Featured stories at The Weekly Standard:
"The Thin Man: Obama’s Slender Record," by Bill Kristol.
"Biden’s Exaggerations: Inflating Obama’s Records Will Not Resolve Doubts," by Karl Rove.
"Would You Hire Barack Obama: The Resume of a Chronic Underachiever" by Dean Barnett.
Sarah Palin, giggling on local right-wing talk radio.
Daniel Gross is a brave man:
I await the tidal wave of e-mails and blog posts from self-made, hardworking, accomplished people who earn $250,000 but who don’t feel financially secure and who don’t consider themselves rich, especially compared to the venture capitalist next door. Having spent my entire adult life in and around Washington, Boston, and New York, I feel you. I’m eager to listen and empathize. Tell me all about how home prices in areas with good public schools are insanely expensive. Tell me about how many other seemingly undeserving people make so much more. Tell me about your proposals to devise an income tax system that accounts for geographically divergent costs of living (the Alternative Yuppie Tax?). Just don’t tell me you’re not rich.
A reader writes:
It would be a big mistake to dismiss Palin’s pop-cultural appeal. It’s clear she was chosen solely
to game the system, and the Republicans OWN that play. I’m sure they expect her to be a lure for the female (not feminist) vote, and they already have a lock on the over 60 white males.
In addition, I predict a bonus unintended consequence for McCain among middle class/educated/post-college/pre-adult white males. A demographic label that follows many into their late 30s and currently trends for Obama. Basically the gamers/Gen-Xers/Seth Rogen/Will Farrell crowd. The GOP has already rolled out video of Palin in snugly tailored fatigues, combat boots and tight t-shirt brandishing a weapon at a meet-n-greet with the Alaska National Guard in Kuwait. I’m sure they’re scrambling to find more. "Sarah Palin as Lara Croft" will leave these guys drooling like zombies.
And if God really is Republican, then she’s been photographed straddling the barrel of a tank cannon at least once in her life.
Note to McCain’s staff: Forget the Vogue Photo shoot. Somebody needs to find her Rigid Tool Calendar pics, then you can put the union blue collar vote in your win column too.In a close race, how many voters from how many groups can Obama afford to have peeled off and lobotomized by McCain, Rove et al? More than a few games have been won with Hail Mary passes.
A reader writes:
This nomination involves the deepest cynicism of our time, the cynicism of identity politics.
Again, the first George Bush is the leader, with his nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Unlike Quayle and Miers, I’m not ready to say that Thomas is lacking in what it takes to do his job — though at his best I think his record on the court will be undistinguished. But his record never had a thing to do with his appointment, which was a finger in the eye of the identity politics of race. Is it really so important to you that a black man be appointed to the Supreme Court? Any black man? Even one who doesn’t agree with your Democratic political philosophy? Well, then, let me introduce you to Clarence Thomas.
Palin’s nomination is probably even more cynical than that, given the context of Hillary discontent. While the press frequently seems to imply that Hillary voters are somehow "moderate" (a laughable assumption, but it’s one that has real force), in fact they’re the furthest left in the party. The very idea is only a response to the right’s need to cast Obama as further left than Hillary. Again, I think that’s risible. And now McCain has decided to test the thesis. Are Hillary voters so deeply angry at their party that they would vote for a ticket with a woman — literally, any woman — on it? Even a Republican, anti-choice ticket?
I’m sure the press will be able to find a few of these women, and you can bet you’ll see them interviewed on some TV news show. Perhaps the feminist left is really that cynical — more so, even, than McCain. Perhaps they really are willing to give up Roe v. Wade, and settle for a pretty aggressively anti-gay administration in order to get a woman — any woman — into the White House, somewhere. But I think this is where McCain’s cynicism will fail him.
"Country First" really was more than a slogan up until now. But if Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President of the United States in this time of crisis (as McCain would have it), then Frank Capra isn’t charming at all, he’s leading us into a populist nightmare. If being mayor of a speed trap town is actually all it takes to be able to govern the United States of America, then government really isn’t that important at all. I don’t think there are enough voters willing to believe that. I think they are, on the whole, more willing to have believed McCain, circa 2000 — before his party’s cynicism infected even him.
(Photo: James Watson/Getty.)
It’s beginning to sound a little like Arkansas. Check out the details of the Troopergate scandal, and the "soap-opera-style" details of the firing of a police chief, who is now venting to the press. No one looks good in all this, and Palin was caught in a lie she had to concede, and her husband comes off as a bit of a bully, and no one seems to doubt she used her public office to pursue a personal issue. It’s pretty trivial stuff, but it’s messy. And the legislative inquiry, headed by a Democrat, is scheduled to report on October 31. I’d love to know if McCain knew all this. Or was this as impulsive and as rashly decided as it seems?
You could make the argument that this is the first election fully to bear the marks of a reality TV world, of Oprah and Survivor and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. And also the Olympics, at least as presented by NBC. We’re perhaps more accustomed than we ever have been to hearing Fascinating and Dramatic Life Stories, stories filled with Conflict and Tension and Obstacles Overcome, preferably in exotic settings — like, you know, Hawaii, or Alaska, or Vietnam, or Scranton. Biden has the bankrupted father, the upbringing in poverty, the stutter, the horrific accident that killed his wife and daughter; McCain has the . . . well, you know all about that; Obama has the — well, you totally know all about that; and now here comes Sarah Palin, just your typical snowmobile-racing, moose-hunting, basketball-playing, beauty-contest-entering-and-almost-winning member of the NRA and Feminists for Life with five kids, one of whom has Down’s syndrome. Other forms of reality TV will never catch up. Looks like the political is the personal — maybe from here on out.
Some patent piffle from Ross. He’s trying to argue that because I haven’t swooned over the chance of a female vice-president who didn’t get there by marriage, like Clinton, I’m somehow being inconsistent. Please. I do admire someone who’s risen the way Palin has, and I’ve said lots of nice things about her. But let’s be honest: Palin is now where she is – not as Alaska governor but as vice-presidential nominee – because an old white guy decided to play some identity politics, and felt he had to shake up his campaign, not because she has fought her way to the top of the national greasy pole. It’s great that by a combination of a decrepit and degenerate political establishment in Alaska, and her own personality and tenacity, she has just become governor of Alaska. But McCain’s choice of her – as is impossible to miss – is a cynical ploy to exploit Democratic divisions over gender. I mean: how many Republican vice-presidential picks have lauded Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro in their acceptance speech? It wasn’t even subtle. I find this kind of attitude to be about condescension, not feminism, about tokenism, not post-gender meritocracy. And, please, there is nothing sexist in being amused by the names of someone’s kids; I found the Romney gaggle hilarious. She was a beauty queen, for Pete’s sake. She has been presented to the nation like a trophy candidate. And some women do indeed find her running for vice-president with a four-month-old disabled child somewhat incongruous. These are the big leagues. These issues are worth airing.
My sense is that this pick is insulting to voters, especially women voters, and terribly condescending to Palin. It’s as much about countering sexism as picking Clarence Thomas was about countering racism.
There’s nothing unclassy about pointing these things out. Maybe Ross is right and this chirpy young governor who has never even uttered an opinion about foreign policy and was too busy to even notice the surge except when hearing about it "on the news" is indeed a quick study and will prove us all wrong. Ross is right to withhold ultimate judgment. But I see no reason not to say on the day she’s picked that the selection seems pretty close to unserious to me. And in the context of a war that McCain keeps (rightly) saying is the fight for civilization, the selection suggests a) that McCain doesn’t believe a word he has been saying about the war or b) his cynicism and opportunism about national security makes Karl Rove look like Dwight Eisenhower.
Take your pick.
(Photo: Mario Tama/Getty.)
A reader writes:
It occurs to me that you are confusing political skills with governing skills.
There is no question that Obama is a very skilled politician. In that sense, he is probably better than anyone the Dems have produced (other than Bill Clinton) in the last 20 years. Or for that matter, anyone the GOP has produced, at least anyone with a national profile. But that doesn’t mean Obama has any governing skills. What has he done in the Senate to convince you that he has the ability to forge compromise, to break through the partisanship or to take on entrenched interests — including in his own party?
I’m not talking about beating the Clintons out for the nomination — that is political skill. I’m talking about putting together coalitions, incurring the wrath of committee chairmen or majority leaders who are toeing the party line and getting something meaningful passed. Where was he on any of the issues that produced the most partisanship in the past 4 years and that cried out for compromise and bipartisanship — immigration, entitlement reform, confirming judges, military tribunals, to name a few? Always on the left with the hard-core partisans, never involved in finding the common ground to produce a solution. I don’t see evidence of any ability to build working coalitions on anything meaningful. At least not in his four years in Washington. And if he did it in the state senate in Illinois, he has been awfully quiet about it.
Palin, by contrast, has taken on her own party and has done quite a bit in a relatively short time to reform Alaska politics. McCain obviously has built a whole career around being the GOPs answer to David Boren, Sam Nunn, Chuck Robb, etc. — the type of Dems who managed to find a middle way through the partisanship to get things done in the 80’s, even when it pissed off everyone in their party and caused people to accuse them of party disloyalty. So far, I have seen little of Obama that does not prove that he is just a showman — a very good one, but still a showman. (That’s why his speeches always sound so much better in the moment than a day or two later, when you think about what he said.)
In the end, the VP pick does not change a lot of votes, but it does tell you what type of person tops the ticket. By picking Gore, Clinton was saying that he was not Mondale or Dukakis or Kennedy, but was a conservative Dem and would run a left-of-center administration and stand up to the party’s left wing. By picking Palin, McCain says that he is not Bush or Cheney or Delay or Gingrich, but is someone who plans to shake up the system and is willing to make bold choices along the way. It makes it much harder for Obama to argue effectively that McCain is four more years of Bush and much easier for McCain to argue that he is the second coming of TR. That is where he wants to be, and it is probably his best shot at winning, as well as governing the way he wants to govern.
I still think it is an inspired pick. I’m surprised that he had the balls to do it but I have newfound respect for him that he did. And no, I am not “on the right,” unless that term now includes former Democrats-turned-Eisenhower Republicans. Sorry, not everyone who has passed on the Obama Kool-Aid is on the right.
Nate Silver puts it well:
Palin is the most manifestly ordinary person ever to be nominated for a major party ticket. In this year of bittergate and Britney-gate and McCain-has-seven-houses-gate, that could conceivably be a virtue; it’s certainly less tone-deaf than a selection like Mitt Romney would have been.
But Palin isn’t merely playing at being ordinary, the way that Bill Clinton (Rhodes Scholar) or George W. Bush (son of a president) or Hillary Clinton (wife of a president) might. She really, really comes across that way — like someone who had won a sweepstakes or an essay contest. Her authenticity factor is off-the-charts good; her biography sings. But do Americans really want their next-door-neighbor running for Vice President, or rather someone who seems like one?
The Dish 