Sarah Palin for President

Posted by Andrew Tobolowsky on 10.05.2008

America's crush on Joe Six Pack

I am well aware that the current upswell of Palin for president 2012 is part of some kind of reality television show I don't know that I'm participating in, designed to raise my blood pressure from "marginally unsafe" to somewhere around "your blood has actually turned solid". And that's fair.

Nevertheless.

The viability of Sarah Palin as a person worthy to be president requires of anyone two enormous leaps of faith. The first is that her pretty much unprecedented public incompetence can NOT be blamed on her, but entirely on John McCain for "forcing her not to be herself." From there, you still have to believe pretty firmly that that so far unrevealed "herself", with absolutely no evidence to support the assumption, is worth having any where near that kind of power.

Basically, you have to WANT to believe either of those things pretty hard to even enter their orbit. And you have to believe, too, that John McCain had no good reason whatsoever to put a muzzle on her. So I asked myself. Why do you want to believe? The answer's easy of course.

The Joe Six Pack paradox.

There can be no question that America has a major league crush on candidates that seem like "people like us".

Like the girl who only digs bad guys, America has a serious problem. We know it's bad for us, we just can't help it. Don't think it's escaped my attention that the only successful Democratic presidential candidate of the last twenty seven years is a guy whose nickname is "Bubba". But only the uber-talented, if slimy, Bill Clinton, who was actually a Rhodes Scholar one of THE most prestigious awards a graduating college student can receive, can have his cake and eat it too.

The real paradigm to negotiate from is George W. Bush. The idea then, as it is with Palin, is that his complete lack of understanding, or knowledge, in matters domestic and foreign, military and economic, his complete lack of personal qualification for the job (I know! He was a governor too. I'm talking about him) was not actually a minus, but in fact an enormous boost to his campaign.

The idea being that he understood us, because we also thought you could solve every international problem by throwing bombs at it and every economic problem by slashing rich people's taxes. In fact, as much as I believe that John McCain's policies are pretty much the same as Bush's, personally, you want to look for somebody who can outBush there are few people in the world better suited than Palin. Also vaguely charismatic and completely clueless. She's perfect!

There are few dumber ideas in politics.

It's based on the idea that the reason Washington isn't meeting our needs is because the politicians we have don't care about us, which is something "someone like us" will do. So far, so good. But it requires, like believing in Palin's competence, an additional leap to the idea that ANYTHING Washington is bad so the only thing to put IN Washington must be something else.

That's a ludicrous idea. If you think the system is at fault, create a new system. But if you want to keep the system, you still had better find somebody who's GOOD at it, dang it.

If I dislike the way my (still theoretical—so far as I know) kid's bus driver is driving the bus, I'm not going to assume that it is bus driving at fault and then look for somebody who does not know how to drive, because I do not want all of those children to die.

I'm not saying she's a bad person. I am sure if she and I had a conversation and managed to avoid abortion or foreign policy, which is what I typically do any way, we would get along just fine. She's good at at least seeming to care.

Liking a candidate personally is not a good reason to support them unless they also have good policies. In fact, the first thing you should look for is good policies. Because policies are what they will DO. This is ass backwards, America.

Sarah Palin has no policies. She has articulated none. Those few policy matters that have escaped her mouth, around all of the vapid slogans, have shown only that she is willing to try to cover her ass on things she hasn't even been challenged on yet, and that she's so much of a foreign policy hawk ("I wouldn't blink."
"We can't second guess Israel on ANYTHING it might do." "We're waving the white flag of surrender!") she may even make George Bush look like a dove before it's all said and done.

Now, I assume that a large part of McCain's dip in the polls has to do with Palin's more thorough unmasking, so I am not MUCH worried about this. But I am disheartened that after Bush we would even flirt with the idea.
So that's what I think about the phenomenon. I'm just one man.

There's a hospital by my house called Medical City, a pretty reputable place. Big billboard out front that says this: Expertise + Caring = Medical City. I always think about that when I think about Sarah Palin.

How anyone could vote for Sarah Palin for ANYTHING, after the disaster that was George Bush, is rooted in this: we have come to distrust expertise. It's betrayed us, let us down. Now we assume we can compensate by leaving it, and finding "caring" alone.

But I am certain that you can see that having a family member who is not also a surgeon performing your open heart surgery is not the best policy for your continued existence.

Especially one who has so cruelly and persistently deprived "ing" words of their god-given "G"s.