More Swift Kids

Here is the new one about Sarah Palin and I think it is the best one yet:

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

And just to show they are equal opportunity, here are videos about Hilary and Obama:

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

The Button

I hope you take this in the light-hearted manner in which it is intended...

Neglect

I've been sort of neglecting the blog this past week because I really don't know how much of this election I can take anymore. Pardon the astral physics simile but it is like the campaign is moving closer and closer to the speed of light and time is starting to slow down and maybe even go in reverse. It's like the the election is not responding to the the rules of nature like gravity or the laws of motion.

The polls make no sense. How does the addition of Sarah Palin make an Obama voter switch to McCain. Is it only about gender and nothing else? Karl Rove is criticizing McCain for false ads. This from the guy who spread rumors that McCain had an illegitimate black child. Obama is criticized for wanting children to know how to not get molested.

So for a while it's going to be just music from me...I feel like this guy from Get Your War On at the end of the day:

Feeling Better

I'm feeling better about Palin today...I've just got to remember that Dick Cheney had the most experience of any Vice President so the opposite would have to be better, right?

Love Her or Hate Her

Love her or hate her, her kids gave us the best moment of any convention this year...maybe ever.

It Had To Be You.........

Matt,

Lets assume for the sake of argument that John McCain was looking for the following traits in a vice-president:
--Female
--Acceptable to the conservative base
--Doesn't automatically alienate swing voters
--Good campaigner
--Seen as ready to be president if necessary (experience, etc.)

Now lets look at the candidates and see how they fare:

Carly Fiorina: She does seem like Mitt Romney in a pantsuit. But had McCain picked her, the press would have instantly focused on her departure from Hewlett-Packard. She has no governing experience, so the heartbeat questions would still be there. Conservatives would view her warily. She has been one of McCain's surrogates, but hasn't done such a terrific job that her campaign skills would stand out. If McCain is trying to avoid being the ticket of the rich, a CEO is your last choice for vice-president.

Meg Whitman: The conservative base would probably find Whitman to be acceptable. The scale of acceptance probably does something like: hatred, suspicion, lukewarm, acceptable, happy, ecstatic. Her eBay time was largely a success. Again, the heartbeat questions are going to be even louder for her than they were for Palin. And she does pose the problem of being one of the few people in this country who is richer than McCain's family.

Lisa Murkowski, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins: No, no, no.

Liddy Dole: She's running for re-election, so picking her could cost the GOP a Senate seat. She has no ability to campaign off the cuff and was very wooden in her run for president. If she was 10 years younger, she would have been a more serious prospect.

Kay Bailey Hutchison: This is probably the only other really viable candidate. The base would veer between hatred and lukewarm on her selection. She is a good campaigner, but not one that excites voters. In some ways, she is a female John McCain: fairly solid conservative who crosses over just enough to give the party heartburn. The experience questions would be less likely to come up.

No one can deny that Sarah Palin added excitement to the ticket unlike any other. If McCain wanted to simultaneously make the base deliriously happy, enrage the other side and make swing voters go, "Hmmm," he could not have picked a better candidate. Peggy Noonan (among others) is right: this pick is dynamite. We just don't know if it is going to blow up on Obama or McCain.

Facebook Drama

CS and I got into it a little bit today on Facebook but I thought it was only fair to reprint it here...it is hard to gauge our true feelings as we live 500 miles apart but I just want to say that I can't wait until this election is over.

It all started with a semi-serious snide comment on my Facebook status:

"What is it conservatives saw about Harriet Miers that they now ignore about Sarah Palin?"

CS responded:

"Harriet Miers had no experience -- what so ever. Harriet Miers had no track record to be judged on. And most importantly, Harriet Miers would have been in a job where she was accountable to no one. Sarah Palin has relevant experience, she has been governor and being vice-president means she is still accountable to the voters."

I got a little worked up and shot back:

"As you well know, only recently did we expect Supreme Court nominees to have any judicial experience at all...and if there is any branch of government in which a person could be expected to have "on the job training" it would be someone with a life appointment.

The answer is abortion. People complained about a lack of a record with Miers because conservatives were not 100% certain she wouldn't become another Sandra O.

The opposite is true here with Palin. We have actual down syndrome babies and statements against abortion even in cases of rape and incest to show how Palin feels. And therefore, it seems other common sense problems can be glossed over...e.g. member of secessionist party, at best minimal national security experience, etc... I don't pretend to not gloss over Obama's problems myself but this is beyond focusing on the good and sticking one's head in the sand."

I'm sorry to blow up CS. Thank goodness we don't pick Vice Presidents until nearly September.

Does John McCain ever watch movies or TV or read books?

John McCain has done it. He is the equivalent of a black astronaut, the cop who is months away from retirement or the young soldier with a pregnant wife stateside. He is destined to die in office.

Picking a female vice-president is the surest way to guarantee that the president will die in office. Maybe his death will be long and slow, like Teddy Bridges. Maybe he'll die trying to prove his toughness. He should probably hire a food tester, because Palin might be out to kill him, Caroline Reynolds-style. When Glenn Close served as Harrison Ford's vice-president in Air Force One, we nearly had the immovable object versus the irresistible force of movie plot lines: Harrison Ford in an action flick (where you can assume he will save the day) vs. a male president in mortal danger with a female vice-president waiting in the wings (so you can assume he will die). Maybe he'll just be boring and die of a good old fashioned heart attack.

The Sarah Palin story is just too cliched. Go to Hollywood and pitch them this story:

"You've got a former beauty queen hockey mom who eloped with her high school sweetheart. She lives in Alaska and is living a normal life when she decides to run for City Council to make the small town where she lives into a better place. Before long, she ends up as the mayor. And then she is appointed to a powerful government board by a crusty U.S. Senator turned Governor. He ends up being corrupt, so she takes a big risk by speaking out against him and then running against him, trouncing him in the process. She spends two years as governor and finds herself pregnant with a Downs Syndrome baby. Not long after giving birth, she gets a discreet call asking her if she is interested in possibly running for vice-president. She figures she doesn't have a chance -- it'll probably go the former governor with perfect hair and the whitest teeth you've ever seen who got beat in the primaries -- but thinks it would be kind of cool to tell her grandchildren that she was almost vice-president. The Republican nominee is facing the first African-American presidential nominee and needs to shake up the race, so he meets with her and loves her and chooses her. She is introduced to the world and it isn't long before the press and her political opponents are digging up everything they can find. One of her sharpest critics is a gay blogger with a British accent. Suddenly the entire nation is buzzing about the fact that her 17-year old daughter is pregnant. People are questioning whether she will be able to stay on the ticket. She gives a great speech at the convention and starts prepping for a debate against a Senator who has been in Washington for 30 years and has a reputation as a loquacious blowhard and a superb debater."

The Hollywood exec would declare that it sounds way too cliched, but might ask how it would end.

We know how it would end. She would win the debate and help McCain win a narrow victory. Once inaugurated, she would discover that McCain has no use for her in actually running the country -- he only put her on the ticket to win. Left to a boring life of funerals and presiding over the Senate (a body which includes the losing president/VP nominees of the last election), she wishes she had stayed in Alaska. The mere mention of her name causes White House staffers to chuckle. About six months into his term, McCain will authorize a highly dangerous covert mission in Iran. Hours after ordering it, he will die of a heart attack in his sleep, leaving her in charge of a military mission that she knows nothing about. And this is the same time as her daughter's boyfriend/fiancee leaves her and the Downs Syndrome child is causing her trouble and heartbreak. Will she be able to balance it all?

Now you know why Bartlet never considered having a female politician replace Hoynes. Between that and multiple sclerosis, he would have been as good as gone.

My Newsweek to CS's Atlantic Monthly

Typically when CS and I go back and forth on political issues I feel like my posts are something akin to a small blurb in Newsweek and CS's are straight from a three-week in depth investigation in the Atlantic Monthly or Vanity Fair...

To make my point here's a tidbit I was meaning to add to my earlier post "Here's What Frightens Me"...somehow it got lost along the way but it was going to be, in fact, the actual thing that frightens me the most:

Governor Palin named two of her kids after characters from the TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed.

Well, it turns out that maybe she didn't...it looks like a good thing I forgot to write that little bit earlier...Here's some more information on the kids' names...

The Palin Pick

When I got to work this morning and checked CNN, I was legitimately shocked to see a banner headline proclaiming that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was McCain's running mate.

Her name had been bandied around, but I always dismissed it as the female version of J.C. Watts. Just as Democrats have fretted about the religion gap, Republicans fret about the gender and race gaps. And both sides love their trophies, the politicians who they can point to and say, "See, we aren't all bad." Ohio Governor Ted Strickland is always held up as a former pastor (even though he was only briefly the associate pastor at a church) and who can forget the endless parade of black Republicans at the 2000 Convention. If the auditor of Ohio County, Indiana had been a black Republican, I guarantee they would have addressed the convention. Palin seemed to be a superficial "hey, she's a woman and if we have a woman on the ticket, female voters might like us." It's the political version of "I'm not racist. Some of my best friends are black."

Hopefully, the McCain campaign wasn't thinking so superficially. I think the idea of sending Pawlenty or Romney to debate Biden scared them. Against Pawlenty/Romney, there was a very good chance of another Lloyd Bentsen-Dan Quayle moment where Biden fillets them as they look on plaintively. There wasn't a viable VP candidate who was going to be able to go into that debate and match Biden, haymaker for haymaker. But Palin changes that equation.*

(*Remember the Let Bartlet Be Bartlet West Wing episode, based on the famous Let Reagan Be Reagan memo? There is no one who has ever said Let Biden Be Biden. Joe Biden has always been irrepressively who he is. No matter the stakes, he will always be the brainy attention whore who loves a good quip and is the embodiment of an Irish hail-fellow-well-met. You cannot get him to change. When prepping for the Alito hearings, his staff implored him that he needed to ask short, open-ended questions to force the nominee to talk. And Biden told them he understood. And then promptly spent the hearings delivering rambling soliloquies that forced Alito to say virtually nothing. So if Palin leaves the door open to a great putdown quip, you would need a 110,000 volt cattle prod to keep him from making it. Against another white male politician, he could have that Bentsen moment. But against a young woman, he could have a Rick Lazio moment. He could come across as the hectoring male boss who belittles and doesn't respect the views of a younger female. It's an archetype that I'm guessing a lot of females have dealt with in their professional lives and would make them instantly sympathetic to Palin. So instead of finding someone that can beat Biden, they found someone who might be able to make Biden beat himself.)

Both Palin and McCain have something to prove with this pick. Palin's mission is obvious: she has to show that she can handle the national media spotlight on a daily basis where any misstep will race across the internet at record speed. This is an area of campaigning where Senators do better than Governors. Senators are used to the Washington media, understand how they operate and are cognizant of how words are perceived, received and can be skewed. Governors are used to dealing with their home state media, where provincialism is a plus, not a minus. It's a little bit like being president. How you are viewed in your own country and how you are viewed elsewhere in the world can be completely different. And coming from a state like Alaska only increases the learning curve. Palin got off to a distinctly un-Quayle like start in the announcement, but the key test will come in handling the day-to-day glare.

For McCain, he has to prove that this was not a token pick. You would think that proving Palin isn't the Republican Geraldine Ferraro would be Palin's job, but it's not. McCain has to prove that Palin will be a strong voice in his administration and this isn't just a sop to women. This will backfire if independent women voters think they are being patronized by McCain. And it isn't enough to throw her issues like women in small business or something that reeks of "women care about this crap, let me play with the army guys." McCain needs to let her take the lead on some gender-neutral issues. Let her be the one who hammers away on government waste and the Bridge to Nowhere. Let her hammer Biden and Obama for voting against an amendment that would have diverted money for the bridge her state didn't need to a state that did need it (post-Katrina Louisiana). It not only gives her some intellectual heft, but makes her look like a governing partner, not just a campaign partner.

This was probably the only pick that McCain could have made that would leave the base happy and make moderates curious. He deserves credit for having the guts to make the pick, even though he just handed the Democrats their instant rebuttal point on the experience question. This pick is playing with dynamite. The media will be quick to fit any gaffe into an inexperience narrative and the names Quayle and Ferraro will be just as quick to roll of their tongues. James Carville said that the key to picking a vice-president is to "make the opposing campaign manager throw up." I don't think David Axelrod has the heaves yet, but it probably made him sit down and think through how this changes the race and changes Obama's approach. And considering McCain's other options, that is a victory in and of itself.

Here's What Frightens Me

Okay, McCain has selected Gov. Sarah Palin as his VP candidate...Paul Begala succinctly summarizes the days discussion in his article as "Is McCain out of his mind?" In the end, I don't think this will change things much in the polls [I mean the polls that have Obama up by 8%]. I don't see how the selection would make people who wouldn't vote for McCain yesterday vote for him today. The problems they have/had with McCain [whatever they are] don't go away while Obama's biggest problem [lack of foreign policy experience] was addressed by his VP selection. For me this is a marginally positive "do no damage" selection.

That being said, I would say McCain has a slightly less chance than a coin flip at being our next President. That being the case, I am scared shit less that there is a chance that Sarah Palin could be the Vice President. At least with any of McCain's other choices I would have been assured A. An guaranteed improvement from Dick Cheney and B. Someone who knows what the Vice President does all day. I would have been most comfortable with Romney...he's run businesses and I am sure that if I ever met him he would be one of the nicest people I've ever met...Plus a Vice President I can call Mittens is always fun...Tim Pawlenty would have been okay too, I mean no one from Minnesota has ever done anything really bad, right?