MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Thoughts on Sarah Palin

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Longtime readers will remember that Sarah Palin was on my early short list for McCain. I said back in June that she might be a good pick if McCain found himself behind in the polls and needed a Hail Mary pass. Now that he’s made the pick, how does it look?

First, Palin is undoubtedly qualified to be president and vice president. The Constitution sets those qualifications in Article II, Section 1. One need only be (1) a natural-born citizens; (2) at least 35 years old; and (3) a resident of the U.S. for at least 14 years. There’s no question that she meets those qualifications.

There’s also no question that she has plenty of experience. As many people have pointed out since Friday, Palin has been in elected or appointed office since 1992 — a year after Obama graduated from law school. That’s nearly as much experience as John McCain himself. If you count her experience on the PTA, as McCain says we should, her experience is almost Biden-esque.

The real question is the quality of that experience. Does Palin’s experience — a city councilor and then mayor of small town, energy commissioner, and 18 months as governor — make her ready to be president? The answer to that question is largely in the eye of the beholder, but I think it’ll be a tough sell to the American public. It might have been easier to sell over time with a longer roll-out, but the surprise pick makes it particularly difficult.

There’s also Troopergate. Although the facts remain somewhat in dispute, it seems pretty clear that Palin has, on at least one occasion, abused the official power of her office to get someone fired and then lied to cover it up. The first instance happened when she was mayor of small town. The most recent incident happened this summer, when she fired the chief of the state police for refusing to fire the estranged husband of her sister-in-law who was then a state trooper. She’ll probably be deposed and possibly censured in Troopergate during the fall campaign.

And then there’s Palin’s positions on the issues. To the extent that she has positions on national issues, they’re to the right of McCain. Her positions on abortion and contraception, in particular, are closer to Mike Huckabee’s than McCain’s. (Indeed, Huckabee has released a statement praising the Palin pick.) That’s why James Dobson and the religious right are so delighted in her selection.

In the end, I think the pick is more important for what it says about John McCain than for anything it says about Sarah Palin. It showed us all that he’s ready to shoot from the hip on day one. According to recent articles in the NYT and Washington Post, he made the pick after meeting her only once last February and without vetting her at all. That’s not the kind of approach to serious issues that most Americans are going to want.

The pick also showed us, I think, that McCain put politics ahead of governing. This was a choice from identity politics, pure and simple — a big gamble that Palin’s gender and religious conservatism will attract enough votes in a few key swing states to win the election. For all the things that one can say about Sarah Palin, one thing you can’t say is that she knows how to get legislation through the U.S. congress.

And, finally, the Palin pick showed us that McCain will say anything to get elected. For the last six months, McCain has argued that Obama is dangerously unprepared. By picking someone with even less foreign policy experience than Obama, that argument now looks disingenuous in the extreme. As far as I can tell, Palin’s foreign policy experience consists entirely of a family vacation to Ireland and Alaska’s geographic proximity to Russia and Canada.

I said on Friday that I was delighted by McCain’s choice. I’m even happier now that more facts are coming out.

What are your thoughts?

August 31, 2008
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What’s wrong with this picture?

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Have you seen People magazine’s exclusive photo of the McCain and Palin families?

Four members of the McCain and Palin familes are absent from the photo. Palin’s eldest son, Track, and McCain’s youngest son, Jimmy, are in the military and on deployment. McCain’s older son, Jack, is at the Naval Academy.

Where’s Bridget McCain?

Bridget is the McCain’s adopted daughter. She’s originally from Bangladesh and is very brown-skinned. She’s 17 years old — older than three of Palin’s children who appear in the photo and the same age as the fourth.

Are the McCains ashamed of their brown child?

Cross-posted from Facebook.

(Photo by Michael O’Neill:Left to right: Sarah Palin’s daughters Bristol and Willow, Sarah Palin with her husband Todd, their baby Trig, and daughter Piper, John McCain with his wife Cindy and daughter Meghan)
August 31, 2008
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A master stroke

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Let’s give the McCain campaign credit for one thing: They sure know how to steal the Democrats’ thunder.

Democrats dominated the nation’s attention this week with their convention, culminating with their historic affirmation of Barack Obama as the first African-American to nominated for president by a major political party. Sen. Obama punctuated that with what has been generally hailed as a successful acceptance speech in front of some 80,000 rapturous supporters in Denver last night.

It was, in short, a very good week for Democrats.

The Republicans, who hold their convention next week, have detonated a political bombshell that will sweep away attention from Democrats and undercut some of the historic nature of Obama’s ascent with their pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate. More than the obvious ploy of picking a woman in hope of stealing some of the still miffed supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, it is the attention-grabbing nature of the pick that is astounding.

I am not saying that Gov. Palin is either qualified to be president, or that she is a good pick for Sen. John McCain. I am saying that for today, at least, she helps Republicans shift attention for the Democratic ticket.

The incredible thing is that Palin exposes a significant weakness in the Democratic ticket. McCain’s pick of Palin shows now that Obama was not wise to pick Joe Biden as his running mate. Those disaffected Hillary voters can now vote for the McCain-Palin ticket in some good conscience. The Republicans found a woman who was good enough when Democrats couldn’t. I’m not saying Obama should have picked Hillary. But she is not the only woman in the country.

By not picking Kathleen Sebelius or any of the number of qualified women around this nation, Obama left the door open for McCain to make this play.

Some of abhorrently sexist manner in which Hillary was treated during the primaries and caucuses, especially by the media, has pissed off a sizeable number of her supporters.

That Palin is a conservative Christian who is anti-choice and disagrees with Hillary on virtually every issue is not lost on me. Her supporters have a legitimate grievance that the Obama campaign did not pay enough attention to. Now Democrats may pay in November. I just know that women will now vote for the Republican tickets in some states in numbers significant enough to make a difference come Nov. 4.

August 29, 2008
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Shades of Nixon

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The campaign of John McCain for president of the United States has been lurking in the gutter these past several weeks.

Karl Rove’s henchmen, when they took over the faltering McCain campaign, they quickly surmised that they could not win on the issues. The American voters would not trust Republicans to fix the mess the party has made of the economy and America’s moral leadership in the world.

To win, they figured, they have to get in the sewer and throw sludge at Sen. Barack Obama and throw sludge they have, heckling Obama at every turn, peddling trivia and inane arguments. No matter how stupid, the McCain people with wield it. No matter how insane, McCain will come in at the end to say he approved of this message.

It’s quite a Faustian bargain: Some see McCain as a honorable man, a man of integrity. I’ve never felt that. Here is a man who sold his office to Charles Keating and cost the American taxpayers billions of dollars by running interference for him with federal regulators.

McCain not only cheated on the wife who waited at home for him during his five years in captivity, he threw her over for a much younger woman with a hefty bank account. McCain effectively abandoned his first wife and the family she was helping him raise.

How could anyone consider him a man of integrity?

August 28, 2008
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GOP Veepstakes

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Word is out this evening that Sen. McCain is finalizing his vice-presidential pick tonight. Because we may know as soon as tomorrow who he’s chosen, it’s now or never for another round of veepstakes.

If I were advising McCain, here’s who would be on my suggested short list:

Tom Ridge
Kay Bailey Hutchinson

As a Democrat, those are the only two that I think could be game-changing. Tom Ridge might piss off the lunatic fringe, but I just don’t think that they’d abandon the party at the end of the day. Not for a guy who’s going to be spending the next four years going to funerals.

Hutchinson, in my view, has almost no downside. She’s not an excellent campaigner, but I don’t think that’s a big deal in this campaign. McCain’s best hope of attracting die-hard Clintonites is to pick a woman, and Hutchinson’s the best of the bunch. She might also present a good contrast to Biden in the debates. Hutchinson is the pick that I fear the most.

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is worthy of serious consideration, but she arguably wouldn’t meet the ready-to-be-president criterion. I don’t think she gets McCain anything that Hutchinson doesn’t get him already.

Meg Whitman might also be worthy of serious consideration. But her inexperience and at least questionable record at eBay could be liabilities. She also doesn’t get McCain much that Hutchinson doesn’t get him already.

Finally, Mike Pence and Rob Portman might also be worthy short-listers. I have long thought that Pence would be an excellent candidate, but he’s almost completely unknown. He’s the Chet Edwards of the GOP veepstakes. Mike who? Portman is a solid if uninspiring choice. He’s got economic experience, but that could be a liability — it might be seen as a pick from weakness rather than strength.

Although McCain has some good choices, my guess is that he’s going to go for Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty. For some reason, the conventional wisdom sees both candidates as relatively safe picks. My guess is that the McCain camp feels pretty good about their current position in the polls, and they don’t want to rock the boat. I think that’s a mistake.

Romney has an almost unique ability to inspire loathing. People don’t like him. Even though he holds all the right positions for the Republican electorate, he came in third in the primaries. Pawlenty has an amazing ability to inspire sleep and would look like a dope next to Biden.

I think McCain really wants to pick Joseph Lieberman, but he’ll realize in the end that Traitor Joe would be more repulsive to his base than he can handle. Lieberman gets him little that Ridge doesn’t and pisses off more people.

Wild cards include David Petraeus and Eric Cantor.

Who do I, as a Democrat, want McCain to pick? If Jeb Bush and Dick Cheney are unavailable, I’d be delighted if McCain picks Romney, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, or Carly Fiorina.

Who do you think McCain should pick? Who do you think he will pick?

Cross-posted from Facebook.

August 27, 2008
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A wanderer arrives

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When I was a young newspaper reporter (a nerdy one, at that) at The Record in Hackensack, N.J., one of the journalists I looked up to was Michael Powell. Mr. Powell was then at New York Newsday but he had passed through The Record in what was becoming an itinerant career, with stops at Newsday, the Washington Post and now The New York Times.

When some of us would get discouraged about something in journalism, we would reach for some of Mr. Powell’s old stories, particularly his profile of Frank E. Rogers, the long-serving mayor of Harrison, N.J. His stories in The Record and Newsday gave us hope. He was the writer we aspired to be when we grew up as reporters.

I recount this to say that Michael Powell is a phenomenal reporter and a great writer.

I don’t know whether Mr. Powell aspired to a career at The Times (as most of us did) but we heard that he turned down The Times to go to the Washington Post when New York Newsday imploded. Some writers have been known to spurn the stultifying culture of The Times, some of them preferring the Post (Washington) and the Los Angeles Times.

In any case, Mr. Powell is at The Times now and The Times that he comes to, though still a colossus, is somewhat tarnished, prone to getting in its own way. And the Mr. Powell that I now read in that newspaper seems different. His work here, especially covering the candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic Party nomination and for the presidency of the United States, has bothered me at times.

Which is a long way to come around to what I want to say, which is that I enjoyed immensely Mr. Powell’s “American Wanderer . . . “ piece in Sunday’s “This Week In Review” section. The piece is well researched and well written. In fact, it may be over-written, especially the opening section:

That an air of the enigmatic attends Barack Obama is a commonplace; he is a man of fractured geography and family and wanderings.

He came of age in far corners, Indonesia and Hawaii, went to schools on both coasts and landed in Chicago, where he had no blood tie. With talent and ambition, he has leapt for the presidency at a tender age and will go to Denver to claim his Democratic nomination for the office.

There is to Mr. Obama’s story a Steinbeck quality, like so many migratory American tales: the mother who flickers in and out; the absent and iconic father; the grandfather, raised in the roughneck Kansas oil town of El Dorado, who moves the family restlessly, ceaselessly westward.

The American DNA encodes wanderlust ambition, and a romance clings to Mr. Obama’s story. The roamer who would make himself and his land anew is a familiar archetype.

And yet to describe such a man as rootless, as some people do, can stir up more questions, and an ambivalence reflected in the answers. What is rootlessness anyway? The word connotes something both celebrated and feared. Early on in Mr. Obama’s time in Chicago, the Democratic machine types would ask of this preternaturally calm young pol: Who sent him?

That question, probing and suspicious, has tendrils extending deep into our history. Again and again in American culture, the rootless outsider becomes an insider, and begins to guard his prize.

First he has to find that prize. For four centuries hope and despair pushed immigrants to these shores. Royalist Cavaliers found in the Virginias a new hierarchy. Puritans spread insistently across not always fruitful lands of New England. The Highlands English and Scots no sooner landed in Philadelphia in the 18th century than they lit out for the hills of Pennsylvania and down the mountain ridges of the Appalachians. In their sackcloth and baggy trousers, they were unceremonious and warlike wanderers.

“When I get ready to move, I just shut the door, call the dogs and get started,” is a Highlands saying transposed to a new world. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued in 1893 in his influential “Frontier Thesis” that the key to American vitality could be found in this relentless, drifting movement.

My only quibble with this section is that what Mr. Powell claims as a uniquely American trait is actually a universal one. It transcends every culture. It is the linchpin of every fairy tale, adventure, or fantasy, from “Beowulf” to “Harry Potter” and everything in between.

Every society fears-lionizes the stranger who by dint of talent, vision, unique strength, or magical power overcomes to lead.

After this immensely enjoyable, yet strained, opening, the piece settles down and reaches some surprising conclusions:

Of the two nominees, Sen. John McCain has been the more peripatetic figure, with Obama the more rooted one. Obama is the one who sought out community and has stayed in one place for two decades. He is the one who is not divorced and has raised a family with his wife while Mr. McCain abandoned one family to marry a much younger and wealthier woman.

I hope Mr. Powell stays and that his career flourishes at The Times. I want him to take everything that is good about the place without being infected by its many maladies.

August 25, 2008
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Waging a campaign–Two thoughts

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Both Frank Rich and Bob Herbert had sound advice for the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama on the Op-ed pages of the New York Times this weekend.

Echoing the theme of an essay I’m working on and still hoping to post, Herbert weighed in on Saturday with advice that Obama hew close to economic themes:

I’m all for thoughtful, reasonable, even cerebral candidates. John Wayne has had way too much influence on our politics. (“Bring ’em on.” “Bomb, bomb Iran.”) But if ever there was a presidential campaign that cried out for a populist’s passion, this is it.

The last eight years have been calamitous. We’re struggling with two wars, one of which we never should have started. The economy has tanked big time. The housing market has collapsed and foreclosures have skyrocketed.

Motorists are reeling from high gasoline prices. The financial-services sector is teetering like a skyscraper in an earthquake. Robust budget surpluses have morphed into deficits stretching to the horizon and beyond. And cash-strapped, debt-ridden working families are viewing the future with high anxiety, if not outright fear.

Senator Obama should be invoking F.D.R., who wanted to make the U.S. “a country in which no one is left out.” And Harry Truman, who had no qualms about getting in the face of the political opposition. (“I never gave anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.”) And Robert Kennedy, who wanted the government to get behind a massive effort to rebuild the country and create millions of new jobs.

Senator Obama has been talking about the economy lately, but his approach has been tepid and his remedies vague. The electorate wants more. A so-so appearance in Martinsville, Va., this week warmed up considerably when Senator Obama began talking about jobs and the nation’s infrastructure.

“We need a policy to create jobs here in America,” he said. Suddenly, the crowd was paying closer attention.

That’s what Obama needs to be talking about, Herbert says.

Frank Rich points out that McCain is a man whose time has passed. That Obama needs to work the “Change we can believe in” theme that vanquished the vaunted Clinton machine.

“Change We Can Believe In” was brilliantly calculated for a Democratic familial brawl where every candidate was promising nearly identical change from George Bush. It branded Obama as the sole contender with the un-Beltway biography, credibility and political talent to link the promise of change to the nation’s onrushing generational turnover in all its cultural (and, yes, racial) manifestations. McCain should be a far easier mark than Clinton if Obama retools his act.

What we have learned this summer is this: McCain’s trigger-happy temperament and reactionary policies offer worse than no change. He is an unstable bridge back not just to Bush policies but to an increasingly distant 20th-century America that is still fighting Red China in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in the cold war. As the country tries to navigate the fast-moving changes of the 21st century, McCain would put America on hold.

After reminding Obama that the media is not his friend, that the press would highlight and amplify his presumed faults while glossing over and giving a pass to McCain on real defects, Rich offered the following advice:

What should Obama do now? As premature panic floods through certain liberal precincts, there’s no shortage of advice: more meat to his economic plan, more passion in his stump delivery, less defensiveness in response to attacks and, as is now happening, sharper darts at a McCain lifestyle so extravagant that we are only beginning to learn where all the beer bullion is buried.

But Obama is never going to be a John Edwards-style populist barnburner. (Edwards wasn’t persuasive either, by the way.) Nor will wonkish laundry lists of policy details work any better for him than they did for Al Gore or Hillary Clinton. Obama has those details to spare, in any case, while McCain, who didn’t even include an education policy on his Web site during primary season, is still winging it. As David Leonhardt observes in his New York Times Magazine cover article on “Obamanomics” today, Obama’s real problem is not a lack of detail but his inability to sell policy with “an effective story.”

That story is there to be told, but it has to be a story that is more about America and the future and less about Obama and his past. After all these months, most Americans, for better or worse, know who Obama is. So much so that he seems to have fought off the relentless right-wing onslaught to demonize him as an elitist alien. Asked in last week’sNew York Times/CBS News poll if each candidate shares their values, registered voters gave Obama and McCain an identical 63 percent. Asked if each candidate “cares about the needs and problems of people like yourself,” Obama beat McCain by 37 to 23 percent. Is the candidate “someone you can relate to”? Obama: 55 percent, McCain: 41. Even before McCain told Politico that he relies on the help to count up the houses he owns, he was the candidate seen as the out-of-step elitist.

So while Obama can continue to try to reassure resistant Clinton loyalists in Appalachia that he’s not a bogeyman from Madrassaland, he must also move on to the bigger picture for everyone else. He must rekindle the “fierce urgency of now” — but not, as he did in the primaries, merely to evoke uplifting echoes of the civil-rights struggle or the need for withdrawal from Iraq.

With his choice of vice president in place and the party convention starting this week, the real campaign is about to begin. How will we finish? Obama has to craft a message for the times, a message that will convince America to turn away from the chimera that is McCain to the real solutions that Obama offers.

August 24, 2008
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The war prisoner card

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The presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain in recent weeks has brandished his stint as a war prisoner every time anyone deigned to criticize the good senator. The inimitable Maureen Dowd offered a catalog:

So it’s hard to believe that John McCain is now in danger of exceeding his credit limit on the equivalent of an American Express black card. His campaign is cheapening his greatest strength — and making a mockery of his already dubious claim that he’s reticent to talk about his P.O.W. experience — by flashing the P.O.W. card to rebut any criticism, no matter how unrelated. The captivity is already amply displayed in posters and TV advertisements.

The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, the pastor who married Jenna Bush and who is part of a new Christian-based political action committee supporting Obama, recently criticized the joke McCain made at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally encouraging Cindy to enter the topless Miss Buffalo Chip contest. The McCain spokesman Brian Rogers brought out the bottomless excuse, responding with asperity that McCain’s character had been “tested and forged in ways few can fathom.”

When the Obama crowd was miffed to learn that McCain was in a motorcade rather than in a “cone of silence” while Obama was being questioned by Rick Warren, Nicolle Wallace of the McCain camp retorted, “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous.”

When Obama chaffed McCain for forgetting how many houses he owns, Rogers huffed, “This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison.”

As Sam Stein notes in The Huffington Post: “The senator has even brought his military record into discussion of his music tastes. Explaining that his favorite song was ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba, he offered that his knowledge of music ‘stopped evolving when his plane intercepted a surface-to-air missile.’ ‘Dancing Queen,’ however, was produced in 1975, eight years after McCain’s plane was shot down.”

It is an all-around excuse for Bad Boy McCain. He could commit adultery and engage in rank political corruption because, you guessed it, he was a prisoner in the infamous Hanoi Hilton.

Never mind that he is the least temperamentally suited man  to run for the office since Barry Goldwater, the presidency of the United States is his for the asking simply because he was a war prisoner.

McCain has even not bothered to develop a plan for many of the problems ailing America because we deserve to have him as our president because he’s a prisoner of his and our past.

August 24, 2008
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Second slot

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The New York Times

Obama Chooses Biden as Running Mate

Selection Ends Two-Month Search

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY 6:40 AM ET

Word of Senator Barack Obama’s decision leaked out hours after he had informed Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia that they had not been chosen.

Washington Post:

Biden has served more than 35 years in the Senate, where he has emerged as one of the leading voices in the Democratic Party on foreign policy matters. He is also a two-time presidential candidate. (Photo: AP)

August 23, 2008
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