The Best Possible Choice

[billroper]

I was delighted when the news broke this morning that McCain had selected Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate, having gone to bed last night expecting Pawlenty. McCain needs to take risks if he's going to have a chance of winning this election and this looks to be one of the good ones.

McCain needs to get people who can be persuaded to do so to take a second look at him. (If this doesn't apply to you, that's fine. I suspect that McCain could have picked the deity of your choice as his running mate with a divinely-backed promise of Peace on Earth and he still wouldn't be your preferred candidate. :) ) Palin provides that in a way that none of the supposed front-running choices could have. Whether it will make a difference remains to be seen.

And I am absolutely thrilled to have someone on board the Republican ticket who has made her reputation by going in, kicking butt, and taking names in her efforts to rid her own party of corruption. If it were possible to say the same about Senator Obama, I'd be much less worried about him than I am. (Yes, I know about the investigation into Palin. It appears to be a non-event. Certainly McCain knew about it and picked her anyway.)

That is change that I can believe in.

I wish we had such Republicans in Illinois.

Comments

[patoadam]

It's fascinating to talk to you about politics, because you see the same facts I do, but reach opposite conclusions.

I lack the imagination to understand how anyone who cares so little about the lives of Iraqis as to support our war there can sincerely care about the "right to life" of a fetus. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps over a million, Iraqis have been killed, including at least one woman in labor, killed by American troops while she was en route to a hospital to have her baby delivered.

So I view the "pro-life" sentiments of Bush and McCain as nothing more than a calculated, insincere attempt to win the votes of the religious right. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, doesn't just talk the talk, she walks the walk. But at the same time, I don't think that giving birth to a child with Down's syndrome qualifies one to be Vice-President. Palin's sincerity on an issue that I feel should be a matter of individual choice is a reason not to despise her, not a reason to vote for her.

I'm happy that the Republicans have selected their first female running mate, 24 years after Walter Mondale selected Geraldine Ferraro. But Palin has governed, for 18 months, a state with the population of Fort Worth, TX. If Bush wanted to select a woman VP, why didn't he select someone with more experience, like Christine Whitman, Kay Hutchison, Elizabeth Dole, Susan Collins, or Carly Fiorina?

I'm not worried so much that Palin would be clueless if she became President, but that McCain would be clueless if he kept appointing people like Palin.

Any President, no matter how experienced or inexperienced, knows only a small fraction of what is needed to make sound, objective decisions. So any President must appoint to his or her administration reasonably impartial, knowledgeable people with expertise in many areas. I know of only two such people in the Busn administration: Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke. They both were ignored because their facts contradicted neo-conservative ideology, so they quit or were fired and wrote books critical of the Bush administration's ideologically based, reality-free policies.

Sarah Palin is not a Paul O'Neill or a Richard Clarke. She would be no more of an asset to a McCain administration than Mike Brown, the Arabian horse guy, was to FEMA. Even the Bush appointees with considerable experience, like Cheney and Rumsfeld, based their beliefs (or at least their claims) on ideology rather than on reality. They believed the fairy tales about the WMDs, collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, "we will be greeted as liberators", and so on, because those beliefs supported the administration's desire to invade Iraq.

This country can't afford another ideological, reality-free administration.

[patoadam]

P.S.

I don't think that giving birth to a child with Down's syndrome qualifies one to be Vice-President.

I realize you never said it does.