GOP VP thread: Palin is the pick

Being a supremely talented politician and speaker aren't bad things, that means you're able to guage the situation and get things done. Last I checked, that's what a president's supposed to do.

 

Read what I wrote. I didn't say it is, though there is more to being a good president. My point is that if Palin is good, she can dull the experience factor too. The difference between Obama & Palin on the experience question is not that his extra couple of years in the Senate trump her 2 years in the statehouse, but that he has already shown the world how talnted he is. Palin coming up to bad. We'll see.

 

If Palin is good, yes. She strikes me as someone who's walking down the path Obama traveled four to eight years ago. Obama needed room to grow from 2000 to 2004 to 2008. I think the question most of us have about Palin is whether she's ready right now, should anything happen to McCain, when she might have been two or four years away from being ready for such a prominent role.

 

One of my cohorts, who is a political junkie, brought up an interesting theory.

He thinks that after McCain and what passed for his brain trust (yes, I'm talking about you, Rove wanna-be Steve Schmidt) saw the lights-out reaction after Obama's speech (even that Nazi Pat Buchanan called it "One of the greatest political speeches in American history..."), they panicked and threw Tim Pawlenty under the proverbial bus and decided to recapture the momentum they built up over the last month with Palin.

Well, given what happened with the news cycle, it worked.

Given Palin's weak credentials with everyone save the base, it proves Obama's questioning of McCain's judgment is dead-on nails.

 

The Politico article is recommended. It posits that McCain and his camp know electorally the race isn't as close as people would like to believe, too many states for McCain to defend, not enough money, not enough time. With Palin he gets the conservatives to pony up and some buzz, but it looks like his campaign is going to lose another week to Gustav (which may turn into a plus for the GOP, missing out on Bush and Cheney and giving the GOP a mulligan on hurricane response). I don't feel qualified to start the RNC thread - Old Tony? Hondo? Zag? - so can we get one going?

 

This is a must-read blog for anyone interested in this story:

http://mudflats.wordpress.com/

To say that people in Alaska are shocked is an understatement. And not shocked in a good way.

Meanwhile, people are digging big-time. All her local, backwater hick politics bullshit is coming out. She is a mean, vindictive bitch who got elected mayor and started firing people like the library director and the police chief because they didn't support her in the election. Then the Troopergate firing once she becomes governor. It looks so small-time.

 

I know the Republicans like to discount this, but I think it's also important to take into account the difference in their life experience, too.

Obama has traveled the world, for personal reasons and political, long before he became the nominee -- Palin just got her first passport in the fall of 2007, from what I read. And it was for a short trip to visit injured soldiers.

Obama was a state and U.S. senator for eight years in the one of the most populated states in the country -- Palin was a two-term mayor for a 9,000-person town and a 20-month governor for, far and away, the most isolated state in the country.

I don't want to underestimate Palin's ability to trump her relative lack of experience; after all, that's one of the many things I like about Obama.

But it seems to me that his life has prepared him a lot more for him to possibly be the president at his age/experience than her life has prepared her to be the possible vice president at her age/experience.

 

Was it allowed here to call Hillary a "mean, vindictive bitch?"

I honestly don't remember.

Palin is under investigation for abuses of power. The name-calling, though . . .?

Buckweaver: Republicans wouldn't discount life experience if such talk benefited their candidate. And it is a good point.

 

I called her the first two at some point, I'm sure, but avoided the third.

 

That may be too pessimistic an assumption on the part of the McCain camp. Yeah, having 84,000 people attend your acceptance speech looks good, and Obama has quite a volunteer network. But will Obama's "supporters" actually make it out to the polls on election day? Many of them come from demographics that historically have not voted in large numbers.

 

That's a fear I have, too, suburbia, but ... we've never seen a campaign like this before. The only way we're going to know for sure is on Nov. 4, but I have to believe they're going to get enough supporters to the voting booth to make a difference.

If they can get 84,000 to the convention speech ... if they can get 75,000 to a primary speech ... I see no indications that there's going to be much of a letdown on Election Day.

 

Watched some FNC this afternoon. Give combat pay to the poor janitor who has to wipe the jism off the floor.
They read one e-mail after another from purported Hillary supporters who say they're backing McCain now. I call bullshit. These are probably dopes just wanting the ego boost of having their e-mail read on the air.