Palin Not Up to the Job

I've been asked what I personally think of Governor Sarah Palin. The short answer is she is dangerously unready to be Vice President. Furthermore, by choosing her John McCain has shown the same thing about himself.

Imagine an applicant for an executive position in your company or organization at their interview. Imagine this person being unfamiliar with the basic facts about your industry and how it works. Imagine them winking and trying to act "cute" while answering interview questions. Imagine them telling the personnel director that they were not going to answer the questions that were asked, but would instead talk about whatever they wanted. Now imagine how quickly your hiring committee would show this buffoon the door.

We are not talking about your assistant director of marketing, but about the Vice Presidency of the United States. This is the official who would be standing next in line to a chief who would be 76 years old during his term, a man who already has a history as a cancer survivor. That is to say, this Vice President would have approximately a one in three chance of being called upon to finish out that term.

To place in this position a person of such demonstrated ignorance, supercilious preening and lack of forthrightness is nothing less than a danger to the republic. This is what John McCain has done.

One can see how he may have been attracted to her challenging the traditional GOP establishment in Alaska. No doubt that took some guts. He must have identified with her struggle, recalling how he opposed the Party in the Senate on such things as tax policy, torture, campaign finance, and immigration before he caved on all these issues and returned to the discipline of the party fold on all of them in order to get the nomination. Perhaps his conscience was bothering him about this.

But moxie alone is not sufficient to name someone Vice President. They have to be ready to serve as President, and they ought to be ready to do so right now. Appointing someone with Sarah Palin's resume Undersecretary of the Interior and keeping an eye on her to see how she does would be a bit of a stretch, but could be justified. Placing her a heartbeat away, and a septuagenarian heart at that, from the presidency makes a mockery of the slogan "country first." It is, to be frank, politics first and country be damned.

It gratifies me to see that the American people do not seem to be falling for the razzmatazz this time. Joe Biden, who actually knows what he is talking about, won the debate with Palin by 25 points Friday night. The number of undecided voters who said the debate made them more likely to support Obama was 80% higher than those who said it made them more likely to support McCain.

Facts, it has been said, are stubborn things. It just may be, that after nearly eight years of experience with what happens when you have a leadership that invents its own reality and holds inconvenient facts in contempt, the American people are ready to demand some substance, honesty and gravitas of those who would conduct their public business. Sarah Palin fails on all three counts, and that is why she is unworthy to occupy the high position to which she has been nominated. Those are my considered judgments of Sarah Palin.