Get That Woman Some Visine!

Put the speaker in a pinstripe suit topped by a head covered in Brylcreem and you could imagine the following tough-guy quote coming out of the mouth of The Great Communicator back in the early 80’s.

“You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war. You can’t blink. So I didn’t blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.”

Only thing is, it wasn’t Ronald “Dutch” Reagan uttering that quote from atop his stallion on his California ranch. It was Sarah Palin. Yes, the AK-47 toting wunderkind Governor from “less-population-than-metro-Pittsburg” Alaska.

But wait. Before you write this off as the rant of a Democratic Party hack, let me tell you a few things I actually like about Sarah Palin.

For starters, I like her faith. For the first time I think we are actually seeing a REAL, no-holds-barred Christian on the path to the White House. For all George Bush’s platitudes, I never once believed he was serious about some of his alleged “faith” commitment. I don’t doubt he’s “religious.” I just doubt he really understands “faith” in the context of compassion.

The religious right played into Bush’s myth of deep faith and pronounced him God’s chosen leader. I, on the other hand, could never get past that smirking, frat boy grin of his. It told me that he said one thing and often meant another. In unguarded moments we heard a different side of Bush, a condescending, profane side that played right along with Cheyney’s legendary gruff edginess.

Palin, on the other hand, strikes me as a woman who understands that her role as a governing leader does not give her carte blanche to impose her faith on those around her. Neither does she impress me as someone for whom claims of faith are taken lightly. Her “faith” indeed appears solidly grounded on consistently Christian doctrine. Those grainy You-Tube videos of her addressing her congregation back in April only confirm for me that she’s the real deal. Where some Democrats felt squirmingly uncomfortable with the unvarnished and passionate nature of what she said, (“Let’s pray that our troops are carrying out God’s Plan”), I heard a woman speaking a language I understood, affirmed, and agreed with. Whether I agree with the fact that our troops were put there in the first place, I do agree that at this point the Christian in me is praying that they are there fulfilling God’s purpose, even if that purpose is as simple as bringing hope of stability to a country we steamrolled in the first place.

So I admit it; I like Sarah Palin’s faith. I believe she’s serious about it, far more so than anybody else in this race, including Obama and McCain. Biden’s a different cat, but then again Irish Catholics are always a little more emotional and overt about their connections to the church, if not their comfort connecting themselves overtly to the name of Jesus Christ. I’m not saying the other guys in this race don’t believe in God, I’m just saying they need to get a lot more comfortable sharing the depth of their faith in real terms before I will believe them. But then again, who am I to judge? (…And entire section of the audience shouts, “Amen!”)

I also think that Palin is “trying” to be a reformer. On this score, though, I think Palin is more reactionary populist than visionary leader. She smelled the pork-laden winds blowing off the hills of the Ketchikan Peninsula and realized that she had a shot to right some egregious wrongs. Even CNN’s “Palin Revealed” report could find scant evidence that her “reformer” label is mere lip service.

Okay, so the fact that she held onto a couple of hundred million bucks in Federal transportation funds when she turned her back from the “Bridge to Nowhere” doesn’t exactly endear her to those of us for whom “doing the right thing” doesn’t mean “doing the right thing as long as I don’t need to give back the cash.” That smacks of a disingenuous politician caught with her hand in the proverbial earmark cookie jar. (“I was for the earmark before I was against it.” What a nice, Kerry-ian parsing of the truth.)

I also like her decision to carry her Down’s Syndrome baby to term. Tough choice for some, easy choice for Christians.

I like the fact that she has a huge extended family around her to help her with her own kids.

Then again…

If she was a little more focused on her family than on her politics, would her daughter be pregnant? That one is up in the air. Bad things happen to good families all the time. I know. I was one of those “bad kids” whose parents could not possibly have been more engaged in their son’s life. I was an embarrassment but they never stopped loving me or supporting me.

If her daughter’s pregnancy should teach Palin anything it is that abstinence talk alone isn’t enough in today’s complicated world. Faith and commitment to abstinence should be as freely taught as any other sex education topic in today’s schools. But the statistics on teen pregnancy in the Christian community show us to be only marginally better at keeping our kids out of the sack with each other before marriage. So is abstinence-only the “best” approach to sex ed when it means that a kid could come home with the clap or pregnant because they don’t get a more inclusive talk on the topic?

I could also do with far less of her condescension about Obama being a “community organizer,” as if being the Mayor of Wasilla and the Governor of Alaska is any more qualification than coming up through the rough-n-tumble politics of the south side of Chicago. Last time I checked Alaska’s total population ranked right up there with the south side of Chicago. I’d call that one a wash.

But that’s quibbling. Obama and Biden have done their best in return to minimize Palin’s street cred when Obama knows full well that as the guy at the top of the ticket he’s open to similar charges of newbie-ness.

So up to this point, Palin is no more thrilling or less thrilling to me than any other candidate. On the one hand I feel more comfortable with her when it comes to hearing the voice of a woman I’d probably bump into at my local church. On the other I feel less comfortable with her because she sounds like just another power-hungry politician.

At the end of the day there are just a couple of things that scare me about Sarah Palin. The things that scare me, though, are show-stoppers.

A penchant for avoidance of “blinking” is one of them.

Sarah Palin’s portrayal of “blinking” as a sign of weakness is the icing on a very rancid cake. It’s the exclamation point on a strident, inflexible sentence that leaves me drawing a long pause.

For a second, let’s jump back to fundamentals.

You want to know what started scaring me about Palin, long before the Gibson interview? “MOTS” Syndrome. Palin’s acceptance speech sounded like so much, “More of the Same.” No new ideas, just the same repetition of old, stale ideas that have long since been exposed as failures.

Anyone who thinks Trickle Down Economics works (tax relief for the rich lets the elite wealthy create jobs for the too-stupid poor) is smoking dope. I’d use the words, “Anyone who thinks Trickle Down Economics works is just plain stupid or greedy,” but that would sound harsh. No, we’ll just leave it at, “smoking dope.” Palin’s penchant for falling lock-step in line with the Bush
“rob from the poor and their miserable entitlements, give to the rich so they can load up on BMWs” tax cutting style is just spouting MOTS.

Anyone who thinks that there is no difference between the need (or desire) for guns in the Alaskan frontier versus the desire (or need) for guns in downtown Philly is just out of touch with reality. Again, I’d like to use stronger language like, “You gotta be high if you think protecting the right to shoot elk is akin to protecting the right to cap your home boy,” but I won’t go there. It’s one thing to defend the right to bear arms in Alaska. It’s entirely another to turn on the nightly news to hear of yet another child gunned down on a Philly street corner knowing that we MUST do something different to stop the scourge of guns in our major cities.

Anyone who thinks that “Drill here, Drill Now, Pay Less” is really going to break America from its dependence on oil is either in the pocket of big oil or just plain naïve. (Or is it greed?) For starters, the amount of effort involved in conducting the environmental impact studies alone make the word “now” mean “10-years-from-now”. Plus, if by “pay less” we mean that those nice oil companies are going to reduce their per-barrel cost just ‘cuz they get more domestic supplies, well, I’d beg to differ. We have more corn than we know what to do with here in the USA, but global food prices are going through the roof because we don’t have the self-restraint to use our land to grow food, not ethanol.

The capper, though, and the reason why this self-professed evangelical looks at Palin and says, “No way!”, is simple.

Palin is nothing more than Clint Eastwood in Versace and Gucci.

Palin’s penchant for knee-jerk, overly simplistic solutions to complex, globally-intricate problems is a nightmarish flashback to previous Republican administrations for whom the solutions were as easy as “Read my lips” and “WMD.”

I look at Sarah Palin and hear Dirty Harry’s words coming out of her mouth. “Do ya feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?”

Why am I so worried? After all, we’re not voting for Palin. Even if Sarah Palin is a little quick on the trigger, she’s not the Presidential candidate.

We are voting for McCain, aren’t we?

Let me ask you a question. Do you really think McCain’s health is going to hold up for eight years in the Presidency, let alone four? As Harrison Ford once put it in the first Indiana Jones movie, “It’s not the age, honey, it’s the mileage.” Take one look at McCain these days and you can see the mileage taking its accumulated toll. He can’t type because of his war injuries. He can barely lift his arms to wave to the (now diminishing) crowds that come out to see him. He has had enough cancer scares to warn off anyone who knows anything about melanoma. Forget the fact that his mother is 96 and spry, she never spent 5 years in the Hanoi Hilton.

So if you’re voting for McCain, you really need to think long and hard about that whole “heartbeat away from the Presidency” thing. It’s not just lip service. Palin would be the heartbeat away and McCain is at an age that makes him closer to his last heartbeat than his first, more so than any prior president.

When I heard Palin utter her now famous, “You can’t blink” comment I winced. “Oh no, not again!” were the first words that came to mind. The reason we are mired in Iraq is because we had a President who failed to “blink.” Further, he was backed up by a complicit, spineless Congress. Perhaps had George, the former governor with the virtually zero international experience, spent more time traveling abroad during his first eight months in office than vacationing at his ranch in Crawford (where he spent a record, month-long vacation after only 7 months in office) he might have been a little more ready to “blink” when the intelligence estimate crossed his desk with the words “Weapons of Mass Destruction” etched in non-redacted black. Perhaps had George been a little more inquisitive and a little less knee-jerk he might have thrown it back in someone’s face and said, “This feels thin. I want more concrete proof before we go spilling young American’s lives for some vague escapade.”

Palin’s unwillingness to “blink” exposes her Achilles heel. She lacks thoughtful depth and reminds me of George W. Bush. She is ready to swing the bazooka over her shoulder faster than she is ready to ask tough questions and dig deeply to unearth answers she may not like.

Palin also perpetuates a myth of American strength that must someday come to an end. You would think, after Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Bear Sterns, Tyco, Enron, and God knows how many other failures before them that Palin would slow down and take stock of America’s balance sheet. We simply aren’t financially or militarily in a position to do anything BUT blink these days. We got to the point where we are because we handed a blank check over to a guy who refused to “blink.” We wanted a guy who wouldn’t “flip flop” and what we got was John Wayne without an intellectual pedigree.

So if there is one thing I’d like to offer Sarah Palin as she fumbles her way along her quest for her next job it’s this; Visine. Once Sarah starts blinking again she’s going to need something to lubricate those eyeballs. Perhaps once she starts blinking again she’ll start to realize that the picture isn’t quite so rosy or easy as it looked like when she pulled the trigger on her candidacy.

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