Sarah Palin must not be elected

From AJS.COM

Sarah Palin is running for Vice President of the United States. Ever since her selection by John McCain, she's been under an avalanche of scrutiny. She's under investigation in Alaska where she's currently serving as Governor. She has very little in the way of public service experience. But, those are issues that a campaign can try to work with and circumnavigate. There's one problem, however that I think is starting to wear thing on Republicans after Dan Quayle and George W. Bush before her: she just doesn't know what she's talking about. Don't believe me? Well, I'm not a fan of the Huffington Post, which I consider to be a rag, but they have two clips from Palin's recent interview on CBS. Just watch the clips and listen to what she says. Think about the fact that, in all likelihood you could have answered the questions with more relevance and intelligence than... that.

Just lend her your ears:

I've defended John McCain in the past. I'll continue to rail against attacks from the right or the left against candidates who have done nothing but try to serve their country. I think McCain would make a passable President, perhaps even a good one. He would be a huge improvement over the leadership we have today.

But I don't think it's fair for us to roll the dice when it comes to a truly incompetent Vice President who may well have to assume the Presidency (according to the CDC, someone around 70 years old in average health for their age has about a 50% chance of making it through the next 4 years a white male of McCain's age would have an average of 10-13 years of life, but this assumes one is in average health which McCain is certainly not).^[1]

Barack Obama may not be your ideal choice, but he and his running mate are intelligent folks who understand the nature of the job. They have the respect of the world and the willingness to work hard to solve the drastic issues that we face. I don't ask you to become a Democrat. I don't even ask you to vote for Obama. Vote for a third party if you wish. Just vote for the non-Presidential candidates. But whatever you do, please do not vote for Sarah Palin as Vice President.

Thank you.

-Aaron Sherman, site administrator.

Pre-debate update

There's been a lot of focus on Gov. Palin recently, due to the upcoming debate. Specifically, I've seen her performance in previous debates, and I'm a bit confused. She's not a gleaming beacon of intellect in her previous debates, but she's certainly not the buffoon that stammered out the incoherent quote above. So what happened? My guess is that she's really bad at staying on-script, and when given a scripted set of responses for an interview, she gets nervous and starts improvising mashed-up elements of what she's been given. That would certainly explain the muddled half-thoughts she regurgitated in that interview. However, it also bodes ill for a debate that's typically nothing but improvising over scripted responses to expected questions. We shall see...

That said, there's another point I want to be clear on: I'm not concerned with a candidate that says "my state is next to Russia, and that's my foreign policy experience." In fact, last night I was challenged to come up with a response that Palin could have used to defend her position, and this is what I said:

So, as you can see, it's not the core argument that being the Governor of Alaska constitutes valuable foreign policy experience that's a problem, here. It's the fact that when trying to defend that position, Sarah Palin made it obvious that she didn't understand why her experience was relevant. Was that nervousness and/or a botched job of staying on script? Perhaps. We'll see tonight

— Aaron Sherman, October 2, 2008

Post-debate followup

Everyone has said it, but I want to re-iterate: Sarah Palin pulled it off. The debate tonight was clearly a win for Joe Biden in terms of specific political points made (I'm just basing that statement on polling numbers, not my own opinion which was less certain right after the debate), but it's definitely clear that she won the debate against herself. She came off as somewhat uncertain and occasionally clumsy, but far, far more confident and controlled than she was at any time since the GOP Convention. She answered questions well, stayed on topic with only a few exceptions and managed to make some seriously cogent points. Sarah Palin was, dare I say, Vice Presidential in this debate.

I'm still quite convinced that we'll be in serious trouble if she has to assume the Presidency, but I'm no longer of the opinion that she would be any worse than, say, George W. Bush. In fact, I think she'd do better than Quayle would have.

Yes, it was a matter of lowered expectations, and yes, independent voters seem to have been largely unimpressed with the substance, but Vice Presidential debates aren't where an election is won or lost unless truly tragic mistakes are made.

1. ↑ It should be noted that my previous numbers were simply incorrect. I'm now working from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_10.pdf which has much more readable tables and corrected my previous misunderstanding. Others have cited a 1:3 probability of his death during the first term, based on known health conditions and other factors.