Strong debate performance tonight from Sarah Palin (and maybe the best of Joe Biden’s life as well); aside from Internet trolls, the worst anyone can say is “she helped herself but she didn’t help John McCain.” It may well have been a draw, but given the strength of Sen. Biden’s performance (which was helped by his willingness and ability to twist the truth into pretzels), that’s no knock on Gov. Palin; and where it matters most, it was a clear win for her—namely, giving clear evidence to her mishandlers in the McCain campaign that they need to let her be herself rather than trying to reshape her.Count me in with those who wish she’d had the freedom to depart from the McCain campaign’s unprofitable lines on things like Fannie, Freddie and the financial crisis, though.
Category Archives: Sarah Palin
Does Biden on a stage trump a grizzly on the car?
I don’t think so. Check out this profile of Sarah Palin from today’s Washington Post.HT: Beldar
HuffPo makes a discovery
Namely, don’t buy the Left’s wishful thinking on Sarah Palin; they now feel compelled to warn their fellow liberals that she’s “a better debater than you think.”Indeed. If they hadn’t tried so hard to dismiss her as a lightweight, they might not have fallen into the trap of believing their own spin; they might even have taken her seriously enough to figure out what those of us who’ve been paying attention already know: she’s a gifted and capable politician who’s shown a considerable knack in her career for taking on and beating formidable opponents. Calling her unqualified doesn’t make her so.
HT: Power Line
The speech they wouldn’t let Sarah Palin give
is a splendid piece of work; I suspect part of the reason the Obama campaign didn’t want her to give it is that it would have done a lot to burnish her foreign policy and national security credentials in the minds of anyone who heard it. Kudos to the New York Sun for posting the speech text in full.Update: The Jerusalem Post has published an excellent analysis of Gov. Palin’s speech and of the effects of her disinvitation, which is well worth your time. I was particularly struck by the concluding paragraph, which is clearly intended as a hammer blow:
[The Jewish Democrats who disinvited Palin] should be ashamed. The Democratic Party should be ashamed. And Jewish American voters should consider carefully whether opposing a woman who opposes the abortion of fetuses is really more important than standing up for the right of already born Jews to continue to live and for the Jewish state to continue to exist. Because this week it came to that.
Is David Axelrod trying to smear Sarah Palin?
Between Dr. Rusty Shackelford’s research, posted at The Jawa Report, and Ace’s followup, it sure looks like it; Patterico says pointedly, “In the criminal law business, we call evidence like that ‘consciousness of guilt.’” Didn’t Barack Obama promise us a new politics that would move us away from partisan smears and character assassination?Looks like his campaign didn’t get the memo.HT: Hugh HewittUpdate: Ethan Winner is trying to fall on his sword, claiming he acted alone and without any involvement of the Obama campaign; as Ace points out, there are strong reasons not to believe him, especially given the existing relationship between Axelrod and the Winners’ firm. Certainly, everyone’s behavior here is highly suspicious.
Where are the defenders of privacy now?
The folks of the pro-abortion lobby would have you believe that they hold a woman’s privacy as sacrosanct.Apparently, that only applies to liberal women. Conservative women, in their view, don’t have rights—they’ve forfeited them from the heinous crime of departing from liberal orthodoxy.If what’s been done to Sarah Palin and her family this time doesn’t make you sick, and worried about the direction politics is taking in this country, then you don’t deserve this country. There is absolutely no place in political discourse for hacking into a candidate’s e-mail, much less using that to publish their e-mails, e-mail addresses, unlisted numbers, private photos, and voicemail messages. If the Bush administration did this to terrorists, these folks would be rioting in the streets—but if you do it to a Republican, it’s OK?For shame. For shame!
Obama, Prince of Denmark: To drill or not to drill
I’ve been meaning to post on this for a while now: amid the posturing and the squabbling over offshore drilling, there was an interesting contradiction in Barack Obama’s acceptance speech a few weeks ago that few people have caught but that’s worth pointing out. I suspect the reason so few people have caught it is that it takes someone in the energy business, like The Thinklings‘ Bill Roberts, to see it:
Tonight, Obama said that drilling is a “stopgap measure”, not a solution. Right after that he said he’s going to promote clean-burning Natural Gas.Which is great, because the company I work for explores for and produces natural gas.But that’s where it gets weird: to get to natural gas you have to drill for it. And there are trillions of cubic feet of it in the outer continental shelf (OCS) that we’ve all been arguing about all this time.It gets even more complicated: It’s extremely common to get BOTH natural gas and oil out of the same wellbore.Sometimes natural gas is on top of the oil, kind of like a “cap” (and water is often under the oil—oil floats on water). So many wells produce all three products—water, gas, and oil. Sometimes the gas is dissolved in the produced oil and is separated when it gets to the surface.But, bottom line—it makes no sense to say no to drilling while simultaneously touting natural gas.I realize this is probably boring to many of you, but because I work with people who do the work to find the darn stuff, I found that to be a pretty interesting comment.
What this shows is that, like most of us (including Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the leadership in Congress), Sen. Obama doesn’t really know much about energy production and the issues related to it. That’s hardly surprising, but it does mean that at a time when energy prices are a major concern in our economy—and when, as John McCain and Sarah Palin have both pointed out more than once, oil and gas imports are a major foreign-policy concern—the Democratic presidential candidate is offering policy prescriptions in this critical area that are based not on actual knowledge of that area but rather on ideology and political convenience. Thus we see him doing things like “saying no to drilling while simultaneously touting natural gas,” just because he doesn’t know enough to know that he’s contradicted himself.This is one of the things which makes Sen. McCain’s choice of Gov. Palin so striking. She’s taken flak from both sides of the aisle for not being broadly and deeply versed in foreign policy and matters of national security, and he’s taken flak for choosing a nominee who lacks that kind of understanding; and there’s no question that she has a lot to learn in that area, and that the wisdom of choosing her as the VP nominee will depend to a considerable extent on her ability to do so quickly. That said, however, what she does have that’s far harder to find is a broad and deep understanding, both at the political level and at the down-and-dirty practical level, of the energy industry, energy policy, and all its manifold ramifications. She knows how to address these issues, and she’s managed to do so without ending up in Big Oil’s pocket, which is probably almost as valuable. At a time when energy policy is critically important both domestically and internationally, when the GOP nominee for President is already more than qualified to handle national-security issues but is not conversant with energy issues, I think Gov. Palin’s expertise in this area is a powerful qualification—and a pointed contrast to the ignorance on the Democratic ticket.
Positive feminist perspectives on Sarah Palin
As Jonah Goldberg and the Anchoress, among many others, have commented on, there’s been a veritable avalanche of hysterical attacks on Sarah Palin from various liberal feminists; I suggested earlier that a lot of liberals were furious that the GOP put a conservative woman on the ticket—how dare they!—and the more recent wave seems to bear that out. A number of feminists are even going so far as to deal with the cognitive dissonance of Gov. Palin’s existence by denying that she’s really a woman. (Shades of Elizabeth Moon.)They are not, however, the only voices out there. Though fewer, there have also been liberal feminists who have expressed appreciation for Gov. Palin, even as they disagree with her positions. Perhaps the most important such voice is the redoubtable Camille Paglia, whose essay in Salon is profoundly important; though her description of Gov. Palin’s “brand new style of muscular American feminism” has drawn the most attention, she has a number of important things to say. I was particularly struck by her critique of her own party:
The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances. . . .It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism—one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired. But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide.
Also of interest is a perspective from the British press, Rebecca Johnson in the Telegraph:
Politics be damned, Palin was a woman and she was an Alaskan! Moreover, I had been impressed with her when I interviewed her—not for her politics (I’m one of those east coast liberals she doesn’t care about) but for the other things that people across the country are responding to right now: her warmth, her work ethic, her “can-do” attitude.We should celebrate what is groundbreaking about Sarah Palin: a card-carrying member of Feminists for Life is a big step forward from Housewives for Life. And then we should talk about the issues.
Finally, DeeDee Myers offered the Obama campaign some wise advice in The New Republic, making the case that they should leave Gov. Palin alone:
What Sarah Palin has done, and this is something I like about her, is that she’s a women who has succeeded very much on her own terms. She talks about motherhood as a training ground for leadership; she manages and balances her family and her work in her own way. It’s very hard to see where her family ends and her work begins. I think a lot of women see their lives that way. Not everyone’s going to go out and shoot a moose and put their hair up in a bun and put on their sexy open-toe shoes and go to dinner. . . . But does everybody have to be lock-step on every issue? Or can somebody who’s outside—in Sarah Palin’s case, very much outside—the traditional feminist agenda still move the ball forward for women? I think the answer is yes. When I hear Pat Buchanan on TV, decrying sexism in the media, you know? This is not all bad. . . . I don’t know where abortion rights are going to end up in all this, and honestly that concerns me, but I think we need to find a different language to talk about it. I think that there are more women who identify with Sarah Palin than Gloria Steinem right now. Even if they don’t agree with 100 percent of her agenda, her life looks more like their lives.
HT: Jennifer RubinUpdate: see also Camille Paglia’s latest contribution on Sarah Palin, and this comment from Elaine Lafferty, the former editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine.
What ABC didn’t show you
Check out this article on the various pieces of Charlie Gibson’s first interview with Sarah Palin. Looking at the parts of the transcript that weren’t aired, it’s clear this wasn’t just editing for length—it was editing to put as bad a face as possible on Gov. Palin’s answers. No surprise, but if you really want to know how well Gov. Palin understands foreign policy, read the article—and then go on and read the transcript.It’s enough to make me think that Glenn Reynolds is right: politicians who agree to interviews should bring their own cameras and post the raw video themselves so that people can see what really happened.
And the 2008 Zirnhelt Award* for Political Honesty goes to . . .
. . . Dr. André Lalonde, executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada. Dr. Lalonde’s reaction to Sarah Palin’s emergence as a role model for mothers of Down Syndrome and other special-needs children:“The worry is that this will have an implication for abortion issues in Canada.”In other words, he’s worried that that Gov. Palin’s example might “inadvertently influence” women to keep their Down Syndrome babies instead of aborting them, as he obviously feels they ought to do. (Though Dr. Lalonde tried to deny it, “Members of Canada’s Down syndrome community say that many of the country’s medical professionals only give messages of fear to parents who learn their baby will be born with the genetic condition.”) That rather takes the pro-choice mask off the pro-abortion lobby, doesn’t it?And no, before anyone reacts, I’m not saying that everyone who supports legal abortion wants to promote abortion; but a lot of those in the business, either as practitioners or as advocates, absolutely do, and hang anything that gets in the way—even basic public-health concerns.*For those unfamilar with David Zirnhelt, he’s a Canadian politician and former New Democratic Party cabinet minister in British Columbia who was known for his quick temper and uninhibited tongue; Minister Zirnhelt is probably best remembered for telling a group of reporters, “Remember, government can do anything.”HT: The AnchoressUpdate: Andrew Malcolm commented on this as well in his “Top of the Ticket” blog on the Los Angeles Times website; somewhat suspiciously, that post appears to be missing. Hugh Hewitt has a PDF copy of it available here.