Tag: John McCain

Jeremiah Wright’s running mate?

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?

Thoughts on media rumor-mongering (II)

You may have already heard this, but Sarah Palin has made public the fact that her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant. Bristol Palin will marry the father, according to CNN.

The report also says that John McCain knew about the pregnancy before choosing Palin as his running mate, and that the decision was made to announce it now because of Internet rumors that Bristol, not Sarah, is the mother of four-month-old Trig.

And that, I hope, is the end of that.

For the bridge before she was against it

As you may have heard, Alaska’s two largest daily newspapers have published editorials questioning the Sarah Palin choice. The more negative is the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, which says in part:

Most people would acknowledge that, regardless of her charm and good intentions, Palin is not ready for the top job. McCain seems to have put his political interests ahead of the nation’s when he created the possibility that she might fill it.

The Anchorage Daily News isn’t quite so harsh, although this editorial does say “it’s stunning that someone with so little national and international experience might be heartbeat away from the presidency.”

The Daily News also confirms that stories of Palin’s opposition to the “Bridge to Nowhere” are largely fictitious — and that when Palin herself said on Friday, “I told Congress, thanks but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere,” she was, at the very least, leaving the most relevant facts unspoken.

“Palin was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it,” the Daily News reports, telling us, among other things, that her support for the project was a key issue in her successful 2006 gubernatorial campaign. After federal funding was withdrawn, she changed her mind, leading to accusations that did it in a way to attract national attention.

Let’s get real: If federal funding had been withdrawn for the Big Dig, Michael Dukakis and Bill Weld would have been against it.

The Daily News also reports that Walt Monegan, the state commissioner of public safety, whom Palin fired, says both Palin and her husband, Todd Palin, contacted him about her ex-brother-in-law, a state trooper involved in a nasty divorce with Gov. Palin’s sister. Monegan claims he was fired in large measure because of his refusal to get rid of the inconvenient trooper.

This would appear to contradict statements made by both Palins. And there may be e-mails.

Palin favored the “Bridge to Nowhere”

Flummoxed conservatives looking for something nice to say about Sarah Palin cite her opposition to the “Bridge to Nowhere,” a proposed $398 million Alaskan boondoggle that John McCain fought against. For instance, here’s what New York Times columnist David Brooks said on “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” last night:

But what he saw when he looked at her, according to the people I spoke to, is someone who fights the same fights I fight. The first gateway sort of fight that he thought they have in common was the bridge to nowhere. He’s been talking about that for years. She’s the one who killed it.

Wrong. As The New Republic’s Bradford Plumer shows, citing reports from the Anchorage Daily News and Palin’s own official statement, Palin supported the bridge at every step, and dropped it from her list of priorities only when it became clear that federal funding wasn’t going to be forthcoming. In her statement, she even criticizes congressional opponents of the bridge, including, by implication, McCain:

Despite the work of our congressional delegation, we are about $329 million short of full funding for the bridge project, and it’s clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island. Much of the public’s attitude toward Alaska bridges is based on inaccurate portrayals of the projects here. But we need to focus on what we can do, rather than fight over what has happened.

Here’s an AP report from Sept. 22, 2007, noting that Palin had withdrawn her support for the bridge because of lack of funding.

Ron Fournier on the Palin pick

Last week I criticized the Associated Press’ Washington bureau chief, Ron Fournier, for writing what I thought was a dumb and partisan analysis of the Joe Biden pick. Fournier, as I noted, has an interesting history with John McCain, so I was wondering if he would be similarly harsh when writing about McCain’s choice.

To Fournier’s credit, his analysis of the Sarah Palin nomination is pretty tough. Granted, it would be hard for it not to be given its utter ludicrousness. But Fournier hits all the right notes, observing that McCain himself said just a few months ago that he was determined not to repeat George H.W. Bush’s Dan Quayle mistake of 1988 — and making it clear that he just did.

Personally, I think Fournier is wrong about Biden and right about Palin. But he was even-handed.

Palin’s anti-science, anti-gay agenda

According to information dug up by Boston Globe religion reporter Michael Paulson, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin not only supports the teaching of creationism in public schools, but opposes state health benefits for same-sex partners — even to the point of supporting a constitutional amendment.

I know John McCain has said some disturbingly supportive things about teaching “intelligent design,” but no one thinks he actually believed what he was espousing. Palin, on the other hand, sounds like a true believer. Off the top of my head, it also strikes me that Palin’s anti-gay agenda is considerably to the right of McCain’s.

Not good.

Dan Quayle in a skirt

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.

Kerry got the Patrick treatment

I didn’t realize how few viewers had a chance to see John Kerry’s speech last night. So let’s see — the pundits keep telling us that the Democrats aren’t attacking McCain enough; Kerry devotes his entire speech to a full-throated disembowelment of McCain; and the pundits don’t let us see it. Am I missing anything?

Josh Marshall calls Kerry’s “the best speech of the convention.” I don’t think it was quite that, but it certainly gave viewers (some viewers, anyway) the biggest helping of red meat they’ve had so far.