By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
How could Barack Obama be so tone-deaf as to talk about “lipstick on a pig,” given all the lipstick references surrounding Sarah Palin?
The McCain campaign, naturally and shamelessly, is claiming that Obama called Palin a pig, which he didn’t. But, really, Obama is almost inviting the Republicans to misinterpret him. (Via Mickey Kaus.)
Now if Obama wants to call Palin a cheap, grasping hack, that would be entirely accurate.
O’Reilly let Obama get in a few words, but he didn’t get carried away. After all, if Obama had been allowed to speak a complete sentence, it might look like O’Reilly was losing control of the show.
For several days now, I’ve been thinking about the notion that Sarah Palin is just as experienced as Barack Obama — or, for that matter, more experienced, since she’s got executive experience and he doesn’t. I find it ludicrous, so it took me a while to wrap my arms around it.
Though “experience” and “qualifications” are being treated in this campaign as though they are the same thing, they are not. Experience is one of the things you look at — an important thing — in deciding whether someone is qualified. But there are other factors, too.
Let’s stipulate that Obama is less experienced than would be ideal, though I would argue that his years in the legislature of a large industrial state is vastly more relevant than Palin’s time running a tiny town, followed by her cup of coffee as governor. Despite Obama’s lack of experience at the national level, few people in public life today have done more serious reading, thinking and speaking about the wide array of national and international issues that will face the next president.
Thus the question with Obama is whether his deep knowledge of the issues, much of it theoretical and academic, will hold up once he gets slapped in the face by reality. It’s a legitimate concern. Ideally Obama would have run in 2012 or 2016. But politics is never ideal, and he took the risk — a smart risk, in my view — that it was better to run before he was as experienced as he ought to be than become just one of the Washington crowd.
Obama’s qualifications are his experience, his knowledge and his judgment. Voters have been probing those three elements for many months now and have gotten to know quite a lot about him.
Then there is Palin, who was thrust upon the nation less than a week ago. Most of Palin’s experience is virtually identical to chairing the board of selectmen in a small New England town. Sorry, but Obama’s years as a community organizer and as a state legislator, and his short time in the U.S. Senate, are vastly more relevant than Palin’s years as mayor and her brief stint as the governor of state with the population of Boston — a state awash in so much oil money that the only question is how to spend it.
So what about the rest of her qualifications? Her knowledge and her judgment? That’s what we’re all trying to find out now. I’ve made it clear that I think she comes up short on both fronts. There is no evidence that she’s ever given more than superficial thought to any national or international issue other than energy, and I’m not sure how her ideas differ from Obama’s except that she wants to drill, drill, drill. And why not? She thinks the views of the vast majority of the world’s atmospheric scientists — that humans are contributing to global warming — are mere opinions with which she is free to agree or disagree. And she disagrees.
Jon Keller, in his commentary on WBZ Radio (AM 1030) this morning, argued that experience is overrated, and that both Palin and Obama have enough. I don’t quite agree, but I agree with him that that’s not how voters will ultimately make up their minds.
People will vote for the Obama-Biden team or the McCain-Palin team on the basis of issues, values and party identification. In the end, experience is just something to talk about.
A pretty good night for McCain. He really caught a break with President Bush, who I thought came across far better as a chief executive on the job than he would have if he’d actually been in the hall. Bush was at his charming best and stayed on message, making it about McCain instead of himself. Discordant note: his out-of-context reference to “the angry left.”
What got into Fred Thompson? If he’d been this energetic and folksy during his presidential campaign, he might have gotten someone outside his immediate family to vote for him. I agree with David Gergen, who said on CNN that Thompson was unusually effective in talking about McCain’s experience as a POW, but no doubt angered Democrats with his distortions* (my word, not Gergen’s) of Obama’s stands.
It was pretty funny to follow Thompson’s hyperpartisan attacks with Joe Lieberman’s call for bipartisanship. Lieberman was a considerable upgrade over Zell Miller, the then-Democratic senator who made a fool of himself at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Lieberman took a couple of shots at Obama, but you had to laugh with some appreciation at his success in getting Republicans to clap for the Clintons.
I also enjoyed the smirk firmly planted on Lieberman’s face as he praised Sarah Palin.
*And, as Josh Marshall points out, a damn vicious distortion in at least one case.
John McCain’s campaign staffers are pushing back hard on Jake Tapper’s ABC News report that Sarah Palin had once been a member of the Alaskan Independence Party (AIP), which tells you all you need to know about how toxic they fear this issue will become.
Kate Klonick, writing for TPM Muckraker, has now verified that Todd Palin was a member from 1995 through 2002. What’s still hanging out there is this: the McCain camp also denies that Sarah Palin attended the party’s state convention in Wasilla in 1994 — but Tapper’s got three on-the-record witnesses who say they saw her there.
And so it continues.
Media Nation was talking a little while ago with a friend whom I would describe as slightly right of center and deeply versed in foreign-policy issues. He probably would have voted for McCain if he had chosen Joe Lieberman or, for instance, Condoleezza Rice. Mitt Romney? Maybe.
The Palin choice, though, has driven him into the Obama camp for two reasons: his fear of what would happen if she became president; and what it says about McCain’s judgment.
Jake Tapper reports that Sarah and Todd Palin are former members of the Alaskan Independence Party, whose motto is “Alaska First — Alaska Always.” The controversy, Tapper says, is over how hard the party has pushed for independence from the United States. But it gets a whole lot better than that.
According to Lynette Clark, a top party official with whom Tapper spoke, the Palins were members in 1994, and attended the party’s statewide convention, in Wasilla, that year. Sarah Palin quit the party in 1996 in order to run for mayor of Wasilla; there is no indication of when she first joined.
Why are these dates important? Because party founder Joe Vogler, who was chairman right up until his death in 1993, was a “sulphurous” presence known for his “‘America be damned’ rhetoric delivered at D-9-cat decibels,” according to an Anchorage Daily News editorial published in 1998.
America be damned? Gee, who does that remind you of? And could the Palins have been ignorant of Vogler’s views in 1994?
To this day, the Alaskan Independence Party’s Web site proudly carries the following quote from Vogler: “I’m an Alaskan, not an American. I’ve got no use for America or her damned institutions.” And Tapper found that Palin had sent a video message to the party’s annual convention just last year.
I’m leery of relying on Wikipedia, but, given what we already know about Vogler, this seems safe: he was murdered, and, as he had previously made it clear that he wished not to be buried under the American flag, he was buried instead in the Yukon.
Country first, eh, Sen. McCain?
Let me jump ahead to the defense we can anticipate: the Alaskan Independence Party is part of the cultural milieu of Alaska, it doesn’t mean the same thing to Alaskans as it would to us, Palin is really a patriotic American, blah blah blah. And you know what? I have no trouble believing any of that.*
Just as I had no trouble believing that Barack and Michelle Obama are patriotic Americans despite their long membership in the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church.
*But you know what? On reflection, I wouldn’t be surprised if Palin thought Alaskan independence was kind of a neat idea. That would have been the whole point to joining the party, right?
John McCain’s choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (at left in photo) as his running mate is deeply problematic on two levels.
1. It shows McCain can’t adjust quickly to changing events. A woman might have made sense last week. But, right now, it looks as though Republican hopes of peeling off vast numbers of Hillary Clinton supporters are diminishing. No, Clinton voters don’t have to march in lockstep with convention delegates. But whatever lingering anger there was between the Obama and Clinton camps had largely dissipated by Wednesday night.
2. It fails to address McCain’s biggest weakness. That would be his age (72 today) and his history of cancer. Let me be blunt: If McCain wins, it would surprise no one if his vice president became president in a year or two. Palin is stunningly inexperienced. And before you say, “So’s Obama,” keep in mind that’s the single biggest obstacle Obama needs to overcome. Voters are making judgments about that every day. Running mates are not generally subjected to that level of scrutiny. And it already looks like the vetting process used to select Palin was a little ragged.
If McCain really believed he needed a woman, I’m not sure why he didn’t go with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. At 72, Sen. Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina is probably too old, but Hutchison is 65.
By far the most intelligent choice would have been former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. Above all else, McCain needs a plausible president as his running mate. Romney’s not the most popular guy in the world, and McCain plainly doesn’t like him. But he would have done McCain a lot more good than I suspect Palin’s going to do. And given his political and business experience, you can picture him as president.
This is not going to play well, I suspect.
More: Markos Moulitsas, who also thought of Quayle, flips the experience question on its head: “The Sarah Quayle Palin pick is an abandonment of the ‘Obama is not ready to lead’ attack lines. Those are dead, and to be honest, while that line didn’t work for Hillary and it had limited traction for McCain, it still had some traction. That attack line is gone.” He’s right.
And the Outraged Liberal takes note of the corruption investigation now under way involving Palin’s alleged involvement in trying to get her ex-brother-in-law fired from his job as an Alaska state trooper.
Photo (cc) by Tricia Ward and reproduced here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
In my latest for the Guardian, I write that liberal commentators were wowed by Obama’s speech, while conservatives would prefer to attack Obama himself.
Tonight, at least, it seems clear that Barack Obama delivered a terrific speech. How good? Not to be a weasel, but I think it’s too soon to say. His decision to be his own attack dog was an interesting one. Was it smart?
There was lots of soaring rhetoric, of course, as well as more specifics than we’re accustomed to hearing from him. He almost certainly got what he needed this week, despite the pundits’ obsession with the Clintons.
I’ll be scanning media reaction early tomorrow morning for the Guardian. Also tomorrow, I’ll be on “Beat the Press” on WGBH-TV (Channel 2) at 7 p.m. for its convention wrap-up.
Remember when people used to parody Al Gore by talking … very … slowly? He just rushed through his brief speech like the guy from the old Federal Express commercials.
The parallels he drew between Obama and Lincoln — their relative inexperience, their opposition to popular wars, their eloquence — were a reminder that long years in office are no substitute for judgment, even if you think Obama = Lincoln is a stretch.