August 30, 2008

• Since you ask…

  …I’ll tell you what I think of Sarah Palin.

  UPDATED (below)

  When I rolled out of bed this morning and limped into the kitchen, I was considering getting on here to tell you about my trip to town Thursday.  I went into Wasilla to finalize the sale of my old car Streak that’s been parked in front of Greyfox’s cabin since a year or so ago when it broke down on another trip to town just before the pneumonia laid me low. 

  Telling you about the town trip would logically include the story of the harrowing phone conversation with Greyfox the night before, during which he kept asking me what I planned to do about the tires (better ones on Streak, bald ones on his replacement Blur, how to arrange the switch, etc.), then when I’d start laying out the complicated options, he’d come all unglued and freak out, screaming and yelling before I could finish answering his question.  It might have made a good story.

  Stepping on yet another shrew on the kitchen floor reminded me that I had only briefly mentioned the cats’ seasonal rodent collecting behavior.  I did, also, want to tell about my fall yesterday morning that has me limping today.  It has not completely disabled my cordless phone, but the water did disable the LCD so I can’t see the battery charge level or know how long I’ve been talking, and the soaking also affected the speaker, adding some blur and crackle to the sound.

  But that’s another story.   Dlm0908, and lupa, and pinkjag have asked me to tell them what I think or know about Sarah Palin.  How can I resist?

  Where do I start?  Well, she has several of the traits of a successful politician.  She can lie convincingly.  I’d say most people believed her when she said that if she was asked to be McCain’s running mate, she would decline and stay on here as our governor.  I’d be willing to bet that, at the time, she no more than the rest of us believed that the party would choose her, an unqualified, relatively obscure and inexperienced woman from the hinterlands, currently facing an investigation into her (and her spouse’s) abuse of power, as its candidate.

  She also has that facility that most successful politicians have, of evading questions to which she doesn’t know the answers or to which her true answers might not be what the voters want to hear.  Very early in her campaign for governor, I became disgusted at her evasion of direct and pointed questions regarding specific policy issues.  She had a little canned speech about defending the constitution of the state of Alaska that she inserted every time someone asked her a real, searching question.  Has she trotted it out yet, slightly modified, for her vice presidential campaign?  If not, she will, just watch.

  In her run for governor, her major strength was her status as an outsider.  She won a lot of votes by promising to sell Alaska 1, the private jet purchased by her predecessor, Frank the Bank Murkowski, who, by the way is rumored to be cruising somewhere in the tropics and hasn’t been reported seen in Alaska since he left office. 

  Greyfox was an early supporter of Palin.  He even put up a campaign sign for her on his front porch.  But he says he didn’t vote for her when the time came.  Somewhere along the way, that cute face and sweet voice lost its appeal when he began to see and hear the lack of substance behind it.  He now says that she is all style, no substance.

  Pinkjag mentioned Palin’s latest baby.  If she knew ahead of time that her fifth child would be born with Down Syndrome, that fact wasn’t made public.  She might have elected against amniocentesis.  She kept her pregnancy secret until almost time for the birth.  A while later, there was an official announcement to the effect of how proud the family was that God had chosen them to care for a defective child.  That’s not a direct quote of course,  but that’s the gist of it.

  Mark Nickolas writes:

  Question: How will conservatives reconcile
  the fact that 70 days on the presidential campaign trail is going to be
  brutal for Palin at the very time she’s caring and breastfeeding a Down
  Syndrome infant, not to mention what that would mean for the next four
  years if she were to become VP?

  Frankly, I think the father ought to step-in — breastfeeding
  notwithstanding — and pick-up the slack. But social conservatives tend
  to think very differently about the traditional role of mother and
  father when it comes to raising infants. How will they react to this
  issue once the euphoria of the selection wears-off?

  Todd Palin, the aforementioned “father,” Alaska’s First Dood, is another matter entirely.  He’s really good at what he does, racing snowmobiles.  He’s one of those yee-haw good ole boys who tear up the tundra and smog up the air quality with their iron dogs.  Juneau insiders have been complaining about his throwing his weight around down there in the capital, trying to exert authority he doesn’t have, on the strength of his wife’s office.  There have been reports of shouted threats and physical intimidation from Todd.  It’s quite a contrast to Mrs. Todd’s saccharine style.

  This morning, APRN’s AK program reran part of their show on Sarah from back when she was our new governor.  The part they chose to run was the first segment, with her critics voicing their opinions.  Now, they’re threatening to run her current comments on the party’s selecting her, the “soccer mom from Alaska,” (according to her) as vice president.  It’s running in the background now.  If she says anything different or sensible, I’ll tell you.

  ADN today brought out the big type they’d usually reserve for reporting on the Second Coming, and devoted the front page to hip hooray and rah rah for the home team.  Speaking of home teams, when Sarah Heath and the Wasilla High School’s basketball team won the State Championship in 1982, she was known as Sarah the Barracuda.  A couple of years after that, she won the title of Miss Wasilla and placed second in the Miss Alaska pageant.

  Yesterday, she pulled a Jewel by putting career advancement in the Lower 48 ahead of keeping her commitments in Alaska.  She broke a signed commitment to appear at the State Fair, and instead made that announcement of her candidacy from the appropriately named Nutter Center in Dayton, OH.

  Officially, of course, the Republican Party of Alaska is behind Palin 100%.  That’s not quite 100% true for every Alaskan Republican:

  “State Senate President Lyda Green said she thought it was a joke when someone called her at 6 a.m. to give her the news.

  ‘She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?’ said Green, a Republican from Palin’s hometown of Wasilla. ‘Look at what she’s done to this state. What would she do to the nation?’ “  adn.com

  ADN also says that, “business minded Republicans consider her a misguided populist and intellectual lightweight.”  I heartily concur with the assessment of her intellect.  The newspaper quotes extensively from Andrew Halcro, a former Republican who became an Independent to run against Palin for governor after his party chose her. 

   ”When I first heard it, I thought, wow, that’s great for Alaska. Then I thought, wait, what just happened? Because of course the lack of experience does jump out at you,” Halcro said.

  Palin is a skilled campaigner able to make people believe in her, said Halcro, who spent nine months on the campaign trail in 2006 running as an independent opposite Palin and former Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat, in the general election

  “You really have to have a high level of respect for Gov. Palin in the sense that she has this real ability to connect with people. And suddenly people don’t think about health care, they don’t think about the economy, they don’t think about whatever else, education,” said Halcro, a self-described wonk. “It’s not about the policy. It’s about the person.”

  Palin always saw that, he said.

  “It’ll be interesting to see if that recipe works on the national stage,” Halcro said.  (adn.com)

  Okay, so Halcro has to “respect” her for demolishing him in political attacks, but some of us, Andrew and Sarah’s fellow Alaskans, are not so respectful even though her political ability is impressive.  She hasn’t proven to be a good administrator.  The “probe” underway now, to which national news media have paid scant attention and which the Party has downplayed, involves the firing of the Commissioner of Public Safety.

  Sarah Palin’s little sister was married to an unruly Alaska State Trooper and they were going through a messy divorce.  Among other things, that Trooper was reported to have tasered his young stepson, the governor’s nephew.  Learning that the governor didn’t have the authority herself to fire her brother-in-law, Palin ordered the Public Safety Commissioner to do it.  He says he informed her that there were procedures in place for such a move, and that he didn’t have that authority, either.  She fired him for insubordination.  At least, that’s the story that has been reported in local media.  The investigation is ongoing.

  I wasn’t going to vote for McCain anyway.  Greyfox said yesterday that some people on the forums at totse.com, where he is a moderator, who had intended to vote for McCain, changed their minds when the choice of Palin for veep was announced.  Yaaay.  Doug reported similar remarks from people in his chat rooms.  Yaaay.

  Reason suggests that if Sarah debates Joe Biden, he’ll demolish her point by point, but even if he does, she might out-sweet and out-pretty him, and I have so little confidence in the intelligence, perception and discernment of American voters, and in the health of John McCain, that I seriously fear that Sarah Palin could end up as first female president of the U.S.  As Greyfox pointed out last night, such an eventuality would set back women’s issues and women’s rights past where they were forty years ago.  She’d screw the pooch (his words) so bad, that nobody would want to risk another female president again.
  
  EDIT (1:30 PM):

  When I told Greyfox the gist of this piece, he told me that another Alaskan commentator had his say in the editorial pages of today’s Anchorage Daily News.

  A tidbit:  “…most Alaskans like Palin. I know I do.

  “But let’s be honest here. Her resume is as thin as the meat in a vending machine sandwich. I’m thinking being mayor of Wasilla doesn’t qualify her. And she’s less than two years into her first term as governor. Except for her high-profile gas pipeline legislation — which I like a lot — she doesn’t have much to show. Oil taxes? Most of that work was done by the legislature. Ethics? Ditto. And her role in killing the much-touted Bridge to Nowhere? Talk about coming in after the battle is over and bayoneting the wounded.”

  Mike Doogan’s opinion piece on Palin.

  UPDATE (8-31-08, 8:20 AM)

  I am getting really sick of hearing all the hype and hoopla about Sarah Barracuda.  Here is a brief excerpt from an email I received today from Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood:

  Times
  like these, it’s hard not to hear my mother’s voice in my head. I can tell you
  that my mother, the former governor of Texas and a remarkable feminist leader of
  her time, would have been downright outraged right now. What would have offended
  her most about McCain’s decision to put Sarah Palin on the ticket is how utterly
  calculated, how awfully pandering it is to women. It is the worst kind of
  politics. Mom would have said, “Women voting for this ticket is just like
  chickens voting for Colonel Sanders.”

  • 3:58 pm
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