Tag: John McCain

Obama, Palin and experience

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.

Sarah Palin’s debut

She projected strength but not authority. She made a reasonably good case for herself, but grossly exaggerated her reformist credentials on the “Bridge to Nowhere.” She was charming and well-spoken. Given that no one knows who she is, I suppose she had to go on about her family longer than most politicians would.

Surely Palin had a more difficult task than Joe Biden, who delivered a “B” speech last week. Biden’s been around forever, so no single speech was going to make or break him. Palin, too, turned in a “B” performance, or maybe a “B-plus,” under much more challenging circumstances.

I think Palin established herself as potentially an effective surrogate for John McCain, but she’s got a ways to go before she establishes herself as a credible potential vice president. Is she now going to do the Sunday shows? Hold a press conference? Given the McCain campaign’s blame-the-media strategy, maybe they’ve decided to skip all that.

The speech of the week so far, by the way, was Rudy Giuliani’s.

Exploiting Bristol Palin

Josh Marshall puts forth a provocative argument that I half-agree with: that it’s the McCain campaign, not the media, that has wallowed in Bristol Palin’s pregnancy, while the media have been drilling down on the investigation into Sarah Palin’s firing of the state-police commissioner, her hypocrisy over the “Bridge to Nowhere,” her and her husband’s ties to the wacky Alaskan Independence Party and the like.

I think Marshall is on to something, but it’s not as clear-cut as he makes it sound. I have seen a lot of coverage, nearly all of it stupid and irrelevant, about Bristol Palin, her pregnancy and her self-described “redneck” boyfriend. It’s not all coming from the McCain camp. But the campaign is clearly exploiting it.

Peggy Noonan’s hilarious lie

Read and then listen to Peggy Noonan’s open-mic exchange with Mike Murphy, in which she says the McCain campaign is “over,” and describes the choice of Sarah Palin as “political bullshit.” Then read her lies about what she really meant.

What’s fascinating is that Noonan clearly understands everyone knows she’s lying. So what’s important to her is that she demonstrates her loyalty by lying rather than confessing to the obvious truth.

A good night for the Republicans

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.

Still more on the Palins and the AIP

Jake Tapper appears to have conceded that Sarah Palin was not a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, though her husband, Todd, was from 1995 to 2002. And Tapper writes that “at least two AIP officials recall her attending the 1994 convention,” though I count three: Lynette Clark, Dexter Clark and Mark Chryson.

This is messy. It looks like Tapper took Lynette Clark’s word for it when he first reported that Sarah Palin had been a member of the AIP — understandable, given that Clark is currently the chairwoman of the party and was its secretary in 1994, but also risky.

How much of an issue is it that Todd Palin was a seven-year member of an organization whose founder, Joe Vogler, hated America? How much of an issue is it that Sarah Palin may have attended the party’s statewide convention in 1994, and made a cheery video that was played at the AIP convention as recently as this year?

We shall see. I doubt we’ve heard the last of the Alaskan Independence Party.

More on the Palins and the AIP

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.