=^..^=

My first impression that Palin’s veto of an anti-gay bill in Alaska would put off social conservatives was dead wrong (not a surprise, who understands social conservatives anyways?). They gave her a pass based on the fact that she vetoed it under protest and supports a litany of other anti-gay legislation (including the very bill she vetoed!), plus of course the all important abortion question (I swear, social conservatives seem to think the only things wrong with the country are gay people and abortions). Seems Palin has shored up McCain’s credibility with social conservatives, but is that necessarily what McCain needs? The vast majority of social conservatives will come around to supporting the GOP pick in the end. Oh sure, they’ll whine about not having a better choice, but you don’t need to look further than Sen. Brownback numbers to see that they’ll happily simply ignore the existence of one of their own if it means the difference between winning and losing. Simply put, they vote for whoever the GOP gives them. But it’s not unreasonable to suppose that McCain won the nomination, in part, thanks to NOT being a darling of the social conservatives. Putting a staunch social conservative on the ticket may win him a vote or two from the extreme social conservatives who might have otherwise stayed home, but just how many votes will he lose from the Independents or moderate Republicans (who likely gave him the nomination in the first place), by hopping on board the social conservative bandwagon (perhaps George W. Bush saved him a seat?)?

It seems like the GOP has caught on to the fact that Palin effectively obliterates the argument that Obama isn’t experienced enough. Since that’s pretty much the basis of their entire campaign, the new talking point aimed at hanging on to that little sound-byte is that she has more executive experience than Obama and Biden put together. If that’s the route they are going though, seems to me they’re omitting one important fact. McCain has no more executive experience than Obama or Biden. If you buy that executive experience is all that matters, that leaves the top of the GOP ticket worthless. At least Obama has the youthful/fresh-face/change thing going for him (that was what Palin was supposed to bring to the GOP ticket). If executive experience is the only experience that matters, that leaves McCain with NOTHING to run on and he’s the guy they’re actually running for President! Not smart. If you’re going to try to make your argument work by changing the definition of “experience,” you might want to first look at see how such a change effects your guy.

As for the stuff about her pregnant daughter, I don’t really care. At best, it’s an anecdote about the inefficacy of abstinence-only sex education; at worst it’s a big pile of schadenfreude. The only part of it that is moderately interesting (though not surprising) to me is the right-wing response to it. Can you imagine the venom that would have been directed at the child of a unmarried teen Democrat? I mean, it wasn’t even that long ago that Dan Quayle took TV character Murphy Brown to task for having a child out of wedlock and she wasn’t even a teen or, you know, a real person. God forbid it be a teen child of Barack Obama’s having the child, or we may even be treated to hearing all about how such a thing is the result of “black culture.” No, the families of politicians should be off-limits (the same way they should have been when the GOP attacked Michelle Obama earlier this year), and the children of the candidates doubly so. That said, those who are NOT off-limits are the hypocrites who once cited Rush Limbaugh as a poor soul who needed our support as he struggled with the disease of addiction while simultaneously arguing for locking up young black kids who get involved in drugs. And those same people are doing it again.

The McCain campaign has more or less most all it’s eggs in one basket: Obama is too inexperienced to be the president. That’s been the dominant message of the whole campaign. But there is no stronger endorsement for the presidency that a presidential candidate can give than to select someone as their VP. By selecting her as his VP, McCain is saying, “If I can’t be President you are the person, out of the entire nation, I think would do the best job as President.” That’s a much stronger endorsement than any voter (who must select from available choices) can give a given candidate. Either McCain is knowingly not putting the best interest of country first, or he is giving an unsurpassed vote of confidence to Palin’s ability to be President (and not just to be a president, but to be the best president possible other than himself).

That means that, in McCain’s view, experience is not a necessary qualification for the presidency. Yet that’s the polar opposite of the assertion he’s based his entire campaign on up to this point. When he’s reiterated over and over that experience is an integral qualification for the presidency, then suggests that the best candidate for the job (other than himself) is a politician who has none, who is really being the hypocrite?

I don’t really know much about the Alaskan governor, but from a demographic standpoint, I think she stands to help McCain out a bit. The biggest plus for McCain is that she’s a female. There’s still alot of Hillary supporters (though a minority of them) who have made it clear that they have no problem abandoning their liberal principles and ideals if going conservative would put a woman in the White House. Even the blind can see that these votes are the primary reason McCain made this selection, and the impact of it will not be small, as I have little doubt a good number will not object to McCain using them that way. The fact that Palin is young enough to be McCain’s daughter (in fact she is years younger than McCain’s oldest child), could be a double-edged sword for him. On one hand, bringing on somebody even younger than Obama onto the ticket could help reduce the criticism that McCain is too old to understand what’s going on in the modern world. On the other hand, when your VP pick cold be your daughter (and isn’t to far of from a granddaughter’s age), it certainly doesn’t make McCain himself look any younger.

As far as the issues go, I don’t know, and haven’t been able to find too much on her. She’s strongly pro-life which will help McCain with the social conservatives he’s had trouble with. On the other hand, while she opposes gay marriage and supported the state’s constitutional amendment to ban it, she also used her very first veto to block a law that would have taken away benefits from the partners of the state’s gay and lesbian employees, and she *gasp* admits to having gay and lesbian friends. That’s gonna take a huge chunk out of her social conservative street cred, while (with the exception of the self-hating Log Cabin crowd) not buy her any votes from gays and lesbians. In my opinion, one of the biggest issues of this election is the energy crisis. Palin seems to toe the GOP party line on energy with her “let’s drill everywhere” viewpoint. That shouldn’t be a surprise though when you find out that her husband is an oil exec with BP. The solution to the oil problem is not “more oil.” Bringing on such an obvious connection to “Big Oil” could potentially hurt.