My obnoxious post earlier aside — this pick is catastrophically bad.
Most obviously, this pick is a craven attempt to try and peel off just enough women for McCain to win. That’s the math now in McCain land. All of the grandiose talk McCain had about new politics, about being a maverick is now boiled down to just a stunt in an attempt to win the White House. Key to this new math is the expectation that women will vote for McCain/Palin, just because she’s a woman, which would mean that McCain thinks that millions of women in America voted for Hillary Clinton because of her chromosomes. Never mind the fact that she had years of experience and a compelling message (a compelling message, by the way, is something that the McCain camp is still missing).
I cannot find a single person on a national ticket, ever, who is more unqualified than Sarah Palin — the only one that comes to mind is Spiro Agnew, and it should be noted that Baltimore county (Agnew was a county exec before he was Governor of Maryland) had about 450K people, not 8K. The 5th Congressional District has approximately 615K people, Alaska has about 680K people. She has served as Governor for all of about 20 months in a state with about half the population of Hennepin County — a state mind you that is flush in petrodollars. She hasn’t had to deal with a difficult budget, she has no practical experience with the difficult arts of governance — let alone the experience necessary to be President. She shows little or no understanding of foriegn policy and the response of the McCain camp to this, is that she’ll learn at McCain’s feet, the very robust sexism of that comment aside — do we need a vice president who needs to learn at the feet of a 72 year old cancer survivor?
Hillary Clinton could have been President — not because of her gender, but because of her judgement, her experience and her wisdom — these are as far as we can tell traits that Palin lacks.
And finally, more than Sarah Palin what this pick says
John McCain showed with this pick — his first presidential choice — that he doesn’t have the judgement or the character to be President of the United States. A guy who has run on his fealty to the country picked as his #2 someone wholly incapable of leading it.
[Edit]And, one thing earlier I forgot to mention, McCain met Palin once before last Wednesday and spoke to her on the phone just one other time. Think about that for a second, he picked a person who won’t help him govern any better but who he cravenly thinks will help him campaign better after having only met her once in person before last Wednesday.
That shows me pretty clearly that he doesn’t have the judgement, the temperment, or the values to be President.
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