, along with deflating some of the other claims Sen. Obama made in his speech.Of course, the problem for Sen. McCain is that Sen. Obama is an even harder figure to attack directly—because he’s a gifted politician, because it’s tricky to do so without looking like a racist, and because he just doesn’t have much of a record to look at; he, too, needs a broader target to which he can link Sen. Obama. I’ve been arguing that that target should be Congress, as a way of highlighting Sen. Obama’s clear and strong identification with the Democratic agenda; Karl Rove agrees, and notes the particular vulnerability of this Congress, and particularly the fights that are looming. As Rove concludes,
The end result of all of these messy fights is that a Congress—which hit a record low 14% approval rating in a July Gallup Poll before its members left on summer vacation—may become even more unpopular.Inevitably, John McCain and Barack Obama will be drawn into these fights. And, although both are sitting senators, the advantage may go to Mr. McCain. Democrats control Congress, so they are accountable. Mr. Reid and Mrs. Pelosi are two of the worst advertisements for Congress imaginable. And Mr. McCain has an impressive record of political reform he can invoke, whereas Mr. Obama, who has yet to complete his first term in the Senate, has no accomplishments to point to that demonstrate that he is an agent of change.The 110th Congress is an excellent target for Mr. McCain. He ought to take careful aim at it and commence firing.
Kudos also to John McCain for class
My understanding is that this ad, congratulating Barack Obama on his victory and noting the poetic nature of his accepting his party’s nomination on the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech, is set to run tonight during the Democratic convention.
Kudos to the John McCain Ministry of Disinformation
There’s been some talk in recent weeks about the website http://www.mccainpalin.com/, especially among those of us booming Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate. Today, it has in succession redirected to websites purporting to announce a McCain/Pawlenty ticket, a McCain/Hutchison ticket, and now a McCain/Romney ticket. Where it will go by the time you click on the link, I have no idea. Plus, there are other indications and rumors flying—Tim Pawlenty has canceled appearances, the Secret Service is at Mitt Romney’s sister’s house, and so on—all pointing different directions.I can only come to one conclusion: the McCain campaign is playing with our minds. Having watched Sen. Obama’s pick leak despite efforts to keep everything hush-hush, they’ve decided to go the other way and flood the arena with disinformation. There are so many red herrings flopping around out there right now, the only thing you’re going to accomplish if you dive in is to come up smelling fishy.I have no idea who Sen. McCain’s pick will be; I think the complete absence of any pointers aiming at my favorite governor might be telling, but I’m by no means sure enough of that to say. I am sure of this, though: Sen. McCain said his pick is going to be a surprise, and by cracky, he wants to keep it that way!
Will he do it?
The interest in Sarah Palin continues to drive the traffic on this blog up and up and up, as the search hits keep rolling in; and it’s not just me, either—Adam Brickley’s blog, which is the hub of the Palin movement, topped 5,000 hits both Monday and Tuesday (a fact he relayed in his excellent “pep talk,” in which he made the case for Palin as well as he ever has). A great many people across this country—many Republicans, but also more than a few moderate Democrats—are catching the vision of a McCain/Palin ticket, and getting excited about the possibility. This is the reason John McCain needs to name Gov. Palin as his running mate, because you can’t say that about anybody else; the arguments for the other candidates are all purely rational, coldly political parsings of the data. There are equally strong rational arguments, and perhaps stronger, to be made for Gov. Palin, but among them is this: she excites people. None of the other candidates do that, except Mormons for Romney; none of them excite both wings of the Republican base; none of them excite people beyond the Republican base. Only Gov. Palin does that, and I hope Sen. McCain realizes that.The question is, will he do it? We’ll find out tomorrow—or maybe today, if it leaks the way the Biden pick did. If he does, then yes, the media will immediately go on the attack, but despite them, we’ll see the excitement continue to build; if he doesn’t, it will deflate. We have lifelong Democrats who are leaning toward voting Republican for the first time; some of them will go back to Sen. Obama. We have disaffected Republicans who don’t like Sen. McCain but are thrilled at the prospect of voting for Gov. Palin; some of them won’t vote. We have others who like Sen. McCain well enough but aren’t energized by him, but would love to turn out and work for a McCain/Palin ticket; they’ll still vote for him in November, but most of them won’t contribute otherwise. And then there are those of us who will keep beating the drum regardless, but would like to have as many reasons as possible to make our case; there’s simply more to be said for McCain/Palin than for McCain/Hutchison or McCain/Pawlenty, let alone McCain/Romney. And yes, for a lot of us, if the Palin energy goes, there will also be a lot fewer people listening to us as we do.So, will John McCain make history by picking Sarah Palin, Alaska’s preternaturally accomplished female governor, as his running mate? I don’t know—but I hope so.
A couple facts on offshore drilling
This is the offshore-drilling map: what Congress has allowed and what it has disallowed. The green areas are legal, the red aren’t, and the yellow aren’t under our jurisdiction. (For the rather lurid “No Zone” thing, blame Idaho Sen. Larry Craig—this was produced by his office.)
This is the map of the mockery that China, Cuba, Canada, and other countries are making of that ban, drilling into the Gulf oil fields from sites as close to 50 miles off the coast of Key West.
At the very least, as we debate expanding offshore drilling, we need to be aware that just because we’ve banned it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening—it just means it’s happening a little further off shore, to the benefit of other countries (some of them our enemies) instead of our own.
McCain/Leno ’08
I just got the chance to watch last night’s Tonight Show, which was a great one; Jay Leno was at the top of his form. (I especially enjoyed his crack that he had John McCain and Dara Torres on “not for politics and the Olympics, but just because I like being around people who’ve been told they’re too old for the job.” Nice shot at NBC there.) It was interesting to note the dead silence from the audience when Leno mentioned Joe Biden, and interesting too to see how well Sen. McCain connected with them; it underscored the point folks have made that he’s much better in an informal, unscripted setting than he is in a stump speech. (That, I imagine, is the reason Barack Obama has refused to do the town hall meetings with him, because Sen. Obama is the other way around.) I expect it helped that this was Sen. McCain’s 13th appearance on the show—I got the sense from watching him and Leno that there’s a fair degree of friendship between the two of them, as they seemed to enjoy talking with each other. They cracked a few jokes—some at Sen. McCain’s expense, a couple at Sen. Biden’s—but they also had some serious discussion, and I think some worthwhile points were made. In particular, I appreciated his response to Leno’s question about the dollar that the first thing we need to do is “stop sending $700,000,000 a year to countries who don’t like us,” which was the beginning of his argument for expanded domestic energy production—drilling, nuclear, hydrogen, the works. (Perhaps my biggest surprise of his appearance: he got applause from the audience for calling for offshore drilling.)If you didn’t get the chance to watch Sen. McCain on Leno, the video is below.
One last comment: might I just add how much I hope to see Gov. Sarah Palin sitting in that chair a few weeks from now as the Republican VP nominee? I think she’d rock the show.