The Tooth Fairy Ticket

By BJ

I said in my first post about the Palin pick that it is almost impossible to determine just what Palin's views on foreign policy are due to the nearly complete lack of data on her. A far more detailed critique on that point can be found in this post by Elrod.

In government, like in business, executive leadership requires VISION as well as competency.

So, how does one move up from one level to the next? Not just by showing the ability to “run things” at a lower level, but by developing and advancing a vision for how things should be run at a higher level. When mayors run for Governor, they step beyond the parochial needs of the municipality and press for a vision of the state. . . .

The same, of course, is true for Governors who run for President. Yes, their competency in delegating authority and managing budgets and priorities is critical to the Presidency of the United States. But to justify the move from the State House to Washington, they must show a vision and agenda for the nation as a whole. The executive responsibilities of the Presidency are so much grander than that of any Governor, and so require an extensive vetting process where the candidate sells his or her ideas across the country and offers a specific plan to implement those ideas. It’s a big task and it often takes years.

So, does Sarah Palin’s executive experience really make her qualified to be President of the United States?

Being Governor of Alaska is perfectly fine; the sparseness of Alaska’s population doesn’t disqualify her.

Even being Governor for 18 months doesn’t totally disqualify her, though it does lessen the number of examples of her supposed executive strength.

Much more problematic is that she has never offered a VISION of the country beyond the parochial needs of Alaska.

She has literally no position on foreign policy and national security. Not wrong positions. No positions.

She has no stated positions on the economy, or ideological outlook for the role of government in managing it.

Her positions on energy policy are driven not by national needs, but by the peculiarities of Alaska. Nowhere has she suggested how those needs may transfer to the country as a whole.

She has offered no position or vision on health care, arguably THE defining issue for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Again, she doesn’t have a “wrong” position. She has NO position beyond what is required under Alaskan law.

It is those facts above that show how woefully unprepared Palin is for the role she's been picked for, though I'm sure she can be filled up with talking points for the campaign trail. You can add Hilzoy's post on Obama's executive experience to put the final nail into that coffin if you need to.

The pick also says something, while not surprising, certainly not complimentary about McCain and the Republicans around him, which Robert Farley says about as well as I've seen it said:

The choice of Palin over any number of vastly more qualified women on the Republican side also tells us a bit about how McCain interprets the candidacies of both Clinton and Obama. McCain thinks that Clinton and Obama are both, essentially, affirmative action hires; they rose to prominence not because of qualification or talent, but rather because the one is a woman and the other is black and the Democrats go for that kind of thing. The antidote? A woman; any one will do, since (in the Republican view) you're already throwing qualification to do the job out the window when you eschew a gnarly white dude.

And what it says about McCain's judgement is even more dangerous:

Palin's qualifications are, to a very real degree, secondary to the issue at hand. What matters most right now is John McCain's comically dangerous sense of judgment. He picked a running mate he met once for 15 minutes, who's been the governor of a small state for a year and a half, and who is in the midst of an abuse-of-power investigation in which she appears to have lied rather blatantly. She has no obvious expertise in any area, and no record of any kind of federal issues. McCain doesn't care.

Sensible people of sound mind and character simply don't do things like this. Leaders don't do things like this. It's the height of arrogance. It's manifestly unserious. It's reckless and irresponsible. It mocks the political process. Faced with a major presidential test, McCain thought it wise to tell an imprudent joke of lasting consequence.

But to return to Palin's qualifications, since, barring this is all some kind of big joke the McCain campaign is playing on Americans, she will be running to be second-in-line for the most powerful post on the planet, and it behooves us to try and figure out just how she will lead. Thomas Levenson took a look and doesn't sound too impressed:

I just want to remind folks that her creationism and her global warming denialism are not just isolated oddball beliefs.  They are windows into the qualities of her mind, how she thinks and reasons.

And in the shortest form, what it tells me is that she is not someone who eagerly confronts harder truths.  It is certainly possible to have deep faith and understand the overwhelming explanatory (and useful) power of modern evolutionary biology and all its related fields.  But doing so requires hard thinking, and a willingness to sacrifice the simple comfort of Biblical literalism.  Simply saying saying that a creator did it is not the answer.

. . .

That is:  lots in the blogosphere and the mainstream media have questioned Palin as a candidate because her experience does not make her a plausible President on day one.  But on day two of the Palin era, what scares me much more is not the fact that she hasn’t done very much, nor even that she doesn’t know very much, but that the handful of data on the record that gives insight to her thinking about science tells us that her capacity for judgment is poor.

Which is, of course, exactly the same argument the Democratic National Convention made against her much more experienced, fully formally qualified running mate, John McCain.  McCain/Palin:  the Tooth Fairy ticket.