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| Home Front: Politix |
| We Get the Political Candidates We Deserve |
| 2009-07-04 |
| Cutting bait [Mark Steyn] In states far from the national spotlight, politics still attracts normal people. You're a mayor or a state senator or even the governor, but you lead a normal life. The local media are tough on you, but they know you, they live where you live, they're tough on the real you, not on some caricature cooked up by a malign alliance of late-night comics who'd never heard of you a week earlier and media grandees supposedly on your own side who pronounce you a "cancer". Then suddenly you get the call from Washington. You know it'll mean Secret Service, and speechwriters, and minders vetting your wardrobe. But nobody said it would mean a mainstream network comedy host doing statutory rape gags about your 14-year old daughter. You've got a special-needs kid and a son in Iraq and a daughter who's given you your first grandchild in less than ideal circumstances. That would be enough for most of us. But the special-needs kid and the daughter and most everyone else you love are a national joke, and the PC enforcers are entirely cool with it. Most of those who sneer at Sarah Palin have no desire to live her life. But why not try to - what's the word? - "empathize"? If you like Wasilla and hunting and snowmachining and moose stew and politics, is the last worth giving up everything else in the hopes that one day David Letterman and Maureen Dowd might decide Trig and Bristol and the rest are sufficiently non-risible to enable you to prosper in their world? And, putting aside the odds, would you really like to be the person you'd have to turn into under that scenario? National office will dwindle down to the unhealthily singleminded (Clinton, Obama), the timeserving emirs of Incumbistan (Biden, McCain) and dynastic heirs (Bush). Our loss. |
| Posted by:Glenmore |
| #11 Sara's a tribute to the real meaning of independent minded American woman. Politically savvy - no, honorable - yes. F*ck the MSM and the east coast elite weenies, I'll take the Air Alaska flight attendant any day. |
| Posted by: Broadhead6 2009-07-04 22:49 |
| #10 Palin's "weakness" is that she cares about her family. I suppose we'll end up with more politicians like Mark Sanford who don't. |
| Posted by: DMFD 2009-07-04 19:08 |
| #9 McCain lost my respect when he sat out the Abu Ghraib "panties on the head torture" routine. The one sitting senator who could have shut that cr@p down, decided to let GW stew in it for old times sake - piss off old man - once a hero, now a zero. |
| Posted by: Rob06 2009-07-04 16:23 |
| #8 think of 4 years from now, when that Yahoo Dem who won because the the Stevens fiasco will be up fo r the senate... Palin will be a shoo-in for the senate. Then in 2020 she looks to be 11 years away form this with several years in the senate behind her, and all her kids except Trig are adults... She's not done yet, not if she doesn't want to be. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2009-07-04 16:12 |
| #7 If Palin waits until she is just a bit younger than Hillary, that will be the 2024 elections. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2009-07-04 16:07 |
| #6 would you hire Steve Schmidt or any other backstabbing little McCain toadie? Cut their own throats. |
| Posted by: Frank G 2009-07-04 14:05 |
| #5 Personally, I'm all for taking the entire McCain staff (and McCain) out behind the woodshed for a little character-building. I don't like McCain. I've never liked McCain. Palin was the reason I voted, instead of sitting this one out. It's time for McCain to fold the tent and slip back to Arizona, permanently. His "staff" should be unemployed and unemployable. As for the title, it's wrong. We get the political candidates whose ego is so large they're willing to do anything, even murder, to gain power. We'd be better off picking names randomly from the telephone book every two years. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2009-07-04 13:58 |
| #4 Palin can now take up fundraising in a major way and also take on the MSM at the same time. She's young & could well forge a new identity in the process. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2009-07-04 12:35 |
| #3 I confess I don’t understand the point of the McCain staffers in the Vanity Fair hit piece on Palin (and that’s what it is, a hit piece) — if the staffers were so brilliant, why aren’t we addressing ‘President McCain’ today? Memo to Steve Schmidt: when you run a losing campaign, shut up afterwards. I generally like Ms. Palin; she’s a political natural and an engaging figure who connects with a lot of people, and if she’s a welterweight, that was clearly good enough for Alaska. If she made a mistake, it was the very first one — she agreed to sign on to the McCain campaign even though her family life was some stressed, she clearly hadn’t done enough to be ready at a national level (to be a heavyweight) and, most importantly for a politician, she didn’t understand that the McCain campaign was incompetent. It wasn’t clear that McCain was a loser at that point; indeed he was only a point or two behind Obama in August. But a savvy pol would have looked at the internal dynamics and would have predicted that the campaign would falter in the stretch. A lot of non-savvy commenters saw it, and she should have seen it. Sarah didn’t see it, and she didn’t do her homework. That’s her mistake and I’ll bet she sees it now. Now that she has the experience she has (an experience I’d like to avoid for my own family), I wonder if what she might do in the future is, in part, start to deal with the nasty MSM and pols who think that going after family is just fine. She stared down Letterman and made him look a fool; perhaps she can do that to the rest of the MSM. That would be a worthwhile legacy. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2009-07-04 12:21 |
| #2 not-> Note |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2009-07-04 10:54 |
| #1 Not the common cancer across all these points? Our defective press. Before we start hanging politicians, we would be wist to start shooting editors and reporters first. THey have done the most damage to the republic, along with our leftist indoctrination education system and those who have steered it into a union dominated ditch. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2009-07-04 10:53 |