Paul Mulshine: Palin doesn't pass laugh test

The Star-Ledger's Paul Mulshine penned the following piece BEFORE Sarah Palin's electrifying speech at the GOP Convention, but he still has questions.

Sarah Palin doesn't pass the laugh test

Posted by Paul Mulshine September 04, 2008 2:52AM

H�ow long before John McCain gives the speech where he says he's 1000 percent behind Sarah Palin?

I allude, of course, to George McGovern's famous quote about his first vice presidential choice, Tom Eagleton, back in 1972. That assurance was followed by a decision to dump Eagleton after reports surfaced that he had been treated for depression with electroshock therapy.

This Palin nomination is shaping up to be the worst vice presidential pick since¤'72. I gather that there is still great hope for Palin inside the hall where the convention is being held. But I'm not inside that hall. The modern political convention is a TV show, and it is best watched on TV, which is what I'm doing.

As TV shows go, the first episode of the Sarah Palin series was great. We were introduced to the characters, and we were intrigued. There was mom, the former beauty queen who became a governor. There was the hubby, a commercial fisherman, oil worker and snowmobile racer. There were the kids, all of whom had great TV names like Willow, Piper, Bristol, Track and Trig and all of whom were presumably being raised with the best small-town values.

The second episode was a shocker, though. That's where the baby-daddy was introduced. The term "baby-daddy" has come into the language as a term that describes a father who is not married to a mother. And it turned out that 17-year-old Bristol from the Ozzie-and-Harriet family had been impregnated by a guy straight out of MTV. And as such characters do, 18-year-old Levi Johnston had a MySpace page on which he said all sorts of embarrassing things about himself, including a profanity-laced tirade that ended with the news that he was in a relationship, but "I DON'T WANT KIDS."

Never has a sitcom gone south so fast. Palin had gone from role model to laughingstock in one show. Jay Leno, David Letterman and all the late-night talk-show hosts got into the act.

This is not the sort of thing a candidate recovers from. A candidate can withstand endless attacks from the Washington Post and the New York Times, but you don't go from Letterman's Top Ten List to the top of American politics. Once she's cast as the ditzy ex-beauty queen who failed to notice her daughter was dating a thug, Palin is not going to be able to reinvent herself as the reformer who's ready to take over the presidency.

And the tough tests have yet to begin. As far as anyone can determine, Palin seems to have no discernible views on foreign policy. Back in February, she was quoted as saying of Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning candidate for the GOP nomination, "He's a good guy." But Paul's foreign policy views are the opposite of McCain's. Paul is a non-interventionist. McCain wants to intervene everywhere.

The Paul view is much closer to the traditional Republican view of foreign affairs that George W. Bush appealed to back in 2000. But Bush then did a 180 and committed the federal government to "ending tyranny on Earth." That's a nice thought, but at the time he uttered it, Palin's only political experience was as the mayor of the small Anchorage suburb of Wasilla. That's hardly an apt training ground for sorting out South Ossetia.

The irony here is that Palin is a perfect candidate for running the sort of small-government America that Republicans used to believe in. But she'd have to be the second coming of Joan of Arc to handle the messianic mission McCain seems to envision. She certainly has the skills to handle scripted appearances such as the Friday event and her speech last night (which occurred after this column went to press.) But her handlers must be dreading the prospect of Palin at press conferences. Any gaffe will go straight to the midnight monologues.

Meanwhile, McCain passed over a passel of politicians with extensive experience in that regard. Mitt Romney may be a bit boring, but he was guaranteed not to upstage McCain.

The Palin pick looks like yet another Beltway blunder for McCain. The senator has spent so much of his life in D.C. that he is left flailing about when dealing with the real America. There were reports that his first choice for the veep spot was Joe Lieberman, perhaps the sole candidate who would have been worse than Palin.

I could be wrong, though. Perhaps Palin will turn out to be absolutely brilliant once she gets out there and campaigns. Perhaps this series will have a happy ending.

But if I were McCain, I'd pick up the remote and change the channel.

UPDATE: I wrote this column before the speech because of an early deadline. The speech itself went pretty well, as I noted in my prior blog post, so perhaps I was a bit pessimistic about her prospects. Of course, we've still got the baby daddy in the headlines and lots of other laugh lines out there, so that will keep us amused.

Also, there's the prospect of how well Palin will do when she's out there fielding questions. There's about three newspapers in Alaska, so she'll have to get up to speed pretty quick to handle the media mess that she will be entering.

One thing I really liked from both her speech and the other presentations last night was the emphasis on the "explore-all-options" approach to energy. They could really kill the Democrats on this, since the Democrats oppose not only drilling but also the vast expansion of nuclear we need.

But again Palin is opposed here to her own presidential candidate, McCain. He opposes drilling in the Arctic National Widlife Refuge, a nutty stand that he will have th change.

This analysis piece by Adam Nagourney gives a good synopsis of what the future will look like for her.

Read the original article HERE.

Vetting: Palin the life of her party - Maureen Dowd

The New York Times' Maureen Dowd takes a look at the only candidate in the national races who knows how to field dress a moose.

New York Times, September 3, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist
Life of Her Party

By MAUREEN DOWD

ST. PAUL

For many years, reality was out of vogue with Republicans. They ignored the reality of Iraq and Katrina, of Pakistan and Osama bin Laden.

When confronted with their colossal carelessness around the globe and here at home, their mantra was, as Rummy put it, “Stuff happens.”

Now reality, in all its messy, crazy, funky glory, has flooded the party, in the comely, crackling form of Sarah Palin.

Unable to stop the onslaught of wild soap opera storylines erupting from the Palin family and the Alaska wilderness, McCain campaign adviser Steve Schmidt offered caterwauling reporters a new mantra: “Life happens.”

Indeed, it does. Only four days into her reign as John McCain’s “soul mate,” or “Trophy Vice,” as some bloggers are calling her, on the ticket known as “Maverick Squared,” Palin, the governor of Alaska, has already accrued two gates (Troopergate and Broken-watergate), a lawyer (for Troopergate), a future son-in-law named Levi (a high school ice hockey player, described by New York magazine as “sex on skates”), and a National Enquirer headline about the “Teen Prego Crisis” with 17-year-old daughter Bristol.

It seems like a long time since Vice President Dan Quayle denounced Murphy Brown for having a baby out of wedlock, bemoaning a “poverty of values.” It also seems like a long time — and another McCain ago — that Republicans supporting W. smeared the old John McCain by spreading rumors that he had fathered an illegitimate black child.

This week, the anti-abortion forces celebrated the news of Bristol’s pregnancy, using it as further proof that their beloved Governor Palin — who will no more support sex education than polar bears — was committed to the cause.

Since John McCain played craps first and sent the vetters to Alaska afterward, Republicans have been defending Governor Palin by saying that, while she has no foreign policy experience — except, as Cindy McCain pointed out, that “Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia” — she has a lot of domestic policy experience as a supercharged P.T.A. and hockey mom.

As more and more titillating details spill out about the Palins, Republicans riposte by simply arguing that things like Todd’s old D.U.I. arrest or Sarah’s messy family vengeance story will just let them relate better to average Americans — unlike the lofty Obamas.

“If this doesn’t resonate with every woman in America, I’ll eat my hat,” Bill Noll, an Alaska delegate whose daughter got pregnant at a young age and kept the baby, told The Times’s Ashley Parker.

Even as they push Sarah Barracuda as the glamorous but tough hunting and fishing mom who can juggle it all — she’s the only nominee, as Fred Thompson bragged in his convention speech, “who knows how to properly field dress a moose” — they rant at reporters who wonder how she will juggle it all and question some of her judgments.

At a Washington, Pa., rally on Saturday, as her two other daughters stood with her, Ms. Palin left Bristol baby-sitting Trig, who has Down syndrome. “Then we have our daughter Bristol,” the new conservative Republican star said. “She’s on the bus with the newborn. ... It’s his naptime, so he is with his big sister on the bus. But we thank them for being here.”

And this while Bristol was still absorbing the shocking news that she was about to turn into tabloid roadkill — and oh, yeah, she’s getting married sooner rather than later.

When you make a gimmicky pick of an unknown, without proper vetting, there’s bound to be a sticky press conference sooner or later. I watched it happen with Ferraro and Quayle, and I watched Mondale and Poppy Bush curdle with embarrassment but plow through.

The political unknowns, of course, want that tantalizing brass ring, so they’re not always completely forthcoming about their skeletons, if they’re lucky enough to be ineptly vetted. This is ironic, since the nominee who gets blindsided with these crises — Did McCain really know that this Palin reality show was about to pop and swallow his convention — is presenting them to voters as the most trustworthy people to inherit the nuclear codes.

Because Ferraro grabbed at the chance, without revealing to Mondale’s incompetent vetting team how damaging some of her husband’s financial imbroglios could be, she went from being a female icon to part of the reason it’s taken a quarter-century for another party to take a chance on a woman.

When McCain gets in trouble, he pulls out the P.O.W. card. Now Republicans are pulling out the sexist card.

Hillary cried sexism to cover up her incompetent management of her campaign, and now Republicans have picked up that trick. But when you use sexism as an across-the-board shield for any legitimate question, you only hurt women. And that’s just another splash of reality.

Read the original HERE.

Vetting: Poor job - Steven Chapman

Chicago Tribune columnist [libertarian] Steven Chapman thinks Palin was poorly vetted.

Originally posted: September 2, 2008 9:51 AM

The poor vetting of Palin

If you're buying a house, you get it professionally inspected before you close. If you're buying a used car, you have a mechanic check it out first. And if you're considering someone to be second in line for the most powerful office on Earth, you vet her thoroughly before you make a decision. Unless you're John McCain.

The alarming news about Sarah Palin is not that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. It's that McCain and his aides didn't do everything they could to know everything they needed to know about Palin before picking her.

Did they know about the pregnancy beforehand? That's not clear. The New York Times reports today that they're not saying.

It also quotes some prominent Alaska politicians saying they never got a call from McCain's people about anything else, either.

"I called 30 to 40 people, political leaders, business leaders, community leaders," said Rep. Gail Phillips, a Republican. "Not one of them had heard." The Democratic state senator who is directing the ethics investigation of Gov. Palin--and who may know some things worth knowing--also went untapped.

Of course doing an extensive job of vetting her would have assured the leaking of her name, spoiling the big surprise. But when it comes to the vice presidency, the last thing we need is surprises. And something tells me we haven't gotten the last of the surprises from Palin.

Read the original post and comments HERE.