Obama’s selection of Senator Joe Biden of Delaware exemplified the sort of cool-headed, analytical conscientiousness that defines the Illinois senator. Biden has been in the Senate for thirty-five years, and, while there, has chaired the Senate’s Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees. Biden is knowledgeable on every major issue, a mainstream, center-left Democrat with the understanding of Washington’s ways that comes with a lifetime in public service. In choosing Biden, Obama picked a man whose experience will be an asset to making the candidate’s reform agenda practicable. More importantly, should catastrophe incapacitate or remove a President Obama from the scene, can there be any doubt that the government will be safe under Biden? Obama’s choice was the type of decision we want our leaders to make; based on a careful consideration of the national interest and a dispassionate evaluation of his own shortcomings .
Unfortunately, it is impossible to similarly commend his opponent’s vice presidential selection. It’s sadly ironic that the candidate who has made “Country First” the theme of his campaign showed such base self-centeredness and disregard for the interests of his fellow-citizens in making his own choice. John McCain’s pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin demonstrated gross irresponsibility that calls into grave question the Republican nominee’s suitability for the Oval Office. Palin’s unworthiness is manifest. She was mayor of a town of fewer than 10,000 souls for a mere six years. She has been governor of Alaska, the fourth least populous state in the Union, for fewer than two. Her foreign policy experience is nonexistent; the best the McCain camp could come up with last week was that she knew international affairs because Alaska was close to a part of Russia so remote that, if it sank into the Bering Sea, Vladimir Putin wouldn’t notice is was gone for months. Her positions on energy are what you would expect of the governor of a state joined at the hip with the oil industry. Palin believes that global warming is not man-made, and she thinks God wants a massive oil and natural gas pipeline from Alaska to the Lower Forty-Eight. Apparently, the Big Fella is a big fan of deficit spending.
Of course, as we’ve heard ad nauseam from Republicans for the past two weeks, Palin’s mayoral and gubernatorial tenures, stunted as they have been, give her more executive experience than McCain, Obama, and Biden put together. This is an interesting position. To be sure, while the aforementioned senators were lollygagging around in their unaccountable, unimportant jobs of determining the security and foreign relations policies of the most powerful legislature in the world, Palin was fearlessly defending her state against rampaging caribou by giving a total of zero orders to the Alaska National Guard during her 20 months in Juneau. That said, she certainly knows how to throw her power around in the security sphere; she sacked the state’s Public Safety Commissioner when he wouldn’t fire a state trooper who had a messy divorce with Palin’s sister.
Which leads us to Palin the reformer, the maverick who, along with fellow maverick McCain, is going to ride into Washington on message of a GOP-style change, and then shake up that whole culture of earmarks and cocktail party elitism. After all, she did it in Alaska! She challenged a corrupt party establishment! Dethroned a sitting governor! Said no to the bridge to nowhere! Actually, when she beat Governor Frank Murkowski in 2006, he (and said party establishment) was so unpopular that Osama bin Laden would probably have polled 40 percent in the GOP primary by running against the rampant corruption. After resigning from the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in protest over ethical failures, she served as head of a 527 group called “Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc.,” named for Alaska’s now-indicted senior senator. As for that bridge, Palin turned against it when it became clear that Uncle Sam would not be footing the bill. It’s so much harder to be profligate when folks in Minnesota and Georgia aren’t footing the bill. As mayor of Wasilla, Palin employed a full time lobbyist to get earmarks from Congress. This for a town less than a third the size of Amherst. Hey, what works, works. Palin did preside over an economic boom in her town. If Woman Who Brought Wal-Mart to Wasilla isn’t an indispensable qualification to be one heartbeat away from the presidency, I don’t know what is.
Palin’s also the sort of conservative who makes President Bush look like a Gay Pride flag waving hippie. For instance, she’s not a fan of abortion. Ever. Rape and incest are no longer excuses. She even opposes teaching high schoolers about condoms. She also thinks creationism (not intelligent design, six days and all) ought to be taught in schools along with evolution. She believes that God ordained the Iraq War, and that our current strategy “is God’s plan.” Surely, the deity who led the Children of Israel to capture Canaan couldn’t have lost the touch that badly. Her taste in churches is also a little disconcerting. The Wasilla Bible Church, recently played host to the head of Jews for Jesus, who said, with Palin in attendance, that recent Palestinian bulldozer attacks in Jerusalem were happening because those stubborn Jews weren’t accepting Christ fast enough. Yeesh. At least Obama and McCain had the good grace to throw their crazy friends of the cloth under the bus when it came out that Jeremiah Wright had damned America and John Hagee had damned just about everyone else.
We know why McCain chose this woman to be on the ticket with him. The evangelicals love her, and he needed to get them excited. He hoped to pick off some of the unreconciled Clinton supporters by putting two more X chromosomes on the GOP slate. He hoped that Palin could connect with some of those “embittered” small town voters. We also know how he picked her. McCain had met Palin once, and talked to her on the phone another time before offering her the nomination. His campaign spent the week after the pick being blindsided by damaging revelations that a competent vetting process would have discovered.
We know whom he passed up. Joe Lieberman, a dedicated and experienced public servant, even if he is a certified neoconservative Kool-Aid drinker. Romney, who was a competent governor of Massachusetts, founded a wildly successful consulting firm, and all but saved the 2002 Winter Olympics. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a female senator from Texas with loads more experience at the national level than Palin. Bobby Jindal, the exciting young governor of Louisiana, who acquitted himself so well in the run-up to Hurricane Gustav.
We also know what is at stake. If we elect McCain, and the oldest first-term president ever elected fails to live out his term, Sarah Palin will become the 45th president of the United States. I know nobody who does not find that prospect utterly terrifying. If we elect John McCain, we will have chosen a man who thought that a phone call and a single face-to-face meet was sufficient research on which to base his pick of a possible successor. Whom do we trust with the nuclear codes, this rash man who makes decisions on a whim and flies from the seat of his pants, or the candidate who made this first crucial executive decision methodically and thoroughly, utilizing what some have termed the most extensive vice presidential vetting process ever? The central Republican argument in this campaign has been that, in a time of war and economic uncertainty, we can’t take a chance on Barack Obama. The real question, with the Palin pick in mind, is whether we can really take a chance on John McCain.