The Beltway class whines constantly about how it wants fresh voices in politics, but we guess this means a first-term Democratic Senator rather than a first-term Republican Governor from some godforsaken U.S. state few of them have ever been to.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A sample of some of the spray from the media of late on the Palin candidacy:<\/p>\n
– Eleanor Clift, the McLaughlin Group: “If the media reaction is anything, it’s been literally laughter in many places across newsrooms.”<\/p>\n
– Sally Quinn, Newsweek: “It is a political gimmick . . . I find it insulting to women, to the Republican party, and to the country.”<\/p>\n
– E.J. Dionne, Washington Post: “Palin is, if anything, less qualified for the vice presidency (and the presidency) than [Harriet] Miers was for the court. But there is one big difference: Palin passes all the right-wing litmus tests.”<\/p>\n
– Maureen Dowd, New York Times: “They have a tradition of nominating fun, bantamweight cheerleaders from the West.”<\/p>\n
– Ruth Marcus, Washington Post: “But as a parent in the media, I also know that the Palins assumed this risk. Anyone who watched coverage of the Bush twins’ barroom exploits knew that the avert-your-eyes stance toward candidates’ children has its limits.”<\/p>\n
– Charlie Cook, Beltway pundit, on PBS’s “Charlie Rose”: “I had a friend that had a young person tell them that they had three interviews to get a job as a server at Ruby Tuesday! So this is like putting a whole — for someone that hasn’t played on a national — Geraldine Ferraro had more — Dan Quayle had undergone more scrutiny, had played on a bigger stage than this. This is putting an enormous risk on someone he didn’t know. And he has to just pray that it works!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Watching the Obama\/Biden camp squirm is a lesson in political schizophrenia.<\/p>\n
We are instructed that Mrs. Palin isn’t qualified, because she lacks Washington experience. But until recently that was said to be a virtue in Mr. Obama, who is at the top of his ticket. Meanwhile, there’s hardly a peep of media notice that the Obama campaign is preposterously trying to remake Joe Biden into a poor scrapper from Scranton when he’s been in the Senate for 36 years. They all know Joe. But when Mr. McCain picks an authentic middle-class mother who is also a Governor, we are told she’s not up to the job.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Tonight, in what will undoubtedly be one of the most-watched events of the\u00a0presidential race,\u00a0the American people will find out if in fact she is up to the job. Ostensibly even more so when she enlists her intellect in a VP debate with Joe Blow’s\u00a0mouth.<\/p>\n
That night we may find ourselves witness to one of the most historic debates of all time as most certainly Joe will underestimate Mrs. Palin or will otherwise be incapacitated by her charms and his inability to control his diction in the presence of a lady.<\/p>\n
John McCain is counting on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
They want McCain to be a maverick and then when he acts like one they pounce like hyenas. They want women to assume more dominant roles and when an ascendant, accomplished and confident\u00a0one does, they say she’s too young, too cute, too average,\u00a0too motherly. They want reform and an end to the entrenched policies and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":228,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-08"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/228"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3210\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}