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Are Americans ready for Sarah Palin?
Submitted by SHNS on Thu, 09/04/2008 - 16:47.
John McCain caught a lot of voters by surprise with his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin, who is less than two years into her term as governor of the 49th state, is younger than Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. And, depending on the standard, Palin has less national political experience but more executive experience than the other candidates combined.
Oh, and Palin also happens to be the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket.
Do any of those details matter? Is Palin too inexperienced to be "one heartbeat away" from the presidency? Is the emphasis on Palin's family a distraction from genuine issues? Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis, the RedBlueAmerica columnists, weigh in.
BEN BOYCHUK
Some people in the media and on the leftist end of the blogosphere see Sarah Palin as a scary right-wing caricature, not as a human being who happens to have a politically conservative outlook. The silliest commentators have focused on the out- of-wedlock pregnancy of Palin's 17-year-old daughter and rumors about her own recent childbirth as evidence that she is... what exactly?
An American mother of five kids, evidently. But Palin's speech in St. Paul, Minn. on Wednesday night should have disabused most fair-minded viewers of the distortions and despicable slanders of the past several days.
Not that the attacks will stop. No, they've only just begun. There is a decent chance that the first woman vice president of the United States will be a conservative Republican who opposes abortion on demand and rejects the pieties of the feminist left. Sarah Palin is dangerous. She must be stopped. So keep the slime coming.
Never mind that there is no shortage of issues this election worthy of discussion this election year. Voters have a right to know where Palin stands on oil exploration and why. For example, she favors drilling on a 2,000-acre parcel of the 19.2 million-acre Alaska National Wildlife Reserve, but McCain doesn't. She's opposed to abortion on demand. Voters should know everything they possibly can about Palin's record as governor, her purported fiscal conservatism and reformer credentials.
Some of it is good and some of it is bad. But the rest is noise.
JOEL MATHIS
Give her this: Sarah Palin knows how to give a speech. Her performance at the Republican National Convention should erase doubts about her political abilities. But is she ready to lead? No.
The critique can be made without sexist comments or attacks on Palin's family.
Republicans have lauded Palin's "executive experience" as governor and mayor. But Alaska -- so flush with oil money the state sends revenue-sharing checks to its residents -- isn't run like any other state. And Palin ran an anti-abortion, pro-Christian campaign for the Wasilla mayorship, a post that has no power over abortion or religion. Once in office, she fired a slew of city workers she suspected of insufficient loyalty. If you're a fan of the culture wars, this is good news. For the rest of us: Not so much.
Laughably, Republicans have tried to argue that Alaska's proximity to Russia somehow means that Palin has foreign policy experience. That, unfortunately, is their best argument.
John McCain has emphasized the need for such experience in a post-9/11 president; apparently it would be unnecessary if -- God forbid -- he should die in office.
This criticism is "elitist" only in the sense that Americans should expect the vice president to actually be qualified for the job. Sarah Palin isn't. Her selection reflects badly on McCain's fitness for the presidency.
(Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis blog at blog.infinitemonkeysblog.com and joelmathis.blogspot.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
Are we ready for Palin
She is George W. in drag. We can't afford her.
This is how republicans give speaches: rarely do the facts support their positions or even the off the wall remarks. Her votes, Senior Huchabuck, were 909; Biden recieved 79,754
But there was nothing in her speech and she never told anything truthful about herself just a bunch of info that was totally false - even as the news about her is coming out in buckets. Her response to that was attacking the press..what a joke.
Explain why Levi Johnston shouldn't be arrested as a pedophile.
How can she protect the country if she can't protect her own kids from pedophiles?
This is his second child; the first was with a 13 year old girl. Even by Alaskan standards (which are very loose) that is a bit young.
Sick.... really sick... yea, we want her in the White House. Her and her husband are good evangelicals, and typical of the breed. But lets move on to other issues.
Her husband and daughter: is child #5 really Sarah's? I don' believe so after looking at family photos on the internet. The eldest daughter is the mother for sure, but is the father of that child Sarah's husband? Let's do a little DNA test.
Will she support states that wish to secede from the United States, since her and her husband were both in a party pushing to have Alaska secede from the Union?
Will she legalize pot since she smokes it herself?
Will she change her position and start supporting unwed mothers, particularly teens so they can finish an education through college?
Last night, this woman was pathetic. Nothing to say that was grounded in reality and less to say about solving our problems except continue the same old republican bull that has existed since Reagan and have proven a failure to all but the rich.
What a joke on McCain by his own party.
And today from the same group that exposed Edwards, the news is she had an affair...oh, no.
ex-Mayor Palin's Fiscal Recklessness
The campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is presenting his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK), as a reformer, fiscal conservative, and “tough minded budget cutter.” Other conservatives have latched onto this image - Phyllis Schlafly calls Palin “the total package” with “fiscal conservative credentials.”
Palin embraces the title, labeling herself a “hard-core fiscal conservative,” whose “agenda was to stop wasteful spending.
However, as mayor of Wasilla, AK, Palin “was not always the fiscal watchdog she has since boasted of being.”
During her term in office, Palin cut property taxes and other small taxes on business. But as the Anchorage Daily News points out, “She wasn’t doing this by shrinking government.” During her tenure, the budget of Wasilla (population 5,469 in 2000) “apart from capital projects and debt, rose from $3.9 million in fiscal 1996 to $5.8 million.”
Palin also successfully pushed through a sales tax increase in Wasilla, which went to fund a $15 million sports complex. However, a land dispute over the sight of the complex led to “years of legal wrangling” and cost Wasilla almost $1.7 million, “a lot more than the roughly $125,000 the city would have paid in 1998 if it had closed a deal to buy the property outright.” Wasilla is still facing budget shortfalls from the case today.
When Palin left office in 2002, Wasilla had “racked up nearly $20 million in long-term debt,” or roughly $3,000 of debt per resident.
But Palin’s approach actually brings her in line with McCain, whose own “massive tax cuts” “would recklessly exacerbate the fiscal irresponsibility of the Bush Administration” and cause the largest deficit in 25 years.
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