Bye-Bye Pitbull

I hope this will be the last I write of Sarah Palin. The best thing Sarah Palin could do right now is to shut up. Let the McCain camp tear her to shreds and show her sophistication and strength by rising above it all and refusing to engage. Do the “I’m rubber you’re glue” schtick and preserve what’s left of her reputation.

But she won’t do that and in a big way, that’s indicative of the overall Palin problem. She’s not that smart. She’s definitely not sophisticated. And she’s not strong.

Many people equate sophistication with celebrity, money, and the trappings thereof. That’s not what I mean. If being sophisticated meant wearing Valentino, then I’d say she was sophisticated. She wore Valentino very well. But it’s more than that. And that’s what she doesn’t have.

Sarah Palin never built on any of her education, such as it was. Being educated isn’t just earning a degree. It’s taking what you learned and building upon it as you go through life. It’s making what you learn relevant to many facets of life, policy, and ideology. It’s understanding your limitations and building on your strengths. There is no evidence that Sarah Palin has done that in the context of the national stage. She may have done that for her role as a small-state governor. I leave that to the Alaskans to decide. But translating and making relevant that experience on the national stage. Oh no she didn’t.

It is my opinion that when you enter the presidential race, you are leaving yourself open to have your entire life and every word under a microscope. The Clintons had to go through that, and they still do. Barack Obama had to endure that, and he emerged victorious. John McCain has endured it for many years. So cry no tears for Sarah Palin. When she entered this race by accepting, she opened herself to that same scrutiny. My only question remains, why on earth McCain picked her? Oh, I know the stories about how he was forced to over Lieberman or whoever, but in the end, he has to own his shit. He made the choice, he defended it. It’s unseemly for his camp to attack her now.

However much fun it is to watch. Call me cruel, I don’t care. I love this country and she told me I wasn’t part of it. I don’t forgive her that. Own your shit Sarah. You said it, and I believe by your subsequent statements and insinuations you meant it. You hate us urbane, intellectual types because we make you feel dumb. But whether you are smart or not is within your power. You are not dumb, but you are not smart. You do not use your intelligence to make good decisions and that is ultimately what made you unqualified for the highest office in the land.

As for McCain, I do think Campbell Brown says it best:

You are the ones who supposedly vetted her, and then told the American people she was qualified for the job. You are the ones who after meeting her a couple of times, told us she was ready to be just one heartbeat away from the Presidency. If even half of what you say NOW is true, then boy, did you try to sell the American people a bill of goods. If Sarah Palin is the reason some voters chose Barack Obama, that is no one's fault but your own. John McCain, as he so graciously said himself the other night, lost this election. He lost it with your help, your advice, your guidance, and yes, your running mate recommendations. And that is crystal clear to everyone, no matter how hard you try to blame Sarah Palin or anyone else.

She’s exactly right. McCain’s choice of Palin is indicative of his wisdom in general. If it’s true, as it’s rumored, that the only reason she was picked is because she’s A) a woman and B) pro-life, what did that tell us about a candidate running for president during these extremely troubled times? McCain shouldn’t blame Palin, but Palin should blame herself as well for accepting.

As I said, I hope this will be the last I write of this lady, and it will be as long as I don’t continue to hear that she’s ready for national office. To be prepared you have to have an intellectual grasp—or even curiosity—about the world around you. She didn’t. She may have a fine intellectual grasp of Alaska, again, not my state. But she doesn’t look outside it (even when gazing at Putin from her front porch). Folksiness and small town “real” America “values” isn’t going to do us jack shit against this failing economy and our troubles overseas. Can we please, finally, realize it takes exceptional intelligence to run this country and that is what we elected?

Everyone can grow up to be President. But not everyone deserves it. Please, let’s hear no more about Ms. Palin except in context of Alaska.

Oh, and if I were her—after getting treated like this by the McCain’s—I’d totally keep the clothes.

Madeline Kahn, You're On

I can often come across as disparaging of the average American, and their decision making process. And I am frustrated by it. But I do realize that it’s not wholly their fault. Americans are busy, they’re tired, and they simply don’t have the time to pay attention the way it’s needed.

Productivity increases occur year after year. Every new technology creates a new efficiency. My primary job over the last decade and more was in process improvement. My job was to increase efficiencies, both through human and technological processes, with reasonable but not barricading checkpoints to ensure a greater output. In short, my job was to increase productivity in the workplace.

What about increasing productivity in our lives? Where does that come from?

Over the weekend Sarah Palin tried to explain the wardrobe malfunction. The problem is, for those of us long opposed to her and to independent undecideds, it’s just not good enough. It’s not the clothes, stupid. It’s the disingenuousness that is Sarah Palin. She no more said thanks but no thanks to a $150,000 wardrobe than she said thanks but no thanks to the bridge to nowhere. She said bring it on until it became unpopular and then kept the money anyway. She isn’t against earmarks, she requested more per capita than Obama ever did. The problem isn’t her clothes, it’s her shallowness. She’s like the kid caught with the cookie crumbs all over her, but still refuses to admit she raided the cookie jar.

Everything about this woman seems perfect until you scratch the surface. That’s the problem with the clothes. Not that she has them, but that she wasn’t honest about them. If her consignment shop clothes are good enough for her now, why did she ever jettison them in the first place? I’m sympathetic, as I wrote here, about her need for the clothes. What I have a problem with is how it’s approached. She allowed herself to be packaged and when it didn’t work, she blames the gift wrapping. If she’s such a maverick and willing to take on her own party, why would she cave so completely on something as simple as a wardrobe?

Nordstrom, Saks, Neiman’s, etc. all put these big tags on the more expensive clothes so that people can’t wear them once then return them. Now the campaign is claiming some or most of them have been returned. Remove the tag and you can’t return the item. Returning them after they’ve been worn is tantamount to shoplifting.

The Republican Party has underestimated the power of Internet communications. They are campaigning as if blogs, YouTube, Google News, and The Daily Show didn’t exist. And it’s biting them. Just like the bridge lie, this is the clothing lie (not to mention the science lie, provided to me by a former classmate who I won’t name because I don’t have his permission). And all of them could have been easily avoided.

Wouldn’t this have been better? “I listened to the people and once they made clear we didn’t want that bridge to nowhere I instead put the money towards more worthwhile projects. I hate earmarks but had to work with the system as it stood because that was the only way to get what was needed to get done. Knowing how broken the system is, I’m in a strong position to change it. See here, here, and there where I made change where I could. Now put me in a better position to make change where it matters.”

Or this: “The clothes? You’re seriously talking about my clothes? Of course I needed new clothes. Didn’t you see what happened to Hillary in the primaries where Glamour and People and all kinds of fashion magazines picked her apart? Didn’t she herself say, near tears, that she needed a lot of help (referring to hair dressers, stylists, and makeup artists) to get through each day? It’s tough to be a woman in politics. Hillary knows what I’m talking about. Yeah, they bought me clothes and yeah, I’m going to pay the taxes on them. Nothing’s free and no one knows that better than women trying to crack that glass ceiling.”

And with the science lie, she once again proves her shallowness in thinking the American people will laugh at the concept of studying the fruit fly without really understanding what that science gains, for all of us.

The list just goes on. But it takes too much time to explain why her lack of intellectual appreciation of science or her skim-the-surface understanding of the earmark and budget system (and why it’s developed) so the wardrobe malfunction becomes what I—and the blogosphere—use to highlight her inherent problem. Which is her complete cynicism about what is really troubling America. She thinks a few folksy winks and stories about her earrings will fool people into thinking she “gets” the issues. But Americans have interesting instincts.

I’m a fashion-aholic and I have no problem with her wearing Valentino and Jimmy Choo. But as a political junkie, I have a problem with her trying to claim one status while portraying another. I have a problem with her attempts to snow the voters. Because Americans are busy, tired, weary, and over-inundated with sound bites. Here I am, with no kids and on a sabbatical from work and I can barely find the time to do all that’s needed to run a simple two-person household and keep up with election, war, and economic news. McCain and Palin are abusing that, and it’s going badly and I find it, as Bill Maher does, cynical; cynical to constantly think that the American people are so stupid as to fall for these tropes.

I can’t trust the American independent voter. I don’t believe they are applying any more judgment in this election than they did in 2004. But Obama is keying into what they want now and need in a way that Bush did in 2004 and in which McCain and Palin so spectacularly are not doing now. And at least Obama is trying to find a way to increase productivity in people’s lives. Worries about healthcare are a constant drain. Worrying about the wars is a constant headache. Worrying about the price of gas and how we can wean ourselves off of it is nonstop acid reflux.

At some point Americans are going to have to start demanding increased productivity in their lives so as to better understand how they live them. And the only way to do that is to decrease the demands on our lives. I do believe this is a first step in this process, by shrugging off the politics as usual (Obama, no matter what you think of him, is anything but usual). The 30-second sound bite as the basis for a decision must die.

Secret Agenda? Another Inane Conspiracy Theory

For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against “liberal elitists” and “leftist intellectuals.” Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.

I have a hard time believing that conservative intellectuals are surprised that the above situation is happening. This conservative intellectual criticism has been a building trend this election with one after another coming out of the closet to either endorse Obama, criticize Palin, and/or question McCain.

Conspiracy Theory Alert Ahead …

The fear of the Republicans this election year was that the base wouldn’t come out to vote because of their deep suspicion of McCain. I think that was an empty fear when, while they may hate McCain, no way would they stand for an Obama presidency either. So there was no need to pander to the base with the Sarah Palin pick. As long as they stayed away from Lieberman, any of the other picks would have been fine and the social conservatives would have come out in the end.

But the independents had already started turning towards Obama during the Democratic primary season. Conservative intellectuals started to smell defeat. Their candidate was old and had eight years of mucking up his record on the national stage. The social conservatives weren’t playing along but any attempt to oust them from the party at this stage would be too obvious. So throw Palin in the mix and the social conservatives are mollified once again that they’re the true base of the Republican Party.

But what if it was all a trick? A strategy to schism the party and return the GOP to its economic conservative roots?

Like my earlier crackpot theory about Sarah Palin as the tool to discredit women, this one rests on the premise that the Republicans know they are going to lose this election and so decided some good must come of it, for them. By picking a member of the religious right wing as the VP, McCain seems to be acknowledging the religious conservatives’ crucial role in the Republican Party, but perhaps it’s just to set them up as a handy scapegoat when he loses. Was this plan all along?

If McCain loses (and today’s projections are more dismal for him than ever with Obama polling at 354-375—depending on which electoral vote mapping site you use), conservative intellectuals will blame the Palin pick. The social/religious conservatives will blame McCain and the conservatives who tanked Palin in the op-eds and endorsements. With the Democrats in control of the executive and legislative branches of government, the Republicans could actually have the breathing room to fix what’s gone wrong in their party. And they need to.

It’s already happening, the RNC is pulling out of races where hardcore social conservative candidates are having trouble (Bachman and Musgrave—far right conservatives—most notably) and the social conservatives are threatening to pull money from the RNC. They should. The Republican Party has done nothing to reward this group for the 2000 and 2004 elections. If Obama wins, Roe v. Wade will not even be in play for another 30-40 years. What will they run on then? The Republican Party does not need, in a post-Obama administration, the rabble rousing over abortion and gay marriage. They need to hunker down to the ideological roots of their party, fiscal conservative economics.

It does not say good things about our country that the race for the leadership of the free world devolves into such petty attacks as we have seen. We need to expunge the fringe politics from our executive branch and put them where they belong, in the Congress.

Green Party members, Libertarians, and extreme social conservatives take note. You are never going to win the executive branch and actually enact your policies while under the umbrella of a major party (what’s George W. Bush done for you lately?). Far-left liberals, Nader is never going to win the White House. The better bet would be for all these other movements to disengage from the two major parties and start actively supporting candidates for Congress under their own label. Let the two major parties continue to duke it out for Senate and the White House, start infiltrating the House. The House is supposed to be the party of the people and should have all the bickering, fighting, compromise, and deal-making that people do. Start building the foundations of your own parties in the House of Representatives and make the House truly represent the people.

Naturally these smaller parties would caucus with one of the two larger parties. Or even, gasp, with each other on certain issues that they can agree upon from time to time. From that stage, under their own labels, they could have a larger voice than the position they are now in, buried under the umbrella of the major two parties. But these groups must be realistic and know that the White House, or even the Senate, is not in play and won’t be for decades or centuries to come.

In the meantime, I will happily sit back and watch the fighting happen starting November 5. Coming up next, my virtual shopping spree where I try to come up with a $150,000 wish list at Neiman Marcus.

The Empress's New Clothes

… if voters aren't turned off by Palin's many other egregious missteps, I doubt a stack of designer receipts will sway many minds. And really, should it?

No, it won’t. And no, it shouldn’t. This story is something to write about given the lack of anything else.

Like it or not, the long Democratic primary season released everything there is about Obama. Hillary did a bigger favor to Barack than I think anyone gives her credit for. Ayers, ACORN, Rezko, Wright all yesterday’s news. McCain can try what he likes in bringing it up now, but all of us have heard it before. We heard the questions asked, we heard the answers, we’re satisfied. We heard it ad nausea then. The media was all over it. Maybe Republicans weren’t paying as much attention then, but the rest of us were, Democrats and independents. That’s why we aren’t interested now. We decided we could forgive or forget those associations.

Because that’s what everyone has to do, regardless of whom they are supporting. Politicians don’t become who they are without making some bad associates or some bad decisions. What we the voters have to decide is whose sins are more or less acceptable. And everyone needs to understand what judgments they are making by doing this. Yes, a tenuous connection with someone like Ayers is not as big a deal to me as the fully unethical behavior of the Keating 5; flipping on every major issue in the last eight years in an obviously opportunistic manner; and picking an unqualified person as his VP in a blatant and cynical pander to Hillary supporters (like we’d really rally to someone from the fundy Christian right).

McCain and Palin aren’t throwing up new ideas nor are they making their policy proposals sound viable. What they are doing isn’t resonating with anyone except those who wouldn’t vote for Obama even if he literally turned water into Bud Light right in front of their very eyes.

Then McPalin hands us the perfect piece to fill up the time. My obsessive attention to the news during election cycles allowed me to literally watch the evolution of this story. It started in the blogs and stayed there until the furor became so great the MSM had to at least report that it was being reported upon. And it’s a damn good selling headline. The populist Jane Six Pack in Tahiri. The woman who claims real Americans only live in small towns sporting Valentino like a New York City society dame. The hockey mom sporting designer labels people only know about because of Oscar night.

That and the fact that McCain isn’t giving the media anything new to report on. They’re sounding the same old tired sound bites while Obama is kicking off foreign policy summits. They don’t realize that people, in quite possibly electing the first black president, understand that the low-income employees at ACORN trying to make quota are surely not the most egregious example of voter fraud in the history of this country. His very skin reminds us of what real voter fraud and suppression is.

What is McCain giving them other than Caribou Barbie’s latest antics? He cries that Obama is a socialist, which the MSM dutifully reports, but upon further investigation it turns out that McCain is for some even more socialist programs than Obama’s progressive tax distribution (a position that McCain once supported himself). Fake Virginians, fake Americans, and I guess anti-Americans are actually voters too no matter how much Palin wishes we weren’t.

So don’t blame the media for a hot story that has people clicking through slideshows. McCain and Palin need to provide something new. And if the only new thing they provide costs $150,000 at Needless Markup, well, they have no one to blame but themselves.