Yeah, I know I’m falling behind the curve, but here’s the video of Sarah Palin — the real one — on SNL over the weekend.
Enjoy.
As a bonus, here’s her "Weekend Update" appearance from later in the show:
No, this isn’t going to satisfy Randy, mainly because I don’t think it’s as bad as he thinks it is. But I was just looking back at some of my recent work, and happened to run across this, which I wrote minutes after McCain announced he’d chosen Sarah Palin. It was the very end of my column of Aug. 31, in which I had complained mightily about Hillary Clinton’s use of the "fight" metaphor:
Just moments ago as I write this, as he announced he’d chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate, Sen. McCain promised the GOP crowd that he’d “fight for you.”
Lord help us.
Note that this was before America fell even in love with Sarah, which was in turn before it fell OUT of love with her.
As I said, that’s not going to be enough for Randy, but as far as criticizing the tone of the McCain-Palin ticket, I was out there first, baby!
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
One day in late summer 1970, I was playing tennis on the courts next to the Officer’s Club at Pearl Harbor. I was 16. My opponent, a long-haired boy whose name I now forget, was younger. He was a visitor from the mainland, the little brother of the wife of a junior officer on my Dad’s ship.
Suddenly, a gnarly bantam rooster of a man rushed onto our court through one of the gates, followed by an entourage of followers who could only be senior naval officers, despite the fact that all were in white shorts, conspicuously devoid of insignia.
Without pausing in his stride, the first man commanded, “You boys get out of here! I’ve got this court.” Taken aback, we nevertheless immediately moved to obey. I knew active-duty officers had precedence over dependents on Navy courts, and although this man looked old for active duty — at 59, he seemed ancient — we could not doubt his authority. As we moved to collect our gear, he noticed my father — at that time the executive officer of the USS Kawishiwi — sitting on the bench where he had been watching us play. The man went immediately to Dad and spoke to him briefly, then came quickly over to us boys. I was unprepared for what came next — an apology.
Introducing himself, he explained that he was extremely busy, that he reserved the court for this time and that it was the only recreation he had, so he had been in a hurry to get to it, which explained but did not excuse his brusqueness, and he hoped we would understand.
No problem, admiral, I said. Don’t mind us. We’re moving. Enjoy your game.
The man was John S. McCain Jr. Had he been in uniform, he would have worn four stars — the same rank his father had attained in World War II. He was CINCPAC — the Commander In Chief Pacific Command — a title that to a Navy brat had the same ring as the words “the king” would have had to someone in Medieval Europe. Except that no king of old ever had authority over as much military power. He commanded all U.S. forces in and around the Pacific and Indian Oceans, from the U.S. west coast to the Persian Gulf. The American forces fighting the war in Vietnam were only a portion of his responsibility.
Among the hundreds of thousands of men under his command was a lieutenant commander being held as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. The naval aviator was nearing his third anniversary in captivity, most of that time in solitary confinement in a tiny, stifling cell, his monotony relieved only by brutal interrogations. His body, and at one point even his spirit, broken, he would be there for another two-and-a-half years.
I didn’t know any of that at the time. Only years after Sen. John McCain had risen to national prominence did I connect him to the admiral I’d met that day. But even among the many who knew about the connection, few ever heard CINCPAC speak of it. Only those closest to him knew about the ritual with which he would mark each Christmas: Every year, he would go to Vietnam and visit troops stationed closest to the DMZ. At some point he would go off by himself to the edge of the base and stare silently northward, in the direction of his son.
Last week, you read (I hope) a column headlined “Barack Like Me,” in which I explained my sense of identification with elements of Barack Obama’s personal journey of self-definition. If you missed it, I urge you to go to my blog (the address is at the end of this piece) and read it. This column is a companion to it. I wrote the earlier piece after reading Sen. Obama’s autobiography about his youth.
This past week, I read Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir, by John McCain and Mark Salter. It’s the very different story of a young man who was far less confused about who he was or where he came from. And as much as I felt I understood “Barry” Obama, my commonality with Navy brat McCain is much more direct, and certainly simpler.
A few months ago, I wrote another column headlined, “Give me that old-time conservatism,” in which I wrote of the values I had learned growing up in a Navy family, “the old-fashioned ones: Traditional moral values. Respect for others. Good stewardship. Plain speaking. And finally, the concept that no passing fancy, no merely political idea, is worth as much as Duty, Honor and Country.” It was written shortly after Sen. McCain won the S.C. primary, at a time when “conservatives” in his party were doing all they could to stop him.
His autobiography is a 349-page exploration of those values.
His grandfather was a hard-driving, smoking, drinking, gambling old salt who cried when he read casualty reports. He had less regard for his own welfare, once telling his wife he would not spend a penny on doctors, preferring to lavish all his money “on riotous living.” He commanded the fast carriers of Task Force 38 through one epic battle after another across the Pacific, stood in the front row at the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri, then flew home that day. He dropped dead during the party his wife threw to welcome him home.
His father was a cigar-chomping submarine commander in the same war, who over the next 25 years worked ceaselessly to live up to his father’s example. As CINCPAC, he unsuccessfully pressed his civilian superiors to let him pursue victory in Vietnam. The B-52 attacks on Hanoi (wildly cheered by his son and fellow prisoners as the bombs fell around them) and mining of Haiphong harbor helped focus the North Vietnamese on an eventual peace agreement in Paris. But Admiral McCain didn’t even get to see the war to that unsatisfactory conclusion before being relieved as CINCPAC. He retired, and lived another nine years, but was never a well man after that. His son believes that he, “like his father before him, sacrificed his life” to the strains of wartime command.
On the fringes of this presidential campaign, one reads silly e-mails and blogs accusing Barack Obama of being less than American because of the African, Muslim part of his ancestry. Some Democrats weakly respond that John McCain isn’t an American, either, having been born in the Canal Zone in Panama. I have to smile at that, because in my life’s experience, the Zone looms as the very essence of America. During the two-and-a-half years I lived in South America in the 1960s, Panama was the place we occasionally visited to get our booster shot of home, the Land of the Big PX, a place to revel in the miracles of television and drinking water straight from the tap without fear.
Ironically, Panama means far less to John McCain, since his family left there when he was three months old. It was the start of a routine that I know very well:
As soon as I had begun to settle into a school, my father would be reassigned, and I would find myself again a stranger in new surroundings forced to establish myself quickly in another social order.
If it sounds like I’m complaining, I’m not. It fostered in McCain and me and thousand
s like us an independence that’s hard to explain to those who never experienced it. I suspect it contributed greatly to the characteristics that his campaign inadequately, and monotonously, tries to describe with the word “maverick.”
But there was a constant in our lives. Growing up, I most often heard the United States Navy referred to as “the Service.” It both described what my father did and why he did it. It was the same for the McCains.
Barack Obama struggled for identity in his formative years largely because of the absence of his father. John McCain and I both experienced the absence of fathers: “We see much less of our fathers than do other children. Our fathers are often at sea, in peace and war.” But unlike Mr. Obama, we understood exactly who our fathers were and why they were gone:
You are taught to consider their absence not as a deprivation, but as an honor. By your father’s calling, you are born into an exclusive, noble tradition. Its standards require your father to dutifully serve a cause greater than his self-interest, and everyone around you… drafts you to the cause as well. Your father’s life is marked by brave and uncomplaining sacrifice. You are asked only to bear the inconveniences caused by his absence with a little of the same stoic acceptance.
But as much as our childhoods were alike, John McCain the man is very different. It’s one thing to know “the Service” as a dependent. It’s far different to serve. As I type that, it sounds terribly trite. Yes, we all know John McCain is a war hero, yadda-yadda, right? But I don’t care how much of a cliche it’s become, it’s true. And it sets him apart.
I can’t write a “McCain Like Me” column because from an early age, he was different. He always knew he would follow his father and grandfather to the Naval Academy. I knew nothing of the kind, and not just because my father graduated from Presbyterian College. There was a brief time in my late 20s when I considered giving up journalism for the Navy; I even took a written test for prospective officer candidates, and did well on it. But my father pointed out to me what I had always known: My chronic asthma would keep me out. So I dropped the idea.
John McCain, by contrast, rebelled against inevitability, raising hell and breaking rules all the way through his four years at Annapolis, repeatedly stepping to the brink of expulsion, and graduating fifth from the bottom of his class. Even reading about the hazing he experienced as a plebe, when upperclassmen did everything they could think of to break him and cause him to “bilge out” — nothing, compared to what he would suffer as a POW — I thought, Did I ever experience such treatment? Was I ever tested to that extent? And the answer was “no.” Nor, despite all his doubts about himself, his own period of rebellion or his sense of alienation, did Barack Obama have such a formative experience. If so, he doesn’t tell about it.
The gulf between John McCain and me would exist if he had never been captured. His heroism during those five unimaginable years — a time when he finally learned the full importance of being part of something larger than himself — only turns the gulf into an ocean.
I say that not to criticize Sen. Obama, or myself. But it’s a fact. We never knew anything like it. Men like John McCain and my friend Jack Van Loan — his fellow prisoner at the Hanoi Hilton — will forever be imbued with an aura that not even The One can claim. Some dismiss the McCain slogan “Country First” as worn-out rhetoric. But I know that for him, perhaps more than for any candidate I’ve ever known, it simply describes who he is and how he’s lived his life.
That almost certainly is not enough to help him win the election. As I watch him on the verge of failure, that saddens me. He’s had three decades to come to terms with the fact that the war in which he gave so much caused so many of his fellow Americans to lose their faith in their country, and he’s dealt with it admirably.
Now this. As I watch him drift further from his goal, I can say “Barack Like Me,” but McCain — he’s on a different plane, and always has been. And increasingly, he seems to be there alone.
Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/
Phillip reminds me of something that I heard about yesterday, and meant to go read and share with y’all. In the middle of one of the worst Fridays I’ve had in a while — my efforts to write the long piece about McCain (the companion to the Obama one last week) were constantly interrupted by minor problems that nevertheless had to be dealt with. One thing about the Obama piece last week that frustrates me is that I thought it was good, and I think I could produce a lot more work like that if I had the time, if I weren’t constantly having to deal with the minutiae of publishing that I no longer have the staff to do. But this is the way things are.
Anyway, at a particularly bad moment in the day, Robert stuck his head in to say "The Chicago Tribune has endorsed Obama," and I said "unh-huh," and he said "it’s the first time they’ve endorsed a Democrat," and I said, "yeah OK thanks."
Anyway, by the time I got away a little after 9 p.m. I had forgotten it, and so I thank Phillip for reminding me.
Here’s the link to the Tribune‘s endorsement. It’s pretty good. It’s got strong points and weak ones. It’s strongest point is that it gives its word, as an editorial board I trust, that we don’t have to worry about Obama, untested as he may be:
Many Americans say they’re uneasy about Obama. He’s pretty new to them.
We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.
That might not be persuasive to a lot of people, but it carries weight with me.
Its weakest point is that it keeps going on about the "history in the making," etc., what with "the obstacles that he faced as an unprivileged black man in the U.S." That latter bit of quote is one I could deconstruct all day, but I gave you some idea what I thought about it last week. I don’t think of him a "black man," and it’s a bit tough for a graduate of public Radford High to see a graduate of Punahou as "underprivileged" (we won’t even get into Columbia and Harvard).
Beyond that, I’ve always held a dim view of identity politics. I think choosing this ticket because a "black man" is on it, or the other ticket because a woman is on it, would be irresponsible.
Speaking of that, the Trib criticizes the Palin choice in the strongest terms, and I gather that played a large role in the paper’s decision. I think it’s going to be the deciding factor for a lot of people. Personally, I think it’s the biggest mistake McCain has made since he failed to "jink" when he knew a SAM was locked onto him over Hanoi.
On the whole, though, while I think it’s a good endorsement, I was disappointed that it didn’t help me more with the decision we’ll have to make next week. I’d feel good about endorsing either McCain or Obama. What I’d have a problem with is NOT endorsing the other one. This endorsement was neither so strong that it made me feel OK about not endorsing McCain, nor so weak that it made me feel OK about not endorsing Obama. Ah, well.
And this time, I’ll try to remember to make sure it posts on the blog before Monday.
This piece will have several things in common with the "Barack Like Me" column:
Beyond that, I’m afraid I don’t think this column is quite as good as the first one. With McCain, the "like me" thing breaks down at a certain point, which is ironic because of the greater superficial similarities in our backgrounds. But while we’re both Navy brats, that’s all I was — a dependent. I never served, much less serving heroically, and that creates a crimp in the whole identification thing.
But I think it still rises above my usual columns in what it offers. I was just very satisfied with the way I was able to tie a lot of disparate observations within a single defensible theme in the Obama piece; and that didn’t work quite as well with this one. Maybe it’s just that I’m really tired (after reading late into the night the last two weeks) and struggled with the writing this time. Or maybe it’s just as I will say in the column: the thesis broke down.
By the way, I’ve gotten a lot of kind comments about the "Barack" piece — and some not so kind. But they all had something in common — all (or most, now that I think back) seemed to assume I was choosing sides in the election, and meant to laud Obama accordingly. That misses the point. So I sent variations on this message to several people who wrote to me about it in the past week:
Thank you so much; you’re very kind.
On Sunday, please watch for my companion piece about McCain.
A caveat: Neither of these columns should be seen as an endorsement, or even an attempt to assess the suitability of either man for the presidency. If you go back and read more closely, you’ll see they don’t even get into that.
What I was trying to do is just raise some thoughts that you might not have seen elsewhere about the formative experiences of both men.
I just say all that because some seemed to take my Obama piece as pro-Obama (some were happy about that; some angry), but that’s not what it was meant to be. The potential exists for some readers to assume the same about the upcoming McCain piece.
We WILL be endorsing, but haven’t yet made the decision whether it will be McCain or Obama. We’ll be deciding that next week.
What you need to remember as you read is that I like BOTH of these guys a lot; our endorsements of them in January were quite enthusiastic. The general election endorsement will be made all the tougher because of that. I know some of you think you know how we’re going to endorse, and you have a 50-50 chance of being right. But you’re wrong if you think the decision is already made. And as the days have gone by, the decision has loomed tougher and tougher. I’m dreading the discussion next week, and still trying to decide how to lead it. I will really be missing Mike Fitts, because as I described in this column and this one, he did a masterful job of helping walk us through these decisions.
You may have gathered from this post that poking around into the doings of ACORN isn’t exactly a high priority of mine. Anyone who looked at what I have to do over the next few weeks would certainly understand that, regardless of his point of view. But it extends beyond that.
The ACORN stuff is just the kind of spin-cycle junk that does not interest me. Does that mean I don’t think voter fraud is a serious matter. No, of course not. It’s just that I don’t see it as that big a factor. Nor do I agree with this writer, who holds the precise opposite point of view of those who are worked up over ACORN:
By George Curry
The Philadelphia Inquirer
There have been some blatant and indefensible voter-registration violations committed by people acting on behalf of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). But the greater threat to preserving the integrity of the ballot box on Nov. 4 is voter suppression.
You see, liberal Democrats and their ideological fellow-travelers get extremely indignant over the idea that somewhere there’s somebody who’s legally (or at least, in their view, morally) entitled to vote and yet will not be allowed to. Conservative Republicans and their fellow-travelers get just as indignant over the idea that somewhere there’s somebody voting who either legally or morally should not be.
And you know what I think? I think humans, and the systems they devise, are imperfect. I think that in any national election, there are going to be a certain number of people (or imaginary people) voting who shouldn’t, and a certain number who are entitled who won’t be allowed to. But I think that with the two groups of people who are worked up about those two problems being all over it, and with a system that tries in good faith to avoid either problem, those two categories will be kept to a minimum, ohne mich. And overall, the competing effects will be something close to a wash.
You want something to worry about? Consider this: Neither problem will involve nearly as many people as the number who are entitled to vote who won’t bother, or the number who WILL vote who are clueless about who or what they’re voting for. It’s an imperfect world, and therefore a fundamentally flawed system for choosing our leaders. It’s just the best we’ve been able to devise so far.
Back to ACORN — yes, I understand that some people think the ACORN scandals provide a window into the character of one of the men running for president. I just don’t find that narrative all that persuasive. I find the Ayers and Wright connections much more relevant, and I don’t even consider those to be central — just relevant, something to take into consideration.
Anyway, that’s my view on the matter. What’s yours?
Among my 588 unread e-mails I went through today were two or three demanding that I go find out, and report back to the writers, whether ACORN had been doing nefarious things here in South Carolina. I made a mental note to — right after reading the 588 messages, going back and reading the 100 or so that came in while I was reading those, selecting op-ed copy for tomorrow, moving the copy for Friday’s page, finishing reading McCain’s autobiography, reading proofs, writing my Sunday column that I plan to be a companion piece to my tome of last Sunday, and emptying the messages on my phone that have overloaded my e-mail — run right out and interrogate each of the 4 million people in South Carolina to find out whether ACORN was active here.
But then I thought: Why not ask folks on the blog if THEY’VE heard about any ACORN doings in S.C.? If they had, I could pass the tip on to our newsroom, which might, just might have what I will never have — time to look into it.
But before I got caught up enough to do even that, I saw that ever-dependable Cindi had noticed that another paper had already checked, and here’s what they found:
Controversial activist group has made no waves in S.C.
ACORN pulled out 2 years ago after SLED started probeBy Robert Behre (Contact)
The Post and Courier
Thursday, October 16, 2008
A national activist organization making headlines for its controversial voter registration drives once had a presence in South Carolina but pulled up stakes after the State Law Enforcement Division opened an investigation into its registration efforts in the Columbia area two years ago.
That investigation is ongoing, a SLED official said, declining further comment.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known commonly as ACORN, operated from an office on Hampton Street in downtown Columbia, but that office has closed….
Anybody hear anything to the contrary? If not, I’m going back to reading that book. I got my proofs turned in a few minutes ago. I’ll probably do what I’ve done all week (and last week, on the Obama book) — stay at my desk past dark, forcing myself to read X number of pages, then going home for dinner, then reading until midnight, or until I can’t keep my eyes open any more. I seldom go to this much trouble for one column, but I thought it paid off in a fairly decent, if offbeat, column Sunday. So I’m doing it again.
Well, it’s almost over, which means that, if God is merciful, I will never have to hear "Joe the Plumber" mentioned again in my lifetime.
"Joe" has now replaced "maverick" as the word I’ve heard way too many times. I suggest that Sen. Obama’s running mate change his first name. For the first time, I feel some small measure of gratitude that Sen. McCain did not choose my man ___ Lieberman for HIS ticket.
Yes, I exaggerate, but only a little.
So what did YOU think of the debate? I thought the same as I did about the first two — not likely to change many minds. And I find myself weary of them, and want no more. I’ll scream if I hear once more that Obama would fine you if you don’t have the right health plan, and McCain would tax your bennies. Face it, gents, neither of you would solve our health care problems. Only Dennis Kucinich had the right idea there.
McCain’s best moment? When he explained to Mr. Obama something that he has a lot of trouble getting into his head: that John McCain is not George W. Bush.
Obama’s best moment? When he listed the people he relies on for advice, as opposed to the abominable Bill Ayers.
But again: What did y’all think?
Speaking of stuff that was on today’s op-ed page, did you read the other piece, the one by the two profs — no, wait, just one of them was a prof (at Furman); the other might more accurately be termed a "writer" — about how that awful John McCain ought to "know better" than to criticize Barack Obama over his associations because of the way he, McCain, was treated in the 2000 GOP primary here? An excerpt:
Here we go again. Politicians falling in the polls are resorting to
character slurs and political smears. To the people of South Carolina
it’s deja vu — all over again.Last
week John McCain’s campaign launched a web advertisement about Barack
Obama’s ties to a “domestic terrorist.” Sarah Palin claimed that Obama
sees America “as being so imperfect … that he’s palling around with
terrorists who would target their own country” and repeatedly commented
on Obama’s “association” with “terrorists.”It is a chilling indictment. But false.
Such
sad irony. In the 2000 primaries, after John McCain defeated a heavily
favored George Bush by 19 percentage points in New Hampshire, the Texas
governor’s campaign was in trouble. If Bush lost the S.C. primary,
where his opponent was already popular, he had little chance of
stopping McCain. Something had to be done. Anything.
What did you think of the piece? Personally, I thought the premise was silly and way off-base. So why did I run it? Well, we run all sorts of views on the op-ed page, and I think a lot of them are silly and off-base. That’s all part of the public conversation. Specifically, I chose to leave this one on the page for two reasons:
Why did I think it silly and off-base? Oh come ON, people! Raising the subject of Bill Ayers — even in clumsy, demagogic language such as "palling around with terrorists" — is in NO WAY like making up a lie about John McCain’s adopted daughter that is specifically and particularly and reprehensibly designed to appeal to the worst racist instincts in the S.C. electorate. Say whatever else you want to say about it, but that’s an extreme stretch. It is ONLY logical if you mean that saying something that reflects poorly upon an opponent’s character is the same as any other instance of doing so. Which is silly.
The authors’ perception of moral equivalence seems to lie in the fact that they believe this, too is "false." But I missed the part where they, or anyone else, has demonstrated that. To the contrary, Obama has had dealings with Bill Ayers, and while the exact nature or extent of said relationship remains fuzzy, what little we know indicates that it was more friendly than, say, inimical. So what you’re left with is quibbling over the quantitative meaning of "palling around," and the generally incendiary, hamhanded style of the assertion by that silver-tongued wordsmith Sarah Palin, or the coarseness of crowds who eat that stuff up.
Or do you think that Bill Ayers is NOT an unrepentant terrorist? If so, I need to see the evidence. Because what I’ve seen argues to the contrary.
Tell you what. I’m going to stop being shy and tell you what I really think — I disagree both with Messrs. Manuto and O’Rourke AND with Krauthammer. I just told you why I disagree with the first two gentlemen. The part I disagree with Krauthammer over is the idea that McCain should have been hammering on this stuff all along. Personally, I wish he weren’t bringing it up NOW. It’s not going to accomplish anything positive — it just speaks to the great divide in our politics left over from Vietnam. That was a battle we didn’t think we were going to fight in this campaign.
And here’s where there is a kernel of a point in the O’Rourke-Manuto piece; they just spoiled it by grotesquely exaggerating it. And it’s this: this is not consistent with the style that has make McCain so popular with those of us who love to watch both sides in the culture wars get mad at him. There’s nothing WRONG with mentioning Ayers; it’s not a foul. But it’s not the style of play we go to McCain for.
There are better ways to say what the McCain campaign has been getting at with the Ayers stuff. For instance, it was stated fairly well in a piece in The Wall Street Journal last week (although the overall thrust of the piece, headlined "News Flash: The Media Back Obama" is in itself another tired cliche):
…Mr. Obama… is the leading exponent of the idea that our lost nation requires rehabilitation in the eyes of the world — and it is the most telling difference between him and Mr. McCain. When asked, in one of the earliest debates of the primary, his first priority should he become president, his answer was clear. He would go abroad immediately to make amends, and assure allies and others in the world America had alienated, that we were prepared to do all necessary to gain back their respect.
It is impossible to imagine those words coming from Mr. McCain. Mr. Obama has uttered them repeatedly one way or another and no wonder. They are in his bones, this impossible-to-conceal belief that we’ve lost face among the nations of the world — presumably our moral superiors. He is here to reform the fallen America and make us worthy again of respect. It is not in him, this thoughtful, civilized academic, to grasp the identification with country that Mr. McCain has in his bones — his knowledge that we are far from perfect, but not ready, never ready, to take up the vision of us advanced by our enemies. That identification, the understanding of its importance and of the dangers in its absence — is the magnet that has above all else drawn voters to Mr. McCain….
The thing is, it’s impossible to imagine a campaign event for John McCain hosted by Bill Ayers. McCain has done a great deal over the years to reach out to people who were opposed to the war in Vietnam, and even to his former captors — he has acted heroically to normalize relations with their country. But there’s no way he would have been associated with a guy who’s proud of HIS association with the bombings of the NYC police HQ, the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon.
Barack Obama HAS been associated with that guy, however fuzzy (and subject to debate) that connection may be. And that speaks to a difference in worldview. But I doubt we’ll ever have an intelligent discussion of that difference.
One of my regulars said on a previous post, and not for the first time:
But I’m sure the endorsement is ready to go…
Since I responded at length to that assertion, I’m turning it into a separate post, for the edification (or something) of all…
No, the endorsement is not "ready to go." I wish. That is, I wish it was done and behind me. In fact, I haven’t even set the meeting to discuss it. We have scrupulously avoided discussing it, but that will be at an end soon. Sometime in the next week to 10 days, we will sit down and do that. (On Monday, we had a brief discussion about HAVING the discussion, but even that was inconclusive.)
It promises to be a difficult decision, and however we end up, we’ll be somewhat divided by it — as we were in both 2000 and 2004, both in the primaries and the general. Endorsements by their very nature — you’re choosing one or the other, and there’s no room for compromise on that point, although there’s lots of room for compromise on the explanation — strain the consensus that we try to achieve on all issues. The presidential endorsement tends to do so more than usual. It’s why some newspapers don’t do presidential endorsements. Or rather, it’s related to why some newspapers say they don’t do presidential endorsements. Personally, I think they’re copping out and trying to rationalize it.
I had my break from that in January. It was wonderful. We were completely unanimous in our support for both McCain and Obama. But I knew then, as I know now, that IF we got our way and they won their respective nominations, our decision in the fall would be far more difficult. It will be.
I appreciate that y’all think you know me and my mind. The purpose of the blog is to help you do so, so it’s nice in a way that you feel comfortable extrapolating my decisions from what I’ve written in the past. But you ignore something very important: I’m the only person on the editorial board who blogs. And even the person you know through the blog has a very serious responsibility to lead a group of people you DON’T know as well through a very delicate decision-making process.
Hopefully, those of you who actually READ THE PAPER know Warren and Cindi better than you would know the board members at most newspapers. That’s the result of a deliberate policy that I instituted when I became editorial page editor in 1997 — we started writing fewer editorials (the unsigned pieces that speak for the full board) to give people time to write signed columns, so that you could get to know the people who participate in setting editorial policy. My blog is a continuation of that, taking the transparency thing to the nth power.
I don’t know how much management experience you have — "you" referring to those of you who believe our endorsement is set and everyone knows what it will be — but even if you’re the greatest manager in the world, it’s highly unlikely you’ve ever been in the situation that I deal with every day: Bringing a group of people with a variety of opinions and life experiences — very opinionated people — together in a consensus around controversial issues. Sometimes legislative leaders cry the blues to me about how hard it is to bring their members together around a piece of legislation over the course of a session, and I have little sympathy. I have to bring people together around definite positions, on deadline, every day. (Add to that the fact that it involves managing up as well as down, since the publisher is always a member of the board. The publisher stays out of most of our decisions, but he or she always participates to some degree in the presidential ones.) It’s not easy. And the presidential endorsement carries with it such baggage that it’s one of the toughest. And it’s a decision that is never gone. If y’all out there remember it (and you do), rest assured that we remember these internal struggles very vividly. And we’re very conscious of the tension going into the next such discussion.
As I mentioned before, I’m starting to read the McCain book that is the closest equivalent to the Obama book I was reading last week. And on the very first page, I ran across this. In fact, it’s the second paragraph in the preface:
I have spent much of my life choosing my own attitude, often carelessly, often for no better reason than to indulge a conceit. In those instances, my acts of self-determination were mistakes, some of which did no lasting harm, and serve now only to embarrass, and occasionally amuse, the old man who recalls them. Others I deeply regret.
One such indulgence of a conceit that he will regret is choosing Sarah Palin, because I believe that decision lost the election for him. It didn’t turn ME against him, but it did a lot of people.
I’ve struggled for words to explain the aspect of John McCain’s character that caused him, after his party rebelled over his preferred candidate (my man Joe) to choose Sarah Palin. I’ve used the term "fit of pique," but that didn’t describe it. In a recent column, I tried to explain it this way:
Second, as much as I admire and respect John McCain, and have for years, I was not enchanted by his choice. It was like, If I can’t have Joe Lieberman, I don’t care WHO it is; if this is what the base wants, they can have her. Which is not a good way to pick a potential future president.
But that didn’t quite state it either. But I think the above paragraph from his book did.
Choosing Joe Lieberman would have been an assertion of everything that is the best in John McCain. But when he couldn’t go with Joe (or decided he couldn’t, rightly or wrongly), he "chose an attitude" that was ironic, contrary, and spiteful toward his party. Or at least that was the way I interpreted it. He chose to say, "Is THIS what you want? Fine, take her."
Yes, it’s more complicated than that. There are things about Sarah Palin that John McCain liked — particularly the fact that she won election against her own party establishment. But there was always an unstated something that I felt MUST have been present for him to make such a decision.
You find me in a foul mood this morning. After all that work last week, and a couple of hours spent Saturday night dressing it up with links and so forth, someone thought to tell me at 10:30 Monday morning that my ginormous column didn’t post on Sunday.
So I’m pretty ticked about that. Normally, of course, I would not have made it through Sunday without checking, but I was busy living my life yesterday, and I was really too tired of the piece by that time to look at it again. It never, ever occurred to me that I still had it saved on "draft."
Well, it’s there now. And now that that’s behind me, I have another book to read this week, which I haven’t started yet. I’ll try to get that book report done this week for Sunday, but I’m not in a position to promise it.
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
One day when I was on the Radford High School track team in Hawaii, I was watching a race from the sidelines, which is where I spent my entire brief track career. A teammate was pulling away from the other schools’ runners. Two other teammates standing near me, both Hawaiians, got very excited.
“Look at that haole run!” one cried.
The other boy corrected him: “He’s not a haole.” A haole, you see, was someone who looked like me. The runner who was winning the race was of African descent.
The first speaker paused a second before happily shouting, “Look at that black Hawaiian run!” With that, his pedantic friend enthusiastically agreed.
I’ve recalled that scene many times in recent months, as Barack Obama won a hard-fought campaign for the Democratic nomination, and proceeded to the point that he is poised to become president of the United States, barring a turnaround in both the economy and the political competence of his opposition.
Whenever I hear people speak breathlessly of his becoming the first black president, I think no, that’s not quite right. I don’t think of him that way. The details I know about him and his life just don’t add up to the description of “black man,” in terms of what that means here on the mainland.
I’ve said that several times, and each time, someone will demand to know what I mean. I have two answers to that. The first is short and simple: He has no ancestors who were brought to America in chains as slaves. Not one. That separates him from the entire American narrative of race.
This very long, rather complicated column is my other answer. This is who I think Barack Obama is, to the extent that you force me to categorize him ethnically.
First, I don’t want to do that. I don’t like doing that with anybody, and I like doing it even less in this case. I can look at John McCain and agree with you that he’s a white guy — a fact to which I attach no importance, but an easy one to agree upon and then set aside. But the Barack Obama who drew my support and that of my colleagues in the South Carolina primary is a person who — at least in my mind — defies such simple categorization. I don’t think of him as a white man or a black man. I think of him as the man who inspired a transported, ecstatic crowd in Columbia, S.C., to chant “Race doesn’t matter!” on the magical night of his victory.
Hard-headed pragmatists will point out to me that this man I see as the post-racial ideal won with more than three-quarters of the black vote that day in January, and that many of those voters were very excited about voting for him as a black man. This is true. But it is also true that a month or two earlier, most of those same voters had been expected to support Hillary Clinton. And while part of it was that they thought that as a black man he had no chance, part of it was also rooted in the oft-repeated charge that Sen. Obama was not “black enough.” The first excuse vanished when he won in lily-white Iowa. The second was no longer mentioned, although it remains as accurate as ever, if you consider a certain amount of “blackness” as being necessary. Which I don’t.
The thing that has struck me over and over is that in some ways Sen. Obama has as much in common with me as with the average black American voter. Hence the headline of this column, obviously drawn from the iconic book about a white man who tried to experience life as a black man, Black Like Me. You might think me presumptuous. But presumptuousness is but one trait I believe I have in common with the candidate. Some might call it “audacity.”
Granted, the fact that both of us graduated from high school on the island of Oahu is a thin commonality, but it’s a telling one. It’s certainly more significant than the coincidence that I once lived in his grandparents’ hometown of Wichita. There are important differences in our Hawaiian narratives, of course. He went to Punahou, a posh private school; Radford was public. I only attended the 12th grade there; he grew up there.
That is, he grew up there when he wasn’t living for several years in Djakarta, Indonesia. I also lived in
the Third World as a child. In fact, I lived in Guayaquil, Ecuador, longer than anywhere else growing up. Young “Barry” and I both spent part of the 1960s thinking in a language other than English. Both of us lived a joyous outdoor, Huck Finn sort of existence in tropical, pre-television worlds (“one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy’s life,” he would later write), and just as happily returned to what he termed “the soft, forgiving bosom of America’s consumer culture.” We both had a period of adjustment in which our soccer-trained bodies struggled to “throw a football in a spiral.”
He lived with his (white) maternal grandparents while his mother was still in Indonesia and his father was far off in Kenya. I lived with my maternal grandparents (although with my mother and brother) while my Dad was in Vietnam.
We both ended our childhoods on an island where there were “too many races, with power among them too diffuse, to impose the mainland’s rigid caste system,” which produced what he called “the legend” of Hawaii “as the one true melting pot, an experiment in racial harmony.”
To me, it was more than a legend; it was reality. It was the first place where I saw significant numbers of interracial couples, and the only place where such unions excited little comment — within my hearing, at least.
But that’s where our stories diverge. It’s where Barack Obama began a quest to define himself, both ethnically and personally, as the son of his absent and little-known African father. He decided something I never felt compelled to decide — “that I needed a race.” Because of his father, and because of his own very limited experience with people around him calling attention to his unique appearance and strange name, he began a complex quest: “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America.”
That quote, and the preceding ones, are from his book about that quest, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. That memoir forced me to remember things that run against the perfection of my Hawaiian memories. As I read of his few personal encounters with racism in those years, from the real (a coach using the “n” word) to the merely suspected (why, he wondered, did a woman in the supermarket ask whether he played basketball?), I’m reminded of a girl I knew at Radford.
Her father was black, and her mother was white, which had never meant anything to me. But one day one of my best buddies told me of a terrible dilemma: He wanted to date this girl, and her mother insisted that any boy who took out her daughter had to first introduce her to his parents. This horrified both my friend and me, but for different reasons. I was pathologically shy, and had few dates in high school. If I’d had to introduce those girls first to my parents, I’d have had no dates at all — it would have raised the emotional stakes out of my range. I kept my two worlds — the one in which there were parents, and the one in which girls existed — strictly apart. So I thought it horribly cruel of the mother to raise an almost engagement-high barrier to her daughter’s social life.
But I also understood she was trying her best to protect her: My friend’s problem with taking her home was that he thought his working-class Irish parents would not approve.
It was amid such tensions between Hawaiian racelessness and Mainland prejudices that Barry Obama struggled to define himself. He listened to Marvin Gaye and mimicked the dance steps on “Soul Train.” He learned to curse like Richard Pryor. He sought out basketball games with the few young black men he could find. He turned to a friend who had lived in L.A. — the two of them were practically the only “black” students in the school — for clues. He read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as did I; it was required at Radford).
But in Hawaii, it was a struggle. While he believed he had to be a black man, it was nevertheless an identity he had to learn.
His conviction that blackness was an unavoidable thing he had to come to terms with is something that he does seem to have in common with most black Americans. It’s the perfect complement to my own white complacency about race as something we can all forget about.
But both of us emerged from polyglot, rootless childhoods to deliberately put on identities as adults. He worked on the mean streets of Chicago, eventually defining himself more specifically as a black man from Chicago. After a childhood devoid of religious identity, he joined the church of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
For my part, I went from attending nondenominational military chapels to converting to Catholicism, and while I believe it is my true spiritual path, I also know that on some superficial level I embraced it as a welcome, sharply defined identity, a clear sense of self that I could never achieve as a white, partly Anglo-Saxon, vague Protestant.
And I quite deliberately went from being a geographically universal Navy brat without a trace of accent to define myself as a South Carolinian. I moved to the state of my birth, my mother’s home state, in 1987, and have never moved again. As Barack Obama — not Barry any more — dug relentlessly in the soil of Kenya for his heritage, I wrote scores of columns and editorials about the problematic meaning of the flag that my Confederate forefathers served under.
Very different, perhaps, but the process of deliberate self-definition unites us. That, and a certain analytical detachment of perspective that mars the perfection of our new identities.
There’s a reason why a lot of military brats become journalists. We become, as children, accustomed to trying to fit in, but at the same time being observers of the communities we try to embrace. There is a sense of outsiderness, a sense of being watchers, that we never entirely shake. So it is that I see a kindred spirit in the candidate who spoke in such professorial tones of “bitter” working-class whites — without malice, but with a detachment that alienated those he described.
And I could be dead wrong, but I think I understand how a man of such inclusive instincts could have sat in a pew for 20 years listening to the Rev. Wright’s outrageous black nationalism. There are times when, confronted with some of the more idiosyncratic aspects of Catholicism — say, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus — I think on some level, I suppose these Catholics do these things. And since I have decided to be Catholic, I accept it. I suspect there were times, many times, when Barack Obama thought on some level, I suppose these black preachers say these things, and accepted against his own inclinations.
Do you think I’ve gotten myself into enough trouble with enough people in this long, rambling reflection? I’m sure I have. But I hope I’ve communicated that while I see why some simply call Sen. Obama a “black man,” I’m more likely to think, “Barack like me.”
Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.
A lot of y’all think I’m way harsh on our gov. Well, the guy deserves to have someone stick up for him on this one. Barack Obama’s campaign has done him a rather grave, although ridiculous, injustice.
As Sanford says, the attempt to tie him to Obama’s old friend Bill Ayers (that’s him above with Bernardine Dohrn in 1980, and below in 1981) is "bizarre." From the story in the Greenville News:
Obama’s campaign responded in recent days, noting in a fact-check release to reporters this week that Ayers "is currently a distinguished scholar at the University of South Carolina where Republican Gov. Mark Sanford, who supported Sen. McCain’s campaign as far back as the 2000 primaries, serves as an ex-officio member of the board of trustees. By Gov. Palin’s standards, that means Gov. Sanford shares Ayers’ views."
In an interview with Fox News, Bill Burton, Obama’s press secretary, said Sanford "employs" Ayers.
"He’s the governor of the state and he’s in charge of the board, so that means he employs Bill Ayers," Burton said, adding that, "We don’t think that Mark Sanford or John McCain share the views or condone what Bill Ayers did in the 1960s, which Barack Obama said were despicable and horrible."
Gosh, where do we start?
So I’ve defended Sanford, who in this case was most unjustly accused. But what the silly Obama allegation DOES do, however, is raise this very good question: What on Earth is USC doing paying stipends to an unrepentant terrorist?
Well, I’ll go out on a limb and say something contrary to the "instant analysis" I just heard on PBS. I think McCain did better in this debate than Obama. I didn’t feel that way about the first debate, in fact I was at times put off by McCain’s condescending attitude toward his opponent in Mississippi, the repeated charge that Obama didn’t "understand"…
But this time, I think he caught Obama, and the professional observers, off-balance. Obama obviously came out expecting McCain, running behind, to be aggressive, so he started counterpunching before McCain could come after him. But McCain, comfortable wih the town-hall format, focused more on the questions rather than scoring points.
At no point was this more in evidence than in response to the first two questions, when McCain responded directly, including offering a new proposal to buy up bad mortgages. He said nothing critical about his opponent at all at that point, concentrating on the questions. Obama came out swinging with the usual stuff about "eight years of failed policies" causing the current financial crisis, as though John McCain had been president the last eight years (as he SHOULD have been, I might add), rather than McCain’s old rival, W. The really bizarre thing was the Obama kept doing the class warfare thing with accusing his opponent’s party of caring only for Wall Street and not Main Street, but in order to do that, he had to completely ignore the proposal McCain kept repeating about buying troubled mortgages. It was weird, as though Obama had gone deaf and couldn’t react to what was actually being said.
On the third question, McCain finally said something critical about his opponent. After that, things were more evenhanded, and I think both men did reasonably well, with some false notes (such as when McCain called Obama "that one," which contributed to the "frosty" tone described afterward on PBS).
At the very end, though, McCain again demonstrated his greater comfort with his surroundings. Obama simply didn’t answer the question about "what don’t you know?" As he was going on about his childhood, I remarked to my daughter that I knew how McCain SHOULD answer the question, but I doubted he would think of it. I was wrong. He answered along the lines of what I would have done in his shoes. He said the main thing he does not know is what the future holds, and suggested he believes he is ready to deal with what will come. That’s a particularly appropriate answer for a guy who touts his experience, but is not guided by an ideology. McCain approaches issues pragmatically, depending on what comes down the pike, rather than according to an overall program or philosophy. He didn’t develop the thought the way I would have, but in essence he got it right.
Now, do I think this reversed McCain’s fortunes? No. But it sure made me think better of him than if he had done what so many had said he HAD to do, which was to attack Obama’s character. And Obama, seeming to expect a fight, was thrown off-balance — for him. As always, he was poised, but he was off-point more than usual.
But enough with that. What did YOU think?
We all know what a huge effort Obama has put in to registering new voters — in S.C. before the primaries, and everywhere since. It’s one of the main keys to his success in securing the nomination, and will probably win him the general election. Normally, one could discount his being ahead in the polls on account of the fact that self-identified Democrats often don’t show up on Election Day. This time, they will. And they’ll be registered.
So it’s kind of pathetic to see the two e-mails I received over the last day or so from GOP sources:
The first one I saw (even though it came in second), from Mike Huckabee, just made me think "He’ll use any excuse to strike up a conversation; guess he still has a lot of campaign debt." It was headlined, "A friendly reminder; register to vote," and had a link to this site. It provided a link to this Web site. It came in today.
Fellas, fellas… how can I break this to you? The deadline to register to vote in the November election was Saturday in South Carolina. And you know what? From my moving around the country over the years, I seem to recall that 30 days out is not a particularly unusual deadline, in spite of all those efforts out there to make it easier to vote on short notice (you know, the moves that you Republicans usually oppose).
This is lame, guys. Just lame.
Just so you know, I’m probably going to be posting a little less often this week, until I can get done reading Obama’s book about his childhood.
I think I’ve finished the parts that I really need to have read for the column I’m doing for this weekend, but I’m trying to go ahead and finish it. What column? It’s one about an idea, or set of ideas, I’ve mentioned before:
Talk about what the election of Barack Obama as a black man means
misses the point, since — as a lot of black folks asserted last year
leading up to the primaries — Obama simply is not a "black man" in the
sense that the phrase has meaning in American history, sociology and
politics. I’ve got a column I’m planning on writing about that, after I
read his autobiography on the subject. It will be headlined "Barack Like Me,"
and it will be rooted in the experiences he and I share spending part
of our formative years in Hawaii (where race simply did not mean what
it means here) and outside the United States — both in the Third
World, in fact. None of these experiences are common to the sort of guy
we describe when we say "black American." I hope to write that one
before the summer is over.
I’m a really, really, excruciatingly slow reader (but my retention is good, once I’m done). So I’m trying to grab those moments during the day that I would normally use for blogging.
And then tonight is shot because of the debate. I’ll try to post during or after that.
Sorry to be late posting this. I had a busy weekend, and actually didn’t go back to watch this until this morning. Saturday the wife and I and several of our descendants participated in the Walk for Life, Saturday night I was at a belated 70th birthday party for my former boss Tom McLean out in Blythewood, and Sunday we celebrated both my 55th birthday, and my younger son’s 28th. Busy, busy. How was your weekend?
Anyway, as for the Biden-Palin skit from Saturday night — very funny, very much above the show’s standard for the last couple of decades, but ya know, nothing is going to hit me with the freshness of that first Palin-Hillary skit. After that, they’ve so far just been good sequels. The true genius was in the first one.
But just so you’ll appreciate the latest such sequel, the below clip from Saturday night’s show is more typical of what we get these days. Don’t bother watching past the first few seconds. It doesn’t get any better…
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Poor Joe Biden. He likes attention, and he deserves it. He’s smart, experienced, engaging, witty, and has a smile that, could its brightness be tapped, would give the nation a nice start toward energy independence.
But he can’t get any. Attention, I mean. He certainly couldn’t when he sought the presidential nomination. And then, even after he got picked for the team, when his big moment came — it was all about Sarah.
I think I can speak for much of America here when I say Sarah Palin had me breathless Thursday night. I don’t mean “breathless” the way Kathleen Parker meant it when she described the way she felt watching the veep candidate in her earlier interviews, pulling for her “like so many” women (this was before she decided Mrs. Palin was a “problem” and should drop out).
Nor was I breathless in the sense that David Brooks meant it in The New York Times Friday, when he wrote of “Republicans around the country crouched nervously behind their sofas,” afraid for their gal. First, I’m not a Republican (or a Democrat). Second, as much as I admire and respect John McCain, and have for years, I was not enchanted by his choice. It was like, If I can’t have Joe Lieberman, I don’t care WHO it is; if this is what the base wants, they can have her. Which is not a good way to pick a potential future president.
Nor was it that she’s a “babe,” as I have learned not to say on my blog. She’s pretty, but not to the point of constricting one’s breath.
No, I realized Thursday night that I was getting light-headed whenever she spoke for the same reason that some movies and TV shows are painful to watch. You know how you can tell when something’s about to happen that will be enormously embarrassing to the character on the screen, and even if you don’t like the character (although it’s worse if they’re likable, and Gov. Palin is that), you cringe, because you don’t want to see it. You get embarrassed for the human race; you empathize no matter how much you try not to.
Think of the boss character on “The Office,” in almost any scene.
Often at such moments, I leave the room. Life is painful enough without having your nose rubbed in contrived discomfort. But I had to keep watching the debate, on account of it being my job.
Fortunately, it went fine for all concerned. Sarah did fine. There were moments, of course, such as her repeated demonstrations that she learned to pronounce “nuclear” by listening to the current president (he oughta know, right?). And if she had said “maverick” just one more time…
(I had reached my saturation point on that word during the convention. At least there it had the appeal of being extremely ironic, since the hall was full of people who hated him for being a… you know. Yes, he is one of those, and I like that about him; just don’t say it again. Try “nonconformist,” or even “iconoclast.” Sure, it doesn’t sound as macho, and maybe lots of folks don’t know what it means, and those who do may not like its anti-religious roots. But gosh darn it, if Sarah Palin started saying “iconoclast,” hockey moms all over the lower 48 would start sayin’ it, and first thing ya know it would be as American as snowmobiles.)
But she did fine. And Joe did fine. And in the end I was fine, because I was breathing again.
You may say, “of course Joe did fine,” but things could have gone very badly for him. He likes to show how smart he is, and up against an opponent that much of America is worried for, regardless of how they’ll vote (a friend who had described Gov. Palin’s convention speech to me as “venomous” confided Friday morning that he, too, had been breathless,) he was crossing a minefield.
At this point, you may justly wonder, “Was there substance in this debate, or is it just about how it made you feel?” Suitably chastened, I would admit that there probably was. There was all that talk about Iraq, for instance. And come to think of it, by my lights, Sarah Palin had the right of it, and Joe Biden was wrong. But then, she was just channeling what John McCain has always said — that we can’t afford to lose there. Come to think of it, Sen. Biden was reflecting what Barack Obama, and the folks who swept him to the nomination, believe about Iraq. Joe Biden knows better. Or at least, he used to.
And I don’t know which was more unsettling — the idea of Sarah Palin suddenly becoming president (as she said, “heaven forbid”), or Joe Biden’s intimation that we didn’t need to worry, he’d be there in the Oval Office at all times keeping an eye on that fine young fellow he’s running with (although he quickly added, “He’s president, not me…”).
Not that a Palin presidency wouldn’t be interesting. Imagine the State of the Union delivered in the voice of Frances McDormand in “Fargo,” but speaking lines from an Andy Hardy movie: “We’ll reduce the deficit by puttin’ on a show in the barn! You betcha!”
Forgive me. I get carried away. But I find that we’re in a strange and unexpected place. I had expected to be pretty pumped right about now, because the two guys I wanted to win their respective nominations did so, and I don’t remember that having happened before. But I wasn’t exactly blown away by the first presidential debate; it seemed overshadowed by the Wall Street implosion, which wasn’t the kind of dominant theme I had expected. Nor, apparently, had the nominees.
So we turned to the vice presidential debate, which actually turned out to be more interesting and engaging, to the credit of Mr. Biden and Mrs. Palin.
Still, I don’t think it helped anyone make up their minds — even if it did, for a brief time, have some of us breathless.
Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.
Just got this in a release from Mike Huckabee (Yes, he’s still sending out e-mails, raising money for his "Huck PAC."):
I hope that you had a chance to watch the Vice-Presidential Debate tonight and that it reaffirmed all of our beliefs that Sarah Palin is the knock-out punch the McCain-Palin ticket needs to win in November. Governor Palin is a bright, articulate, talented woman. She has what I consider to be the most important experience – she is a Governor and the only one in this race that has actually ever signed the front of a paycheck….
Huckabee would like Sarah Palin, wouldn’t he? Aside from the governor thing, she’s the one person still out there with his populist, common touch.
Of course, Huckabee was a much, much better speaker — probably the most articulate candidate we saw in the past year, with the possible exception of Obama. Obama doesn’t talk to Joe Sixpack quite the same way that came naturally to Huckabee, although he has his own distinctive sort of populist appeal. It was no accident that both of them won Iowa, riding much the same wave.