Suffragette City

Don’t lean on me man because you can’t afford the ticket,
Back from Suffragette City.

Why pick Sarah Palin, the very inexperienced Governor of Alaska? The talking head consensus seems to be that McCain hopes to entice some disgruntled Hillary supporters, the so-called PUMAs (Party Unity My Ass). I say fat chance. First, I don’t believe there are any PUMAs. They only seem to appear in McCain’s campaign commercials, and then they’re about as real as the Bigfoot corpse that turned out to be a gorilla suit in a refrigerator.

The idea that Palin will convince voters like me to back McCain is nonsense. It’s shallow thinking. I supported Hillary because she’s Hillary. She’s smart, hard-working, dedicated and confident. For me, the fact that she was a woman was ancillary. Though my own ideology differs in some fundamental respects from Hillary’s, I never doubted that she was ready to govern, and govern well.

So, those 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling? I wanted Hillary to break on through to the other side, not the lightweight, right-wing, wholly inadequate Sarah Palin. Come on! For a year and a half, Palin has governed a state with just over half a million residents. Before that, she was Mayor of Ass End, Egypt, population 5,000. I like the mayor of my town, Moscow, Idaho, population 23,000 – four-plus times the size of Palin’s Wasilla, Alaska. Do I think the mayor of Moscow is ready to be President of the United States? Well, no, but she’s more ready than Sarah Palin. And that is freaking scary.

So why would McCain think that Palin would pick up Hillary supporters like me? I don’t believe he does. I now support Barack Obama because he was the next best thing to my gal, Hillary. Again, he’s smart, hard-working, dedicated and confident, and I have no doubt that he’s ready to lead – he’s just not as ready as Hillary.

No, McCain picked Palin for two reasons. The first is that he needed to ensure an enthusiastic turn-out by the religious right. In 2000 and 2004, they embraced the born-again George Bush as one of their own. McCain? Not so much. During his Saddleback vetting, McCain told a story about a moment of Christian bonding he shared as a POW with one of his Vietnamese captors – that drawing the cross in the dirt story. Unfortunately, McCain seems to have lifted that one from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was utter hogwash. And Solzhenitsyn told it better. In Russian.

Palin is the antithesis of everything I believe in. She’s anti-abortion, so much so that she opposes the right to terminate a pregnancy even in cases of rape and incest. She believes in teaching Creationism (AKA hooey) in the public schools. She’s a member of the NRA and an avid hunter. Confession: I’m not a member of the NRA, but I am a hunter. For food, not fur. The NRA? They’re not about hunting. They’re about crazy. Gun crazy.

Palin is young, 44, she’s good-looking, and she’s no intellectual threat to the top of the ticket. In short, she’s Ralph Reed’s dream girl.

McCain has said in the past that the job of the Vice President is to attend funerals and check on the health of the President. As McCain turned 72 yesterday, Palin may find herself doing both. And that would put her in the White House. Scary. If we thought George Bush looked like Alfred E. Newman during his Rose Garden press conferences, what will Sarah Palin look like? As a long-time resident of Idaho, I think I know. Sarah Palin is Helen Chenoweth reborn. Chenoweth, who represented Idaho for three terms in Congress, was about as sharp as a sack of wet mice.

Sarah Palin is a graduate of the University of Idaho. She majored in journalism – not exactly one of the UI’s strengths. Palin is a native of Sandpoint, a beautiful place with next to no connection with or interest in the outside world. What will Joe Biden do with Ms. Palin when they debate? My hope is that he’ll pat her on the back, wish her well, and then just leave. Why shoot fish in a barrel? No one wants to watch that.

The other reason McCain chose Palin? It makes him look like he’s a high-stakes gambler, a big roller, someone who’s not afraid to take a chance. But what is he risking? Us! There is something perverse and a little nauseating about this VP pick. When I was watching McCain and Palin make their announcement, she looked like his trophy wife. Or Anna Nicole Smith. Now there’s a thought!

Think of the Republican women McCain could have chosen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. Elizabeth Dole. Women with stellar right-wing credentials and a metric ass-load of experience. So why not one of them? Not hot enough for McCain? He was a hound dog back in the day, and Cindy is looking a little the worse for wear. If her skin were pulled any tighter, you could bounce a silver dollar off her forehead. So maybe it’s about looks or, worse, maybe it’s about feeling threatened. Hutchison and Dole really are ready to step into the Oval Office. Palin? No way. No how. No, really. No shit.

I’ll Own It — I Miss Bill

He points that index finger at me and says, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” He told me last fall that the rise of Barack Obama was the “biggest fairy tale” he’d ever heard. He loves fast women, fast food, and fast talking, and not necessarily in that order.

And, damn me, I love him. I love Bill Clinton, and I want him back in the Oval Office. Hillary? She’s brilliant. She’s a work horse. Towards the end of her campaign, she showed us her inner Ann Richards. Come to think of it, you know what I really want? Bill as President and Hillary as Prime Minister. Let him get out there and play the big rooms while Hillary goes to Congress to kick ass and take names. Let them govern in tandem. I want me some alternative energy, universal health care, smart diplomacy, and a big, fat inheritance tax on our bloated plutocracy.

Barack Obama? Yes, and a resounding yes at that, but am I feeling the love? Not so much, and that’s funny as I do feel it for Michelle. When I was watching her Monday night, getting some much deserved First Lady props, what I kept thinking was that if she took that charm and that humor and let it loose in the service of her incredible intellect, she would be the next Bill Clinton.

Back to the world of dreams . . .

Skittles and Beer in the Presidential Race

Democrats. Have we done it again? Have we shot ourselves in the foot? And, if so, is it the same foot we’re forever sticking in our mouths?

Let’s take a look at Barack Obama’s strengths. He’s smart. He’s savvy. He’s a great communicator. He doesn’t pretend to love NASCAR or pork rinds or Budweiser. He’s not another unimaginably rich man pretending to be middle class. And that’s why John McCain, an elderly, out of touch, inept campaigner is running neck and neck with Senator Obama.

Eight years after picking as President the guy we’d rather have a beer with, Americans seem to have learned nothing. Barack Obama is too elite. But he only just finished paying off his student loans. He’s not a man of the people. But he was a community organizer in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Chicago. He prefers fresh salmon and steamed vegetables to a triple cheeseburger, fries, and a Frosty. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t have the all-American pot belly and a double chin. Senator Obama is suspiciously svelte. Even more scary, he can drop in a 3-point shot like Kobe. Everyone knows that basketball is not the sport of the people. That would be golf. You know, that game people play on restricted courses.

John McCain plays golf. He was tooling around a week or so ago in a golf cart with the first President Bush. What a great photo op! Two men, both richer than Croesus, discussing the world’s woes or comparing their putters?

Senator McCain is married to a beer heiress. In far too many ways, his positions are more regressive than George Bush’s. He wants to extend the Bush tax cuts. He has said he’d nominate Supreme Court justices in the Scalia-Thomas vein. McCain’s position on energy is much the same as his position on birth control — drill, drill, drill and let God sort out the consequences.

Racism is no doubt at play in this tight race. We’ve come along way, but we’ve a long way to go. Given the economy, the devastation wrought by the Bush Administration, the high cost of gas, and the overwhelming and widespread belief that this country is on the wrong track, Barack Obama should be streets ahead of John McCain and the status quo. That he’s not is a terrible testament to our skittles and beer, short-sighted, terminal anti-intellectualism.

I want to be hopeful about this coming November. I want to believe that we’ll turn a corner, that we won’t miss this opportunity to mature and grow as a nation. I’m trying to ignore that small, cynical voice that keeps whispering “President McCain.” But if I really want to believe, I’d probably be better off if I forgot about politics and just went to the new X-Files movie.