When Sarah Palin eventually returns to Alaska, either for the shotgun wedding or after losing the election, she will meet an electorate that is very different than when she left. I wonder what those approval ratings look like toady?
UPDATE:
Another national commentator, Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek calls her out:
.Palin Is Ready? Please.
McCain says that he always puts country first. In this important case, that is simply not true.
Will someone please put Sarah Palin out of her agony? Is it too much to ask that she come to realize that she wants, in that wonderful phrase in American politics, "to spend more time with her family"?...
Palin has been given a set of talking points by campaign advisers, simple ideological mantras that she repeats and repeats as long as she can. ("We mustn't blink.") But if forced off those rehearsed lines, what she has to say is often, quite frankly, gibberish.
Can we now admit the obvious? Sarah Palin is utterly unqualified to be vice president.
She is a feisty, charismatic politician who has done some good things in Alaska. But she has never spent a day thinking about any important national or international issue, and this is a hell of a time to start.
...
In these times, for John McCain to have chosen this person to be his running mate is fundamentally irresponsible. McCain says that he always puts country first.
In this important case, it is simply not true.
2 comments:
What are we to make of Senator Obama? No messiah should have to silence his questioners yet his appeals to censorship are habitual. The candidate appears above no fray. At this juncture, leftists undoubtedly fathom that their savior is weak and that fair debate equates with his doom. Therefore, their strategy is to scorch any ground upon which they find the right. Barack Obama’s tactics are totalitarian and un-American. They illustrate that, while we should reject him for a thousand reasons this November, none is more convincing than the palpable contempt he has shown for free speech.
What is it with the American mainstream media when we have to turn to Britain to get a more accurate analysis of our political scene than we can get here? First we had my previous post in which the UK Times provided a much better analysis of how Nancy Pelosi's partisan rant caused the bailout bill to fail in Congress while the New York Times basically provided cover for the House Speaker. And now we have this column by Dominic Lawson in the UK Independent that gives us a clear picture of how utterly unqualified Joe Biden is to become vice-president. Yes, while the Amercan MSM remains obsessed with pointing out how Sarah Palin might not be familiar with every last detail of political policy (including the "Bush Doctrine" which almost nobody knew about until Charlie Gibson sprung it as a gotcha question) they continue to overlook not just gaffes but astounding gaps in Biden's basic wisdom. So let us allow Lawson to now go where the American MSM fears to tread (emphasis mine):
Thus last year he declared that his then rival, Barack Obama, was "not yet ready for the Presidency", which was not a post suitable for "on-the-job training", but graciously acknowledged: " I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy, I mean, that's a storybook, man."
Other African-American politicians were hardly amused by the imputation that they were not "clean", and I don't suppose Obama himself was grateful. Still, the Illinois Senator was happy to choose Biden as his vice-presidential running-mate, for several reasons. He is not married to Bill Clinton; he has a strong following among white blue-collar voters, which Obama desperately needs; above all, he is said to have the experience which Obama lacks – he has been a Senator for 36 years and is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
For all the longevity of his tenure, Biden does not deserve the description lavished on him last month by the Los Angeles Times (among others) as "an acknowledged foreign policy sage". He voted against using American military force to remove Saddam Hussein's army from occupied Kuwait, but voted for the American invasion of sovereign Iraq in 2003. Later, he voted against the "surge" which has brought a degree of stability to that benighted country, proposing instead that it be allowed to break up along ethnic lines – the now discredited "Biden Plan". Experience is a wonderful thing, of course – but only if you learn the right lessons from it.
The Republican vice-presidential candidate had been unable to elaborate on the way in which John McCain had attempted to enforce greater regulation on the finance industry, beyond his demand for more supervision of the biggest mortgage lenders; and she struggled to justify her claim that being Governor of Alaska gave her a special insight into the threats from Russia.
Neither of her responses was articulate. But they weren't factually incorrect. She didn't make anything up. That's Biden territory. When he faced the deceptively easy-going Ms Couric, he told the CBS anchorwoman, a propos deals to rescue Wall Street: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened'." As others, but not Ms Couric, have since observed, the US President at the time of the 1929 stock market crash was not Roosevelt, but Herbert Hoover; and Roosevelt didn't go on television, probably because no-one in America owned one at the time.
Nothing in Joe Biden's record, long as it is, suggests that he has the attributes one would wish for in a head of state. There would be plenty of laughs, though.
Dominic Lawson: Why should anyone trust Joe Biden?
The Democrats' candidate for VP doesn't deserve to be called a sage
Tuesday, 30 September 2008
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