Sarah Palin is not entirely a novice. She knows the energy business as Alaska does provide 20% of American oil supplies. She has dealt with Congress on getting Alaska’s fair share of pork even before she was governor. Some see this a negative. Well, reality check, this is the way it works. If you take yourself out of the earmark race, you only hurt your own constituents and reward those who continue to play the game. If real change is enacted, then those who try to game the system can be rightly criticized. But working within the system to gain benefit for your state is totally fair game as the system works now.
My real criticism of Palin on this score is the fact she recognized that the “bridge to nowhere” was a non-starter yet kept the money allocated for it. She cannot claim this as a “win” for her refom message. She needs to be quiet and let this one go. There was no moral victory on the “bridge” issue. She can certainly take credit, though, for getting rid of the jet and other perks of the governor’s office. Though I think a more populous state would have to think long and hard about the security and other implications of having to charter flights or even fly commercial. I think Palin did something that could rarely happen outside Alaska.
Still, I shudder to think of Sarah Palin being the backup-president in the same way I shuddered to think of Dan Quayle or Spiro Agnew occupying that spot. To put that in perspective, I have voted Republican in every presidential election since Gerald Ford in 1976 * (though I liked Jimmy Carter a lot). So I voted for George H. W. Bush in spite of my reservations about Quayle.
I do not have that same confidence in McCain, however. It’s not just his age and the higher than average likelihood that his VP pick will become president. It is that his presidency, like G. W. Bush’s, would be all about his ability to be command-in-chief of the military. Nearly 8 years of chest-thumping about making America safer and getting rid of terrorists is not just wearing thin. It is beginning to significantly irritate a lot of Americans. McCain has all but said out loud that he knows nothing about the economy. I have no idea how he would fix our health care system or address our national debt, social security, or a host of domestic issues that have already been neglected in the 8 years that the government has made us “safer” from terrorists by suspending the Geneva conventions and privacy rights of American citizens. (I give McCain credit for his stand against torture. On this he certainly has a lot of credibility.)
I know that National Security is a key mandate of a national government. We may actually be safer than we were before 9/11. And we may very well not know of the many attacks that were thwarted before they had a chance to unfold. I fully concede that point. But it has been seven years since 9/11. We have new measures in place. Some need to be adjusted to ensure that the basic rights of citizens are respected. But I do not think we cannot elect a president and his backup solely on a National Security platform. We essentially did that in 2004 and in the meantime have seen major failures in the administration’s ability to foresee what was blatantly obvious to even casual observers: namely the irresponsibility of lenders (and, yes, borrowers) that has led to a virtual meltdown of a key segment of the financial markets.
This is just one of the issues on the back burner. We need an administrative team that can show leadership in addressing these issues that are now refusing to stay on the back burner.
