It occurred to me today that though I’ve posted a fair bit about Sarah Palin, it’s been a couple months now since I laid out the reasons that convinced me of the truth of the superficially crazy notion that the best running mate for John McCain is the first-term governor of a small red state that most Americans rarely think about. Given that more and more people are discovering her and starting to consider that superficially crazy notion for themselves, I thought that re-running those reasons might be in order.One, she’s young, just 44; she would balance out Sen. McCain’s age.Two, she has proven herself as an able executive and administrator, serving as mayor, head of the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and now as governor; she would balance out Sen. McCain’s legislative experience (though he does have command experience in the Navy).Three, she has strong conservative credentials, both socially (she’s strongly pro-life, politically and personally) and fiscally (as her use of the line-item veto has shown); she would assuage concerns about Sen. McCain’s conservatism.Four, she’s independent, having risen to power against the Alaska GOP machine, not through it; she’s worked hard against the corruption in both her party and her state’s government. She would reinforce Sen. McCain’s maverick image, which is one of his greatest strengths in this election, but in a more conservative direction.Five, for the reasons listed above, she’s incredibly popular in Alaska. That might seem a minor factor to some, but it’s indicative of her abilities as a politician.Six, she has a remarkable personal story, of the sort the media would love. She’s a former beauty-pageant winner, the mother of five children (the oldest serving in the Army, preparing to deploy to Iraq, the youngest a Down Syndrome baby), an outdoorsy figure who rides snowmobiles and eats mooseburgers—and a tough, take-no-prisoners competitor who was known as “Sarah Barracuda” when she led her underdog high-school basketball team to the state championship, and who now has accomplished a similar feat in cutting her way to the governor’s office. No one now in American politics can match Sen. McCain’s life story (no, not even Barack Obama), but she comes as close as anyone can (including Sen. Obama); she fits his image.Seven, she would give the McCain campaign the “Wow!” factor it can really use in a vice-presidential nominee. As a young, attractive, tough, successful, independent-minded, appealing female politician, though not well known yet, she would make American voters sit up and take notice [as indeed she is already]; and given her past history, there could be no doubt that she would be a strong, independent voice in a McCain administration, should there be one. (Update: for those wondering how she’d do in debates, go here to watch how she did the last time around. Go here to see her inaugural address.)Eight, choosing Gov. Palin as his running mate, especially if coupled with actions like giving Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal the keynote slot at the GOP convention, would help the party going forward. The GOP needs to rebuild its bench of plausible strong future presidential candidates, and perhaps the best thing Sen. McCain can do for the party is to help with this. The party needs Gov. Jindal to stay where he is for another term or two (as, I believe, does the state of Louisiana), but in giving him the convention slot that launched Sen. Obama to prominence four years ago and putting Gov. Palin on the ticket, Sen. McCain would put two of the GOP’s best people and brightest hopes for the future in a perfect position to claim the White House themselves; in so doing, he would make them the face of the GOP for the future.
Category Archives: Politics
Does Barack Obama have a woman problem?
I wouldn’t have thought so—he’s married to a smart, strong, aggressive woman whom he clearly loves dearly (though I personally find her rather depressing); but I’m beginning to wonder. He’s certainly been rather inept in his handling of Hillary Clinton, managing to both cave in to her (and/or Bill) and to tick her off; sending the formal announcement of the Biden pick (even though it had already leaked) at 3 am was just over the top. Now people are starting to ask, “Why is Barack Obama so afraid of women?” I don’t believe he is, but with his campaign’s connection to the attempted political hit job on Sarah Palin coming right together with his treatment of Sen. Clinton, it does seem clear that he wants a monopoly on the identity politics in this campaign. He understands that “first black President” has a powerful pull, and that he can use that (and more power to him); in consequence, he doesn’t want that blurred or undermined by a woman in the race. He didn’t want to be upstaged (for which I don’t blame him), so he didn’t pick Hillary; equally, he doesn’t want to be competing in the general election against a woman on the GOP ticket, which would create crossing and conflicting claims in the identity-politics arena. After all, if the Democrats give you the chance to elect the first black man to the White House, and the Republicans give you the chance to elect the first woman (albeit just to the Blair House, the official residence of the VP), then you can make history either way. (And one would have to admit that between the two, the Republicans nominating a woman would be the bigger surprise.)In any case, I’m quite sure Sen. Obama has no problems with women—but it does seem like more and more women are wondering if he does. (Update: the latest numbers from Gallup show his support among women dropping, and especially among unmarried women, from 46% to 39%.) Some of that, again, is his treatment of Sen. Clinton, who hasn’t buried the hatchet—she’s doing her best to undermine him, even when she helps him; some is rooted in the behavior of many of his supporters, a problem Rebecca Traister wrote about in Salon a few months ago; some of it comes from who those supporters are, or at least the most visible ones. Stacy at Smart Girl Politics asks, “One last thought….have you ever noticed how many of John McCain’s spokespeople on the media rounds are women? Have you noticed how many top business women have lined up to support John McCain? How many prominent women can you name in the Obama campaign?” I’m not sure how widespread this sort of perception is, but Sen. Obama had better do something about it, or he’ll wind up seeing a lot more ads like this one:
Sarah Palin: hit magnet
The biggest argument people offer against Sarah Palin as a potential running mate for John McCain is essentially that she’s too obscure. Part of that is the “Alaska’s a 3-electoral-vote state that’s going to vote Republican anyway” thing (which I happen to think the Biden pick has neutralized, since Joe Biden also represents a small state that was already safely in the column), but it seems to me that the driving concern there is really that most Americans don’t remember Alaska’s up there most of the time and don’t really take anything that happens up there seriously, and therefore Gov. Palin might as well be from Guam for all anyone in the lower 48 cares—she’s just too obscure to be a credible pick.Now, speaking as a Seattle Seahawks fan still smarting over Jimmy Johnson’s comment back in 2005 (our Super Bowl season) that nobody cares about the ‘Hawks because “they’re way up there in South Alaska,” I probably take that sort of twaddle rather more personally, and find it rather more irritating, than is truly warranted. My personal reactions aside, though, I think the folks who call Gov. Palin too obscure to be Sen. McCain’s pick are seriously misunderestimating the power of the Internet, especially as an amplifier for good old word-of-mouth advertising. As evidence, I can offer my own experience with this blog. Probably nothing I’ve done in the last two years has done more to attract traffic than when I started talking about Gov. Palin; every time I put up a post about her, I get a spike in hits. What’s more, of the folks who find this blog through searches, over 31% are currently landing here from the search term “Sarah Palin,” and another 7% or so are landing from some variant of that. (For all of you looking for information on Sarah Palin’s church, I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about that.)I would have expected this sort of result had I been posting on someone like Mitt Romney, who’s already understood to be nationally well-known (and who knows, maybe I’ll get a spike from mentioning him, too); to see it connected to Gov. Palin tells me that in fact she’s already a lot better known around the country than those who are skeptical about her think, and that she’s generating a lot of interest and excitement. There’s simply nobody else out there on the GOP side (including, alas, our presidential nominee) who has people that fired up, or who has the potential to fire up that many more people. The other VP candidates have their supporters, but the people who will vote for McCain/Romney or McCain/Pawlenty will vote for McCain regardless, and probably about as happily; they don’t really add anything to the equation (and Gov. Romney turned off enough people during the primaries that I continue to believe that he would be a net drag on the ticket). Based on what I’m seeing, the same cannot be said of a McCain/Palin ticket, which would generate excitement, support, commitment, and ultimately votes that no other possible combination would.(Update: we’re not just holding serve here, we’re seeing this go to a new level; judging by the spike in hits I’ve gotten today, interest in Gov. Palin continues to multiply. Sen. McCain, the excitement is out there: I hope you have the vision and the cool hand to grab hold of it, even if the CW is that naming her would be a gamble. But then, you have the gambler’s nerve.)(Further update: as the log keeps turning over—I don’t pay for StatCounter, so I just get the free 500-entry log—Gov. Palin keeps gaining on the rest of the list; as of now, right around 70% of all the search hits on this blog over that period were looking for Sarah Palin. That’s how strongly things are running right now. The wave is there for Sen. McCain to catch if he will.)
One more argument for Sarah Palin
I can’t let the news of the Biden pick go by without noting that Joe Biden on the ticket with Barack Obama is the best argument yet for Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket.Sen. Joe Biden vs. Gov. Sarah Palin
Member of Congress vs. experienced administrator
Pork-winner vs. pork fighter
Washington Establishment vs. Washington outsider
Party insider vs. maverick
Uncharismatic vs. charismatic
“Old” vs. “young”
Unexciting vs. exciting
Hothead vs. cool headUpdate: that last is courtesy of Adam Brickley, who has a brilliant post up on how Gov. Palin would neutralize Sen. Biden, the D. C. attack dog, by making him look like a bratty, mean-spirited jerk (which, with Biden, is exactly what you have to try to do, since that’s the way he usually beats himself). As he points out, she’s done it before.
Joe Biden: Barack Obama’s new backbone
I have to wonder if Sen. Obama’s decision to pick Sen. Joe Biden, party and Washington insider extraordinaire, as his running mate wasn’t solidified this past week when Dick Morris branded him “the new Jimmy Carter.” Certainly, in my opinion and in the minds of many, Morris was right when he wrote,
Last week raised important questions about whether Barack Obama is strong enough to be president. On the domestic political front, he showed incredible weakness in dealing with the Clintons, while on foreign and defense questions, he betrayed a lack of strength and resolve in standing up to Russia’s invasion of Georgia. . . .
Harsh? I don’t think so. As Morris continues,
Consider first the domestic and political. Bill and Hillary Clinton have no leverage over Obama. Hillary can’t win the nomination. She doesn’t control any committees. If she or her supporters tried to disrupt the convention or demonstrate outside, she would pay a huge price among the party faithful. . . . But, without having any leverage or a decent hand to play, the Clintons bluffed Obama into amazing concessions. . . .If Obama can’t stand up to the Clintons, after they have been defeated, how can he measure up to a resurgent Putin who has just achieved a military victory? When the Georgia invasion first began, Obama appealed for “restraint” on both sides. He treated the aggressive lion and the victimized lamb even-handedly. His performance was reminiscent of the worst of appeasement at Munich, where another dictator got away with seizing another breakaway province of another small neighboring country, leading to World War II. After two days, Obama corrected himself, spoke of Russian aggression and condemned it. But his initial willingness to see things from the other point of view and to buy the line that Georgia provoked the invasion by occupying a part of its own country betrayed a world view characterized by undue deference to aggressors.
As indeed he deferred to the Clintons’ aggression. This, I suspect, is where Sen. Biden comes in. Whatever his flaws, he’s definitely a strong character; I think, if Sen. Obama wins in November, that Sen. Biden will be a powerful voice in his ear over the next four years, and a man who will wield considerable influence in our government. Since I happen to believe that Sen. Biden is much more prepared and qualified to be president than Sen. Obama is, I don’t think that’s at all bad. And while I do believe, as I said in the previous post, that selecting Sen. Biden will tie Sen. Obama even more closely to the leadership of the Democratic Congress, at least Sen. Biden represents the realist stream in foreign policy among that leadership. Were I an Obama Democrat, I probably wouldn’t like that very much; as one who generally votes Republican, however, I find that reassuring.Which of course raises the big question which will be answered over the next two months: has naming Sen. Biden to the ticket accomplished anything politically for Sen. Obama besides reassuring people who aren’t going to vote for him anyway? Stay tuned—we’ll find out.
Above his pay grade?
When Rick Warren asked Barack Obama, “At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?”, here was the Senator’s response:
Yes, he really claimed that having an opinion on that is above his pay grade. But that doesn’t mean he thinks all opinions about abortion are above his pay grade. Listen to the audio from the beginning of this clip, taken from comments he made in the Illinois State Senate as he led the fight against the state’s version of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act:
In other words, it’s above his pay grade to say that an unborn baby is in fact a baby, but it’s well within his pay grade to say that efforts to protect babies who are born alive after an attempted abortion constitute an undue burden on the women who birthed them. Sounds like what’s really above Sen. Obama’s pay grade is challenging Democratic Party orthodoxy—not a good sign for someone claiming to offer a “new politics” and a post-partisan way of doing business.But then, this is becoming the pattern. As Michael Reagan wrote,
During the forum, his struggle to please everybody by straddling the issues was plain for all to see. He showed he was willing to say and do what he believed everybody wanted to hear. When you try to find any real depth in his beliefs you quickly discover he is utterly shallow and soulless, a sloganeer instead of a missionary. He’s just a politician on the make, trying to be all things to all people—an empty suit proclaiming empty promises. Being without real depth, his platform merely floats on a surface of promises categorized as “Hope” and “Change,” neither of which is clearly defined. He assures us that he wants to change Washington and sweep away all that this city represents. Yet one has only to look at next week’s Democratic National Convention to understand that it’s not change, but lots more of the same.
For that matter, now that we know Sen. Obama’s VP pick, one need look no farther than Joe Biden. I understand the pick, as a matter of political calculation; it’s the same calculation George W. Bush made when he picked Dick Cheney so that voters could feel sure there was a grownup in the White House. Sen. Obama is hoping Sen. Biden can be his Dick Cheney, a man who has the gravitas and foreign policy experience and solid judgment that he himself lacks. At the same time, though, Sen. Biden is as much a member of the Washington establishment as it’s possible to be; more than all but a handful of people, he is the quintessence of the Democratic Congress. I’ve argued before that an Obama administration will really be a Pelosi administration, as the Democratic congressional powers will run the show and Sen. Obama will have to fall into line to get anything done; bringing one of them right into the inner circle of the administration will only strengthen that.Sen. Obama got where he is on a wave of excitement, partly because of his racial heritage, but also in large part because of the power of his rhetoric in promising us a new politics and a new way forward, a way out of the polarized partisan warfare of the last decade or three. Right now, it looks like the power to follow through on his promise is above his pay grade.
Barack Obama, you’ve been rickrolled
This is weird, but it’s funny. (At least, I think so; I’ll let you judge for yourself.)
If we can’t laugh at our politicians, who can we laugh at?HT: Carlos Echevarria
Sense of place and the ’08 election
My honors English teacher in my junior year of high school used to say that there are three themes in American literature: individualism, sense of place, and the American dream. He said this to a class with a large contingent of Navy brats, including me, including many (though not me) whose only sense of the place in which they lived was that they wouldn’t be there much longer and didn’t particularly want to be. (The town in which, through my parents’ determination, I did the majority of my growing up is a nice town in a beautiful part of the country; but at the time, anyway, it wasn’t the kind of place many of my teenage comrades found all that exciting.) I have long thought of John McCain primarily as a counterpart to my father: a Navy pilot, an officer and a gentleman. For whatever reason, I haven’t thought of him as a counterpart of my own, though from a different generation: a Navy brat. And yet, he was and is that, too; he too knows what it means to grow up in a world where home is not a place, but an institution and a people.Peggy Noonan picked up on this, and on the fact that Barack Obama similarly grew up in a variety of places, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “The End of Placeness”. She’s right that sense of place, which my old English teacher considered such an important American theme, is disappearing; the Rev. Dr. Craig Barnes, of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and Shadyside Presbyterian Church, has had some wise and thoughtful things to say on this. As the Rev. Dr. Barnes puts it, before the GI Bill and the rise of American prosperity following WW II, most Americans were Settlers, people who put down roots in a particular place and stayed there (and settled for whatever way of life they had there); those who didn’t were mistrusted. With the GI Bill and the beginnings of modern suburbia, a new generation of Exiles began (exiles being people who know where home is but don’t live there; he cites as an example his own family, which always went “home for Christmas” from their suburban life to the tobacco farm in North Carolina). Now, as he says, Exiles are giving way increasingly to Nomads: people (primarily Gen X and younger) who are equally at home everywhere because they aren’t really at home anywhere. It’s a significant issue for those of us who are pastors, though not everyone has realized it yet.Having this emerging reality mirrored in our presidential candidates is a strange thing, and I can understand Noonan’s reaction to it. That said, as Beldar points out, they mirror this very differently; though this fact is tangential to Noonan’s point, it’s nevertheless significant.I suspect part of Sen. Obama’s appeal to young voters during the primaries (which seems to be fading somewhat) is that his rootlessness, though an extreme form, is a familar type among those of my generation and younger; while few of us had mothers who married Africans and Indonesians and moved us to another continent, the story’s outline is familiar:
Obama, by contrast, can only remember meeting his father once, briefly, when he was 10, and he never met his paternal grandfather at all. They had no presence in Barack Obama’s life while he was growing up; they were only dreams and stories and faded photos, with an occasional letter. . . .While Obama at least had a long-term relationship with his paternal grandparents, even that came at the expense of being effectively abandoned to their care by his own mother—hardly an ideal situation. Indeed, the adults around young Obama seemed in his book to be tied to nowhere and nothing—and outside of their immediate family (and sometimes not even that), to nobody. Obama was both a literal and figurative “step-child.”
Of him it may truly be said, as Noonan does, that he is “not from a place, but from an experience”—and from an all too common experience among younger folks these days: the experience of divorce and remarriage, step-parents and moving from place to place as one’s mother or father or both chase their own self-fulfillment. The place he’s from is the broken family, and it’s a familiar one to many.Sen. McCain, by contrast, grew up with one of the oldest forms of placelessness in the human experience: he grew up in the military. That has some of the same effects, leaving you with the desire to belong someplace; but it doesn’t leave you truly rootless, because you find your roots in the military community and culture. (And it is a culture of its own, connected to but apart from mainstream American culture, make no mistake about that; our local college has even started exempting military brats along with international students from its standard cross-cultural class and including them in the “adapting to American culture” class instead.) Those of us who grow up in Christian homes learn to find our roots in the church as well, which is a very good thing in many ways. (This is why, when Beldar writes that “McCain got a rock-solid and abiding ‘faith’ from his grandfather and father—faith in them, in himself, in the U.S. Navy and the other U.S. military forces, and most importantly, in all of America—while at best, Obama got only ‘dreams’ from his,” I have to say he’s missed the most important faith Sen. McCain learned from his father and grandfather: faith in God.) The effects of this are very clear in this presidential campaign. Sen. Obama can stand before a German audience and call himself a “citizen of the world” because his psychological citizenship is pretty tenuous—his most formative experiences tie him more to Africa and Asia than to America. Sen. McCain could never do that. He doesn’t belong to Phoenix any more than Sen. Obama belongs to Chicago, but he is unquestionably rooted in America, down to the core of his being, through his generations-deep roots in the United States Navy. In the end, I guess that’s why my respect and admiration for the man trumps my deep reservations about him, and why I trust his instincts even if I don’t always trust his ideas.
Is it possible that anyone could be more unlike Obama’s mother, with her dizzying moves from husband to husband and country to country, than McCain’s mother, who was always the quintessential “Navy wife,” wholly integrated into an American military-family culture that is proud and vast and long-standing? However often Roberta McCain and young John moved, they were never alone, never strangers, never “lost”—and they never had to flail about trying to “find themselves.” Rather, from birth to adulthood, McCain was surrounded by people whose lives were dedicated to a clear set of ideals and a clear purpose. All those people continuously reinforced and reminded him of the faith—the dedication to duty, honor, and country—that he inherited as a legacy from his grandfather and father.
And for Sen. McCain, that’s the bottom line; that, ultimately, is his sense of place.
Barack Obama’s foreign vulnerability
There are a lot of people who assume that Sen. Obama, because of his heritage, will have an advantage in dealing with other countries. Part of that, as John Kerry noted, is that if he wins in November, “it would have a powerful message all across the world about the American story. About our making real the words that we live by. That all men are created equal.” Part too, I think, is the idea that because he doesn’t “look like the guys on the money,” non-European leaders around the world will find him more appealing and accessible.Kerry’s certainly right about the symbolic value of an Obama victory—for Americans. What’s somewhat questionable is the underlying assumption here that anti-black racism is only an American problem. That’s simply not the case: anti-black racism is in fact a significant problem in many of the countries who pose us the biggest challenges, including China and much of the Muslim world, in which slavery of black Africans was never forbidden and continues to be practiced. As such, in dealing with countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, or with the Israel-Palestine conflict, Sen. Obama could actually find his African heritage a disadvantage. That said, it should also be noted that his heritage should be an asset for him in dealing with sub-Saharan Africa, where the US is already generally popular thanks to Bush Administration policies and which should assume increasing significance for American policy going forward.There’s another issue as well for Sen. Obama in dealing with the Muslim world, this one potentially more serious: whether he considers himself that he was ever a Muslim, on Muslim terms, he was, and he clearly isn’t now (regardless of what some people might like to tell you, he’s definitely a practicing Christian), which makes him an apostate, a murtad. As longtime student of the Muslim world Daniel Pipes points out, that’s no small issue. Technically, this would make him subject to religious-based assassination, though it seems probable that prudence would prevail over any such impulse; but as the Christian Science Monitor realized, for the US to elect an apostate Muslim to the White House would be a huge propaganda windfall for al’Qaeda and other jihadist organizations. That, obviously, would create major foreign-policy challenges for an Obama administration.Do these things disqualify Sen. Obama to be President? No, certainly not, nor do they mean he couldn’t have a successful administration—I’m doubtful such would happen, yes, but that’s for other reasons. They do mean, however, that the facile idea that electing Sen. Obama will be a boon for American foreign policy is in fact quite dubious.
The things you find by following links
There’s a pro-Hillary Clinton website out there that is trying to prove that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is fraudulent—that it is in fact a forgery to hide the fact that he’s an Indonesian citizen.Wow.I have two reactions to this. One, though I’m no expert, from what little I know about the forensic analysis of documents (from reading textbooks and the like a number of years ago), the evidence behind this argument (as presented by its partisans) looks difficult to refute.Two, the whole idea’s completely insane.Oh, and three: whether this is in fact legitimate or (more likely) the product of the fevered brains of a small group of disappointed Hillary backers, it just goes to show how far people will go these days to try to win an election. If I had to make a prediction, I’d expect this will go the same way as most of the crazy stories I’ve read over the years. (“Did you know Bill Clinton was running drugs out of the governor’s mansion in Little Rock?” Yeah, that kind of crazy story.) Still, every once in a while, one of those stories proves out . . . if this happens to be one of them, the next couple months are going to be a real roller-coaster ride.