Heartbeat
by Mark R. LevinOver at his blog, David Frum asks: “If it were your decision, and you were putting your country first, would you put an untested small-town mayor a heartbeat away from the presidency?” Of course, the question is loaded.
This small town stuff is odd to me. If a candidate is mayor of a large town, does that make her more qualified for the vice presidency or presidency? Don’t we need to know more? Is Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick more qualified than any small town mayor? Is any major city mayor more qualified than any small town mayor? I suppose the question can also be asked: Is a big state governor more qualified than a small state governor, based on the size and diversity of the state alone? Or don’t we need to know more? So, Frum’s line about a small town mayor is by itself useless in analyzing a candidate’s qualifications.
Now, let’s turn to the word “untested.” It’s not clear if by this Frum means untested in a particular field, such as foreign policy, or untested on national issues generally. Since the president is tested in ways no governor or senator can ever be tested in terms of confronting the kinds of issues that come to his office, it seems Frum would be excluding anyone who hasn’t already been president, or maybe he’s including only those who’ve served as vice president. But surely serving in Congress is not, by itself, much of a test of a person’s executive skills (including as commander in chief). Congress is a legislative body where group decisions are made. It requires a set of largely different skills and competencies to succeed as a legislator. Perhaps this is one reason why so few senators have succeeded in becoming president over our history. And, of course, a person can be tested in many ways having nothing to do with government at all. So what, exactly, is the test?
I think the test comes down to judgment. And in making that determination we take the measure of the person. For most of us that includes examining his public record, family life, associations, successes, and failures, priorities, motivating principles, challenges faced, etc. These are the experiences we look at. It is a mistake to say that a candidate is untested because of a pundit’s unfamiliarity with her, which is what Frum is really saying (he provides no other basis for his position, dismissing Palin because she is from a small town and “untested”).
In Palin, McCain did not pick a nobody. The more I learn about her, the more I like her. She has been tested in both her private life and government service in ways that give us a sense of who she is, what kind of judgment she has, and what principles motivate her. And part of that judgment includes knowing what you don’t know and surrounding yourself with experts who share your objectives. Whomever serves as vice president does so not alone but surrounded by a staff of experts.
We reject Obama because of his poor judgment, which we glean from his experiences  his public and private record, bad associations, dissembling, radical principles, and miserable legislative decisions.
Hannity looks nicer in person
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Isn’t it amazing, from the vantage point of the MSM, that the Joe Biden VP choice rounds out team Obama but that the Palin pick dilutes team McCain? I liked Romney and Thompson for the same reasons that I love Palin and those reasons stem from understanding that conservative principles are needed for a government to function properly while not allowing it to overrun its’ boundaries and trespass upon individual liberty and freedom. There is never any gender distinction.
Should McCain have chosen Romney they would both be characterized as two old white males by the same people that now deem McCain and Palin as both too old, too young and too inexperienced; and we are now told that McCain’s choice was designed to attract disenfranchised female Hillary supporters who cannot be lured and fooled by anything less than the real McCoy (Hillary) and that he will ultimately lose votes because of this. From the perspective of us gender blind conservatives we looked at Palin as fit for a VP slot the same way that we looked at Harriet Myers as unfit for a Supreme Court Justice nomination. Now suddenly the gender oriented Hillary love fest has been turned into a Palin hate fest in the same manner that the race oriented love Obama crowd hates Justice Thomas. Hillary and Obama are liberals vs. the conservatives Palin and Thomas therefore Hillary is experienced and Thomas is woefully lacking legitimate Constitutional credentials according to a liberal Chicago community organizer without a job. How come? Because all the fair and balanced arguments over issues have positive reinforcement value, based upon race and gender, when you are a liberal but have negative value, in regards to those same issues, when you are a republican. If you are a non-white and/or female liberal then it shows how fair-minded you are, while if you have an R after your name then it shows how treacherous, sneaky and underhanded you must be to try and fool people using race and gender.
The party that has always used race and gender to dishonestly portray their concern over inequities cannot tolerate playing second fiddle when a candidate is selected regardless of skin color or gender but only on their honest and genuine qualifications to deal with the job and issues at hand. If you doubt that liberals are pseudo compassionates just listen to the recent hullabaloo over the appearance of a Grade 4 or 5 hurricane that they gleefully hope will knock out the Republican Convention. How about the fact that millions of people, animals, homes and business will be irreparably affected.
The reason I especially liked Romney was because he developed and matured into a conservative. For all the criticism of his changed stances he represented a finished product that was a Washington outsider, a governor far removed from the D.C. lives of Senators, who was beholding to no one; these are good qualifications to change a system that you know is broken. Sarah Palin is cut from the same cloth, albeit a younger version, but her record of accomplishements speaks for itself. She was and is an outsider, beholding to no one; she recognized when the system was broken, putrid and corrupt and she advanced from nowhere to take on the insiders and oust them. Just one of her kind is worth hundreds of crippled and beholding drones that advance the status quo. Joe Biden is a static, long time Washington insider, that always voted as a socialist, who gained the title of being Washington’s 3rd most liberal Senator and who now intends to govern under a hopeful commander labeled the most liberal Senator and who himself originated in the bowels of liberal and corrupt Cook County, the epicenter of old–town and old-time democrat politics, that never matured beyond New York’s Tammany Hall. I know because I lived there. Amazingly this same duo masquerading as a new force for change, have a pedigree supporting government expansion to the degree that it has bloated every bureaucracy, advanced federal autocracy, crippled individual liberty with staggering taxes, paralyzed enterprise with numbing regulations, created and expanded entitlements that have choked us with debt, empowered environmentalists with powerful court standing that has inflated energy costs and now they ask to be re-hired if we will only pay them more than we ever did before. What fools they take us for. If I criticized Bush for his unfunded Medicare prescription benefit package and other heavy handed spending imagine how this new tsunami of spending proposals provokes my ire.
Of all the job experiences that these candidates should have, yet strikingly and glaringly lack, is the experience of ordinary Americans, working hard each and every day as farm workers, auto builders, fisherman, engineers, chemists, medical and legal professionals, carpenters, plumbers, boat builders, typesetters, programmers, electricians, along with countless others who all act and interact in day to day commerce that represents the American economy. Beyond all the aforementioned is the unique job of running communities and States with full executive responsibility that, besides Presidents, only mayors and governors possess. The day that Sarah Palin was announced as McCain’s choice I recognized the only conservative, embodying life’s experiences, like the rest of us, but who also had executive experience as both a small town mayor and governor of America’s largest State and who is beholding to no one but to you and me. The rest are all Senators with barely a few years living as the rest of us do for our entire lives. From my perspective Sarah Palin is the one that could have been on the top of the ticket yesterday, while the rest of them should not be on any ticket, on any day.
As Palin recently stated: “If we want a bridge we will build it ourselves.” That one line statement speaks about the heart of conservatism. With but one line she shocked me into attention.
Presidents are usually chosen because they were governors with executive credentials such as Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush, or previous VP’s while almost none were ever senators; in this case such correct credentials belong to only this VP choice.
I believe I’ve said it here, I know I’ve said it in other blogs; until we start electing fishermen, and firemen, and plumbers, and carpenters, etc, to office, “we the people” will never regain control of our government. As a rule, I’ll never again vote for a lawyer for any office. The mistake that has happened over the past 60 years, is that we’ve staffed out government with lawyers. We wonder why everything has become so complicated, when we all know a lawyer can’t say yes in less than 4 paragraphs. Now before you yell, I understand that we do indeed need lawyers, and that there are a lot of really good ones, like M.L. for instance, and they’re doing good, necessary work, I don’t hate all lawyers. America, and all which it stands for is far too important to me, than to leave her in the hands of some, who disagree with her founding principals, only to be made into the image of the ones we escaped from. No, we can no longer trust America to people who’s interest is to re-Mold this great land into their image. I, for one, think America, with all our problems, is still the greatest nation on earth, worthy of every drop of blood ever spilled in her name. Give me a fighter pilot and a hockey Mom any day. America doesn’t need a “rock star”, it needs real everyday people to look out for us, cause the bunch in charge now sure don’t give a tinker’s dam about us.
Our last brush with lawyers was double trouble. The Clintonoids and a Cabinet full of attorneys and other legal advisors were the secret ingredients for the Islamic jihadists that designed 911. We now have two liberal senators who are also incompetent attorneys. If I were America’s enemies I would do everything in my power to insure the election of the Obama/Biden, liberal attorney and senator combo ticket. Trust no one but least of all trust a liberal attorney. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/want_real_change_quit_nominati.html
One of the most powerful pieces of campaign advertising, that has been underused, is that the McCain/Palin ticket is not the attorney ticket that is the Obama/Biden ticket. Americans distrust and dislike attorneys.