Tag: Politics

Teasing out Palin’s religious views

Is Sarah Palin a conservative evangelical Christian? Or is she something quite a bit more exotic than that? It’s an important question, because she herself has suggested she holds some peculiar beliefs that could affect the way she executes her duties as a public official.

The two best stories I’ve come across on Palin’s religious beliefs are this piece on NPR, by Barbara Bradley Hagerty, and one in today’s Anchorage Daily News by George Bryson and Richard Mauer.

First, the NPR story. Hagerty, who’s been described as a conservative Christian herself (though I can’t find a relevant link), does Palin the favor of taking her faith seriously, describing Palin’s beliefs as those of a Pentacostal. Here’s an excerpt for you to chew over:

“Pray our military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country — that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God,” Palin said. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan.”

Poloma [Margaret Poloma, a scholar of Pentacostalism who is a Pentacostal herself] says some people might hear that and say Palin believes this is a holy war, or that Pentecostals think this is a holy war.

“I would think it’s fair to say. Yes,” Poloma says.

One reason, Poloma says, is that most Pentecostals believe Islam is a false religion.

Let’s turn next to the Anchorage Daily News story, which describes her visit to her former church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, last June. That’s the appearance at which she made the comments about God’s will and the war, as well as her suggestion that Alaskans should pray for a natural-gas pipeline. Now consider this:

Later, senior pastor Ed Kalnins — with Palin standing at his side — spoke about tapping into Alaska’s natural resource wealth in order to fulfill the state’s destiny of serving as a shelter for Christians at the end of the world.

“I believe that Alaska is one of the ‘refuge states’ — come on you guys — in the Last Days,” Kalnins said, raising his arm to underscore his point. “And hundreds of thousands of people are going to come to this state to seek refuge. And the church has to be ready to minister to them.”

Oh, my.

So what are Palin’s own beliefs? It’s hard to say, given that neither she nor the McCain campaign is talking about her religion. (And try to remember the last time a Republican candidate at the national level didn’t go on about his religious beliefs at great length.)

The Daily News story does hint that perhaps she’s not as out-there as some of her activities make it sound — noting, for example, that she advocates but has not pushed for teaching creationism in schools and banning state benefits for same-sex couples. But I’m not sure if I’m supposed to feel better if someone prays for a gas pipeline but doesn’t actually mean it.

And what about her apparent acquiescence when Pastor Kalnins went off about Alaska’s role in a post-Apocalypse world? Does she think he was on to something, or was she just being polite? I would argue that Americans have a right to know if the woman who may be our next vice president uses the Book of Revelations as a guide to forming public policy.

Purely by coincidence, I wrote about the Constitution’s lack of a religious test a week before Palin was named. As I argued then, the government may not disqualify a candidate for religious reasons, but we the people are free to judge a candidate on any criteria we like, including religion. We all have our religious test.

Quite frankly, anyone who prays for a gas pipeline violates my religious test. (I’ll give her a pass on the war, since her remarks could be construed as merely praying for the safety of the troops.)

How long does the McCain campaign plan on keeping Sarah Palin under wraps? When is she going to answer legitimate questions about her career, her qualifications and her beliefs?

Palin’s ethics-complaint maneuvers

Earlier this week Sarah Palin, acting as governor, took out an ethics complaint against herself. She then asked the personnel board to investigate charges that she had abused her office in the “Troopergate” affair. Since the personnel board has jurisdiction, she argued further, then the state Legislature’s probe would have to be shut down.

The personnel board is appointed by the governor, though the three currently serving were named by Palin’s Republican predecessor, Frank Murkowski, whom she defeated in a hard-fought primary in 2006. But it’s not quite that arm’s-length; Palin reappointed one of them, Debra English, and English now chairs the board.

Looks like the Alaska Legislature is not going to roll over, though, for the moment at least, Palin has escaped being subpoenaed.

Sarah Palin’s tall eBay tale

In her convention speech on Wednesday, Sarah Palin wowed the delegates by telling them she had taken her predecessor’s taxpayer-funded luxury jet and sold it on eBay.

Oh, wait … she said she “put it on eBay.”

Big difference, as it turns out, because it didn’t sell, and she eventually turned it over to a private broker, who unloaded it at a loss. So on top of everything else, it appears that we also have to parse every word she says.

No such problem with John McCain, who bragged the other day that Palin “sold it on eBay — made a profit.” That’s just wrong.

The conservative case against Palin

Charles Krauthammer makes it cogently. And I’ll add this: If McCain had, say, talked Condoleezza Rice into being his running mate, don’t you think McCain could spend the rest of the campaign writing his inaugural address? Even despite her deep involvement in Bush’s failures?

The grand anticlimax

Last night was a better night for the Republicans than tonight.

Let’s see if I can criticize McCain’s constant invocation of his POW experience without driving an angry mob to chant “USA! USA!” outside my window: Might we agree that by having every single surrogate tell the tale of McCain’s imprisonment, torture and resistance in hushed, dramatic tones, he has allowed the story to be robbed of some of its power?

I wish I could offer more specific observations, but I’m going to have to read the text in the morning. I will confess that I fell dead asleep twice and probably missed about 10 minutes. It wasn’t entirely my fault.

Anyway, it’s over. He’ll get his bounce. And on we go.

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.

Private e-mails, public records

According to the Washington Post, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin sent e-mails from her private Yahoo account to ask the state public-safety commissioner, Walter Monegan, why her brother-in-law was still working. Monegan, whom Palin fired, showed the e-mails to the Post, but wouldn’t provide copies.

Is it legal under whatever open-access law is in effect in Alaska for the governor to use her private e-mail account while conducting official business? An e-mail from the governor to the public-safety commission could be obtained under a freedom-of-information request in many states. How about Alaska?

I’ve sent an e-mail to the AP’s Larry Campbell, who’s listed as the contact for the Alaska FOI Coalition. I’ll let you know what I find out.

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.