The introduction of Sarah Palin has instigated an angry symphony of insults directed towards the veep pick. The main thrust of all the coverage is her “inexperience.” Now mind you, the news media never discussed the “inexperience” of their friend and savior Barack Obama.
Here’s just the facts.
Barack Obama entered the Senate in January 2005 and announced his presidential campaign in February 2007. That’s 25 months.
Sarah Palin took office as Governor of Alaska on December 4, 2006. She was nominated for the Vice Presidency on August 29th 2008. That’s 20 months.
We’re talking about five months difference in a major office here. And Palin has executive experience while Obama sat in the Senate as 1 of 100. The hypocrisy of the mainstream media never ceases to amaze me.
August 30, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I have ceased to be amazed by it, and simply to expect it. Some liberal friend of mine actually tried to argue that Barack has more experience than Palin simply because he has been running for president for so long, putting him in the public eye.
August 30, 2008 at 4:02 pm
She also ran a city. Does it really matter how many people lived there, it’s still a government.
The fact that she’s raised five children, one to adulthood, puts her ahead of Obama in terms of life experience in my book.
August 30, 2008 at 10:11 pm
She’s ahead of Obama because when she speaks, she makes sense.
August 31, 2008 at 3:19 am
She’s running for Vice-President not President so the need for foreign policy experience isn’t so great.
How much experience of that sort did Bill Clinton have when he ran for President?
August 31, 2008 at 5:51 am
Palin is far more qualified to be VP than Obama is to be President.
August 31, 2008 at 10:00 pm
20 months as the governor of an oversized icebox, the mayor of a community the size of my neighborhood and a graduate of the University of Idaho does not impress me.
August 31, 2008 at 11:05 pm
She has accomplished a lot in those 20 months — more than some other governors accomplish in years. See http://beldar.blogs.com/beldarblog/2008/06/alaskas-gov-sar.html
The fact that she has done so much in so little time is far more impressive to me than mere elapsed time in office.
September 1, 2008 at 3:18 am
Anon, I love how Democrats are feminists, until it comes to actually supporting women… Like all those women who got smeared as “trashy” when they had run-ins with the serial-sex-criminal-in-chief.
Alaska’s an “oversized ice-box”. Well done. Obama’s run sweet Fanny Adams (if you know what I mean). Clinton ran Arkensas, the sister-marryin’ capital of the world, where every voter’s “Cletus the slack-jawed yokel”. His “foreign policy experience” consisted of being fellated by white-trash from BOTH Carolinas and BOTH Dakotas and Tennesee, too.
Damn! You Demycrats is so suffistykated!
September 1, 2008 at 3:24 am
And Howard Dean? Vermont’s waay smaller than Alaska (both by population, and area), yet “Dr” Howard Dean was soo impressive to the self-declared “progressives”.
He’s a “Doctor” in the same sense that Kevorkian is.. one of those Doctors who speciallize in taking lives…
September 1, 2008 at 3:33 am
Actually, Mark Steyn said it well:
“Next to her resume, a guy who’s done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of “community organizer” and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.
Second, it can’t be in Senator Obama’s interest for the punditocracy to spends its time arguing about whether the Republicans’ vice-presidential pick is “even more” inexperienced than the Democrats’ presidential one.
Third, real people don’t define “experience” as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong. (On the first point, at the Gun Owners of New Hampshire dinner in the 2000 campaign, I remember Orrin Hatch telling me sadly that he was stunned to discover how few Granite State voters knew who he was.) Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain’t run nothin’ but his mouth. She’s done the stuff he’s merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party’s corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol…”
September 2, 2008 at 2:58 am
Sarah Palin did all of the above with two difficult pregnancies in her life, her own with Trig, and her daughter’s unmarried pregnancy. And she STILL chose life. That shows incredible strength of character, just what this nation needs.
Having given birth to a child with Down syndrome myself in relatively easy circumstances, I know just how difficult that can be. My hat’s off to the steely lady from Alaska! GO SARAH!