The Palin Pick

It finally hit me like a ton of bricks over the weekend. I was so mystified as to why the McCain camp branded Palin as a “hockey mom” right out of the gates instead of touting her political experience and readiness for the job at hand. It made no sense to me, I thought. It just opened the doors to calling all of our attention to her choices as a mom, instead of her experience and resume and qualifications to be the Vice President.

How naive I was. I fell for this masterful trickery hook, line and sinker. At least I wasn’t alone.

Why, it was DELIBERATE – my mind realized over the hot sunny afternoon visit to the park on Saturday. Those brilliant aholes, running his campaign, I thought. How ingenious to brand her as a mom, so that like lemmings, we would all jump on the train of trashing her and reopening the mommy wars, and deflect the attention off the substance: she is NOT qualified to be vice president.

So from this point forward, here on KT, I will refocus on the substance when discussing the McCain-Palin pick. The substance is what the election should be about and the substance is about where this team stands on issues in front of our country. Not where she was when her water broke. Trust me, this is all going to be very difficult for me to do. It’s going to take a lot of discipline.

I would like to add, however, that several male and republican friends have separately questioned my deep dislike for Palin and inquired if I would feel this way if she were a democratic, pro-choice woman. I would like to remind them that we actually had a democratic, pro-choice woman on the ticket – the presidential one – if memory serves. And as any avid fan of KT knows, I did not support Hillary. I re soundly support a woman holding the highest or second highest office in the land but at the end of the day, I support her when she is the right person for the job. There is no question that Hillary was and is vastly more qualified for such position than nobody-Palin but I still didn’t believe she was the right person for the job. So again, it is totally and completely obnoxious to assume that a woman will support a female candidate just because she is a woman. Women do, in fact, pay attention to more than just shared genitals and think through issues of importance and vote for the candidate that stands up for their issues – though McCain seems to think otherwise. I have to believe that women, in the end, like men, vote for the most qualified team, not on chromosomes.

And with that, I will begin paying more acute attention to where Palin stands on issues and what her experience and track record indicates to supports what she actually brings to the table. Of course, her being sequestered from speaking to the media, makes this a little difficult, but we do know that she is anti-abortion even in circumstances of rape and incest, she supports abstinence-only education,  and she has less than two years experience in a state with a population the size of Baltimore, MD. According to the Washington Post, regardless of what she claims on the campaign trail, she did, in fact, support the “Bridge to Nowhere” until Congress botched that one after wasting $200 million and she received her first passport in 2007, only to travel to Canada and then to Afghanistan to visit the Alaska National Guard Troops. When asked her views on Iraq, she has indicated that she hadn’t thought much about the war there.

More to come as we learn more about her.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/09/AR2008090903727.html