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.
