Month: August 2008

Fallows makes a prediction about Palin.

Steve Shofield explores fan culture:

The artist explains:

My practice is concerned with exploring the fascination that the British public has with American popular culture and the sub-cultural world of fandom. In the images, I have shown people in their own homes and environments wearing costumes that they would be dressed in to attend events with other like-minded individuals. It seeks to offer a glimpse into seemingly ordinary lives of my subjects and allows the private to become public.

Denver, Colorado, 7.47 pm.

Reihan is having an argument with himself about McCain’s foreign policy vision. He wrote this for the Spectator:

Whereas Democratic partisans accuse McCain of being a warmonger, the truth is that he believes that force should be used sparingly. And he believes that when force is used, it must be used effectively and with a clear goal in mind, a belief that was at the centre of his dispute with Donald Rumsfeld. Barack Obama and the Democrats made great hay out of McCain’s assertion that it would be fine for US troops to remain in Iraq for 100 years provided there were no casualties. What they don’t mention is that in 2004 McCain explicitly opposed the creation of permanent US bases in Iraq. Whereas Obama’s foreign policy ideology led him to oppose the surge, McCain’s foreign policy pragmatism will make him a more effective commander-in-chief. That is a message McCain needs to get across.

He adds later:

Sparingly? Hasn’t McCain backed force whenever the option was even remotely plausible? I actually don’t think he has. To be sure, he’s not a devotee of the Powell-Weinberger doctrine. But when you look at Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, I think you had three compelling cases for the use of force, certainly from the vantage point of when those decisions were made. What was distinctive about McCain is that in each case he believed that we should deploy a decisive force. Will he be similarly inclined to deploy force to settle disputes in Georgia, Burma, the Nigerian delta, etc., etc.? I doubt it.

A reader writes:

I’m a Senator McCain supporter because I’m a conservative who can’t bring myself to vote for a liberal who will increase the size of government, raise taxes during a down economy, and give the Democrats complete control of Washington. My second tier reason is the huge gap in experience between John McCain and Senator Obama. This makes the Governor Palin pick bittersweet for me. I think she is a potential conservative star of the future, but at the current time she is not ready to be president.

I do think to go on and on about Senator McCain is selling out the country with this veep pick is disingenuous. Sarah Palin is less qualified then Barack Obama to be president, but the fact that the experience gap between the two isn’t large is very telling. If the McCain/Palin ticket wins, the odds of Governor Palin being called on to serve as president early in that term are extremely low. If the Obama/Biden ticket wins, Senator Obama will be president. VPOTUS is a position that lends itself well to on the job training. POTUS is not. To pretend there isn’t a difference between the qualifications for the bottom and top of presidential tickets is naive at best.

If you want to make the argument that Senator McCain is putting the country at risk for his own selfish ambition by choosing Governor Palin as his veep candidate, you have to acknowledge that Senator Obama is putting the country at risk for his own selfish ambition by simply accepting his party’s nomination. I think the Obama campaign realized this somewhat when Senator Obama distanced himself from the attack statement released by campaign early in the day. The Obama campaign wants to talk about the danger in being inexperienced as little as possible.

This isn’t just about the number of days Obama or Palin have been in office. Since breaking onto the national stage Obama has given countless print, radio, and television interviews. He has been bombarded with criticism and praise until a sketch of the man could be draw from the stack of clippings. I’ve only seen a handful of Palin interviews. And I’ve little to no idea about her judgment or what she thinks about the issues. And I don’t know that McCain knows her much better than I do. If voters had found Obama, his experience, or his policies wanting, they had a chance to reject him. They approved. Only McCain has approved of Palin.

Not as gullible as McCain seems to think they are:

These numbers pretty much speak for themselves, but men have a favorable imperssion of Palin by a 35-point margin, whereas women have a favorable impression of her by an 18-point margin. Conversely, by a 23-point margin, women do not think Palin is ready to be President, whereas Palin lost this question among men by a considerably smaller 6-point magrin.

Or how a black man became an elitist:

Schwenkler makes the counter-argument:

Okay, work with me here. Suppose you’re John McCain. If what you say is to be believed – and why shouldn’t it? – you got into politics because you care about your country, and you think that Barack Obama is a hapless, inexperienced naif whose elevation to the Presidency would put the United States – nay, the entire civilized world and the cause of freedom in it – in grave danger. You think, in other words, that it is only if you are elected that this danger can be averted, the terrorists destroyed or dispersed, and the cause of democracy preserved.

Got that? You’re John McCain, and that’s what you think. Now why in the world, in an election as close as this one, would you select anyone as your Vice Presidential candidate other than the person who gives you the best chance to win?

And so why in the world would the decision to the person who does give you such a chance – or whom you at least take to give you such a chance – show that you had opted to “choose your campaign over your presidency”? You won’t HAVE a Presidency unless you can run a successful campaign, and up against the Obama juggernaut there’s no room to pull punches: if Palin gives you the best chance to win, and the cost of failure is civilizational collapse, then Palin it’s going to be.

Sure, but what if, as a 72 year-old man, you have a health crisis or even die in office. That’s a totally reasonable scenario. No one on McCain’s staff even argues she’s ready to take over, or even close to it. It’s also silly to believe that only by taking this massive gamble on a total unknown could McCain have a chance. He’s been running pretty even with Obama until very recently. This pick is an enmorous risk for his campaign and an even more enormous risk for the country.

After the last eight years, do we really want a president who takes massive gambles, consulting with a tiny core of loyalists, without thinking through the consequences, and who hires unknown and untested people to run a government already badly mismanaged because they help his political coalition.

This is the third term of George W. Bush – with less caution.