Month: September 2008

Dickerson:

Another ad-hoc element to the Palin pick is the curious defense of her foreign policy credentials. Republicans and Cindy McCain have mentioned that she understands national security issues in part because she is governor of Alaska, whose borders nearly touch Russia’s. A day and a half ago, I asked the campaign for an example of her dealings with Russia or the Russians. I’m still waiting. Again, maybe there’s a bad-spin explanation here: They’re swamped and are working to get back to me. Or maybe they just made the claim in haste without checking it.

A lot of us are waiting for some pretty basic answers to some pretty basic questions.

Josh Marshall nails it:

A lot of attention is being given to Gov. Palin’s daughter’s situation. The much bigger deal is the expanding trooper-gate investigation, the fact that Palin lied in her Friday speech about her purported opposition to the Bridge to Nowhere, her apparent former membership in the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, and more. Individually, you can come to your own judgment about how consequential these stories are. What they show pretty clearly now — in addition to the news that the McCain campaign is only now sending in a vetting team — is that John McCain didn’t do any serious vetting of Palin before he invited her to join his ticket and, he hopes, become Vice President of the United States.

Fundamentally, of course, this is about John McCain. And the real issue here is what this slapdash decision says about his judgment.

The salient political issues of the Palin pick are two-fold: Can Palin be trusted to tell the truth? And how competent is a campaign that picks a candidate without any serious vetting of stuff that can appear on the Internet within a few hours of the news? We need to refocus on those core questions. I fear the answers are: we can’t trust Palin to tell the truth; and the manner of McCain’s pick demonstrates some of the most grotesque incompetence in modern political history.

But we’ll see, won’t we?

Hurricane Gustav, Pensacola, Florida, 9.52 am.

Their current position:

“Governor Palin and her husband Todd have a loving family and their children mean everything to them. When their oldest daughter Bristol came to them with news that she was expecting a child they embraced her and gave her nothing but unconditional love and support.”

“This is a very personal matter for the family. We should all respect the love they have for the child and the desire all parents would have for their children’s privacy.”

“The media should respect Bristol’s privacy. That’s always been the tradition and practice when it comes to the children of candidates.”

And, “if pressed” the campaign suggests: “The children of candidates do not choose to run for office and be thrust into the spotlight.”

Hilzoy draws a line in the sand:

It’s easy, in the midst of a political campaign, to forget that the people involved are, after all, people. Some of them — Sarah Palin, for instance — place themselves under a media spotlight of their own free will. Others — her daughter, for instance — wind up there through no fault of their own. Imagine yourself in her position: there you are, seventeen years old, pregnant, unmarried. Maybe you understand what happened and why; and maybe your parents and friends do as well. But zillions of bloggers and reporters and pundits are about to make the most personal details of your life into a political issue, and they don’t understand it at all. And yet, despite that, they are about to use you and your unborn child to score points on one another, without any regard whatsoever for you and your actual situation. I want no part of this. None at all. To those of you who think otherwise: that’s your right. But ask yourself how you felt when Republicans scored points using Chelsea Clinton, who didn’t ask to be dragged into the spotlight either.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s fair game to consider Sarah Palin’s statements about her daughter’s decision, and to compare them to her own views about abortion.

That’s a story about whether or not Sarah Palin sticks to her beliefs when they affect her own family, not about her daughter. But it is not fair game to use her daughter, or any of her kids, as pawns in a political argument. To my mind, this extends to using her daughter as evidence that abstinence-only education doesn’t work: presumably, no one thinks that it works 100% of the time, and that’s the only claim to which this one counterexample could possibly be relevant. (That’s why God created large-scale studies.) Likewise, I think that arguing about whether Sarah Palin is a good mother is out of line: we have no idea at all what arrangements she and her husband have made for child care, how their relationship works, and so forth. Assuming that Sarah Palin would have to be her children’s primary caregiver is just sexist.

From an Eagle Forum Candidate Questionnaire:

Q: Are you offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?  

PALIN: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.

The phrase was added in 1954.

Steve Coll has a new piece up on Petraeus’s dilemma. A taste:

When we met recently in Iraq, I asked Petraeus if that ad in the Times had marked the low point of his personal experience in this command. It had not, he said; coping with the deaths of soldiers had been considerably more difficult. He added, however, that he rarely feels stress at all, an assertion supported by his appearance: at the age of fifty-five, he has a lightly lined face and chestnut hair that is barely marked by gray. When he does experience an occasional spike in his blood pressure, he said, it is usually caused by an unexpected event, particularly on the battlefield. By contrast, in Washington, he remarked, referring to the city’s culture of political ambush, “you know what’s coming.”

McCain didn’t.

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)

People gets the honor. The interviewer asks where the children’s names came from:

Sarah’s parents were coaches and the whole family was involved in track and I was an athlete in high school, so with our first-born, I was, like, ‘Track!’ Bristol is named after Bristol Bay. That’s where I grew up, that’s where we commercial fish. Willow is a community there in Alaska. And then Piper, you know, there’s just not too many Pipers out there and it’s a cool name. And Trig is a Norse name for “strength.”

Ezra Klein:

In this election, Joe Biden is proving the low-key, stable, drama-free vice presidential candidate who basically does his job and stays out of the news. Joe Biden.

Ross makes a solid point:

Palin will only help McCain politically if she shows herself to be a quick study and a plausible vice president over the next sixty-six days; if she’s as ludicrous a pick as Andrew thinks she is, then McCain will look like a fool and his already none-too-high chances of winning this election will drop lower still. If she’s a Quayle-type choice or worse, the odds are good that she’ll never occupy the Naval Observatory: She only helps him (and he needs help!) if she turns out to be a case study in his ability to size up political talent on the fly, and if that’s how things shake out, nobody will be talking about how McCain put "country last" with his VP pick.