A Palin!
Posted on August 29th, 2008 in Uncategorized | 21 Comments »
John McCain has picked the female governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his veep candidate—even though she’s been governor for less than two years.
Well! Who says the GOP doesn’t believe in affirmative action?
(Or, as some other websites might say, WTF?)
Of course McCain hopes that he’ll attract female voters by this choice. But the pick is really the worst kind of sexism–the idea that women will now vote for McCain just because his veep pick is a woman, rather than the fact that she’s a qualified woman. And she clearly isn’t qualified. What if McCain dropped dead (always a possibility)—how would you feel about Palin (who, by the way, is eight months older than I am—and I’m young!) moving into the office?
By the way, so few people have any idea who she is that her Wikipedia entry, which I’m now trying to read (got it!), can’t be accessed; everyone’s trying to learn something about Sarah Palin. Including an independent investigator hired by the Alaska state senate to see if Palin tried to fire her ex-brother-in-law from a state trooper job!
Palin replaced the guy with a sexual harasser. But, you know, women will vote for her regardless….
Fun facts about Palin:
1) she’s a former beauty queen
2) in high school, she played basketball and was head of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, who would lead the team in prayer before games
3) Her husband works for an oil company!
4) An evangelical Christian, Palin gave birth to her second son even though genetic tests showed that he would develop Down’s Syndrome. Which he did.
5) She’s a lifetime NRA member.
6) She smoked pot, but says she didn’t like it. (In her case, I actually believe this.)
7) In all fairness…she has a reputation as a reformer who has taken on the state’s crooked Republican establishment.
8) She once appeared in an ad for LensCrafters. (Sorry, just kidding.)
21 Responses
8/29/2008 11:48 am
“She once appeared in an ad for LensCrafters.”
Now THAT’s funny.
8/29/2008 11:59 am
I think the best explanation of all this is the one posited by (I think) your friend Maureen Dowd, which is that McCain can’t stand not being the glam celebrity in the race -the “rebel”, “rogue”, “straight talking”, “maverick” — and has been grinding his teeth watching Obama steal that role from him. So Palin is the choice because not, just for a sad desperate moment, he appears “hip” again.
8/29/2008 12:00 pm
I meant “now”, not “not”. Not. Not.
8/29/2008 12:26 pm
So, does this mean we have to kind to our elders and not hit girls? Wow, do you think Biden is going to have to scale it back a bit because he can’t be seen picking on a girl (a redneck girl at that)?
Yikes, talk about 2 America’s.
Also, what is Mitt Romney thinking at this point? At least he can say he beat Shannon O’Brien. Oh, wait a minute she lost because she wanted to show Russert her tattoo. I forgot.
So this is the hotbed of mediocrity. And….”So it follows that were a man who was clever enough to be able to assume all kinds of forms and to represent everything in the world to come in person to our community and want to show off his compositions, we’d treat him as an object of reverence and awe, and as a source of pleasure, and we’d prostrate ourselves before him; but we’d tell him that not only is there no one like him in our community, it is also not permitted for anyonelike him to live among us, and we’d send him elsewhere, once we had anointed his head with myrrh and given him a chaplet of wool.”
8/29/2008 12:59 pm
She’s pretty. And McCain just lost. What a disappointment.
- A Female Voter
8/29/2008 1:22 pm
I’d do her.
8/29/2008 1:38 pm
McCain just did!
8/29/2008 1:59 pm
Are her followers called “Palin-drones”? Just wondering.
8/29/2008 4:48 pm
There are all the obvious silly reasons for this choice and they can be argued. But the one I think is the bottom line is that a man his age with his health record, picking this woman as a vice-president is down right irresponsible. Very bad judgment. He may think he is invincible and no-one his age should go around thinking they might die any minute but you have to be practical in this life. This is going to be the most difficult, complicated job in the world……..
8/29/2008 5:49 pm
not not
who’s there?
Palin
Palin who?
Palin for President!
Not not
who’s there?
WTF!!!!
WTF who?
Exactly.
8/30/2008 1:54 pm
A few thoughts.
Personally, I’m appalled, not just because she wouldn’t know what to say to Vladimir Putin if she ever had to sit down with him, but because she’ll bring us closer to where we were already going, a theocratic government. The Office of Faith Based Programs will probably become cabinet-level.
And my Rockefeller-Republican friends are appalled too. (I’m an Independent.)
She’s going to be popular with a part of the Republican base, but not, I think, the most important. The evangelicals had nowhere to go anyway, but the business types, whose big money Romney would have brought McCain and whose money McCain badly needs, won’t be impressed with her. Nor will moneyed conservatives be thrilled to have McCain’s march-to-his-own-drummer reputation confirmed. Those folks don’t like creative surprises.
Palin will bring some of the Hillary supporters over — not a big percentage, though that may be important, since the election is going to be decided by a narrow margin. But that’s not her big value to the ticket.
I think Easterners under-estimate the political smartness of this choice. She is BY FAR the most Western candidate I can remember on either party’s ticket. She is the woman Brian Schweizter would have wanted as his high-school sweetheart. She is the person that his female classmates wanted to be. She is not only not Washingtonian, she is a real Westerner, not a faux Westerner like Bush or Reagan or McCain or Romney.
I am just back from Montana, which is up for grabs. They are going to love her there. Remember how many Rocky Mountain states are close races, and how low-population states have disproportional influence on election outcomes in our system. And remember that out there, they don’t read the policy analyses in the New York Times every day. In many states, the biggest daily has a single page of national and international news combined. The real news is about crop and cattle prices, and marriages and deaths. Elections are very much about people.
A scary gambit, but it might work.
8/30/2008 2:35 pm
By the way, in Montana, as of last week, Obama had 55 paid campaign workers and McCain had zero.
8/30/2008 7:37 pm
You’re right Harry, it might work, for any number of reasons. Don’t suppose anybody would bother to look up the details of McCain’s health record…it’s available, I read it…after I posted above. He’s got more risk factors than there are cracks in the glass ceiling. You may well find yourself with a beauty queen runner up mother of five in charge of the most powerful country in the world. That would be historic, no kidding.
8/31/2008 10:07 am
Correction to my first post: Since McCain is taking public financing, who can help bring in campaign contributions is a less important factor for the Republicans. This might actually have worked to Romney’s disadvantage in McCain’s calculations.
And let me add one whopper to Richard’s list: She wants creationism taught in the public schools.
8/31/2008 11:55 am
the gist of last week
“tell the lions the Christians are ready” Obama to McCain
9/1/2024 1:41 pm
So Obama’s plans for faith-based initiatives - of which he talks openly and proudly - are just fine, Harry?
I have a dream that one day black democrats won’t get a free pass when they marry politics and religion.
9/1/2024 3:54 pm
Absolutely not, TH. I don’t like either choice here. Until the Palin announcement, I was on the fence between, as General Turgidson said, two regrettable but nonetheless distinguishable alternatives. (Weirdly, I harbor some hope that Obama is just a hypocrite, a political opportunist, on religious matters. I know Palin is not.) Palin is way more extreme than Obama is. She wants make personal decisions for other people on the basis of what her religion has revealed to her; Obama does not. Palin wants mythology taught as science; Obama does not. (Turns out McCain said the same thing about creationism, without as much pride, when pressed on it.) It is just too much. That’s theocracy coming, a move away from an enlightened democracy back toward the dark ages.
9/1/2024 4:11 pm
And today we have another example of the decisions she will want to make on behalf of the rest of us. She wants schools never to explain birth control to any child, in spite of the evidence of her own eyes of the failure of the abstinence-only approach to sex education. Doubtless it’s wonderful that she is supporting and loving her children and soon-to-be grandchild. She may even be a personal model and an inspiration to us all. I just don’t want her making those decisions for other people.
9/1/2024 6:28 pm
Valid points, I must say, Harry. I actually share your “weird” hope, even if it is sort of pathetic. I had hoped McCain would be the one to lead the GOP away from the evangelicals (their threats didn’t scare me - I thought and still think they are as likely to vote left as ACLU staffers are to vote right) - I wasn’t even particularly worried when McCain “consulted” with Robertson and others (comforting myself with that same “weird” reasoning), but I think we have a true believer with Palin, unfortunately. Give her some time, and McCain may start drinking nothing but pure, distilled rain water 😉
I’ve all but decided to punt the ball for four years.
9/1/2024 8:55 pm
Harry,
It seems pretty clear to me that a vote for McCain is a vote for war with Iran and for continuing out-of-control health-care costs. It’s also, fundamentally, a vote for jingoism and war romances as a driving force in politics. POWs get special status; in a dozen years only Iraq War veterans will have political credibility. And we’ll fight the late 60s and early 70s Vietnam culture wars over and over and over again.
What could be good about a McCain presidency? Seriously. Can you have seriously been considering Bush term III?
Concerned,
SE
9/1/2024 9:32 pm
I am more libertarian than anything else, so I am not happy to vote for the party that prescribes the colors of the food on the plates of those attending its convention. Anyone who wants the government to leave them alone and do only what government alone can do cannot vote for Obama cheerfully.
By the way, the line that Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy is a personal matter and shouldn’t be discussed in political terms is horse manure. If McCain thought it was important for us all to know — immediately — that she has five children, that her son has Down’s syndrome, and exactly when she knew that, it’s fair game to talk about her daughter’s pregnancy too. If the personal symbolism about the son is important for us to know, so is the personal symbolism about the daughter.