Going into McCain's running mate pick, Sarah Palin was probably my second choice -- behind Bobby Jindal but comfortably ahead of any other candidate I could think of. (No idea who was third for me: Pawlenty? I know nothing about him other than that he governs Minnesota.)
I don't quite get the venom directed at her selection from otherwise calm, measured venues like The Volokh Conspiracy. I understand that there's now a shoes-on-opposite feet situation with regard to "experience," though I think it's much easier to defend a neophyte VP than a neophyte president: The former gets all sorts of experience while still being basically an understudy (and attending state funerals).
Anyway she's still a bit of an unknown quantity, sort of like how Barack Obama himself would have been circa October-November 2007. She's generally made great first impressions (also like Obama recently) and has a soaring popularity level. My general sense is that she's actually accomplished things (mainly anti-corruption); by contrast what would you say any of {McCain, Obama, Biden} have actually gotten done in the Senate? She has more executive branch experience than the other three combined, no? (I don't remember whether McCain was ever CEO of a particular company; from their biographies I'm pretty sure neither Obama nor Biden ever started or ran a business, unless I've forgotten something obvious.)
Getting to the point, though, this July 2007 Weekly Standard article by Fred Barnes was, I think, the first in-depth Sarah Palin profile by a national media outlet. It's generally sympathetic, given the point of his bothering to write about her then ("the one shining victory in which a Republican star was born"), and yet these were the things I learned about her in that piece:
Political analysts in Alaska refer to the "body count" of Palin's rivals. "The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah,"
That's a bit fraught, though as long as she's never called herself a "f'g steamroller" I'll ignore my trepidation about whether people with that reputation can avoid spectacular career crashes of their own.
She fired the Alaska Board of Agriculture because it wanted to let the Creamery Board shut down. Think that through: She overhauled a state agency so that she could KEEP ALIVE an anti-free-market government program.
"Though Alaskans tend to be ferociously anti-tax, she persuaded Wasilla voters to increase the local sales tax to pay for an indoor arena and convention center." ...because what on Earth would Wasilla have done without a taxpayer-funded venue?!
Her campaign for governor was bumpy. She missed enough campaign appearances to be tagged "No Show Sarah" by her opponents. She was criticized for being vague on issues. But she sold voters on the one product that mattered: herself.
That passage ends with an oddly backhanded compliment, no?
Barnes also threw in a paragraph about Palin's religious faith, with this quote from her (that I find neither good nor bad): "I believe everything happens for a purpose. In my own personal life, if I dedicated back to my Creator what I'm trying to create for the good . . . everything will turn out fine."
Somewhere else I saw a thread about Palin's opinion of evolution and/or creationism as taught in schools. Just Google her name and the quote "Teach both." I have a fervent opinion -- about the legitimacy of that as a political issue, and the kind of people who have strong opinions either way about it. But that's for another post.
Posted by Matt Bruce at August 30, 2008 05:21 PM