| 10/15/08 04:59 PM |
#809
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David Noon
Alright, I've apparently been summoned to duty here on the Palin thing. I'll be brief, but I've been writing a lot about Palin for the past two months, so I'll throw some links at the end for anyone who's interested.
It's safe to say that I take an extremely dim view of Sarah Palin. As governor, she's been reasonably decent; as a potential vice president (or president), she's a farce. Her demonstrated lack of knowledge on most issues -- foreign policy, the economy, even energy -- is staggering. And when I say "staggering," I'm being kind.
I've tried to explain this to non-Alaskans, with mixed success, but one of the fundamental problems with Palin is that she comes from a state that does a poor job of conditioning political candidates for national office. Alaskans generally view the rest of the United States as a weird, unpleasant, dangerous place that is useful only to the degree that it supplies us with billions of dollars a year in federal support. Palin's a product of this extremely odd political culture.
So until McCain asked her to help him recruit the social conservative voters that abandoned him in the primaries, Sarah Palin had not spent more than two minutes of her life thinking about the kinds of issues you'd expect to be on the mind of a VP candidate in 2008. The fact that she doesn't know what the "Bush Doctrine" is, for example, is mind-blowing -- the Bush Doctrine, after all, is the reason her son (and Joe Biden's son) is in Iraq right now. The fact that she seems to think that the United States should not export any oil it might recover from ANWR is (and again, I'm being generous here) insane, especially to the ears of people who know the first thing about how oil actually circulates in a global market. The fact that she can't discuss any Supreme Court decisions except for Roe is embarrassing -- especially given the fact that at least two recent Supreme Court decisions (Exxon v. Baker and Mass. v. EPA) directly affected the state. These are things she should know about. But she apparently doesn't.
It goes on and on. It's not that Palin is an idiot; she's not. She's just not very curious -- despite her claims to read every newspaper in the country.
I suppose I can understand why a lot of conservatives are excited about Palin. She's young, she's energetic, she can function adequately with a teleprompter and without the risk of follow-up questions. And conservatives got stuck with John McCain this time around, which is of course a shame for them. So I can appreciate the temporary enthusiasm for someone new, even though I share exactly zero of her political views.
But at the end of the day, she's a novelty candidate. Maybe she'll be back in 2012 for a run at the presidency, maybe not. I happen to think she'd do poorly in a prolonged race. But at this point, though, it looks like she'll have four years to catch up on all those newspapers.
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