Frank Rich on mccain and palin
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jose-uno
Sep 7, 2008, 10:49:25 PM9/7/08
to NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL FORUM 1
Palin and McCain's Shotgun Marriage
Sunday 07 September 2008
»
by: Frank Rich, The New York Times
Palin serves as a distraction in the campaign. (Photo: Kevin Tracy)
Sarah Palin makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he
seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the
time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech -
longer even than Barack Obama's - you half-expected some brazen
younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him
a gold watch and the bum's rush.
Still, attention must be paid. McCain's address, though largely a
repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy,
reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to
bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took
his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to
Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn't smug or nasty.
The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.
As is nakedly evident, the speech's central argument, that the 72-
year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as
president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of
it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with
Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his
party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption
and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops
on the most destructive policies of the president who remained
nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second
most popular love that dare not speak its name.)
Even more fraudulent, if that's possible, is the contrast between
McCain's platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the
man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: 'I've
been called a maverick.' If there was any doubt that that McCain has
fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah
Palin.
We still don't know a lot about Palin except that she's better at
delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant
daughter's right to privacy even as she would have the government
intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of
the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is
fiction.
She didn't say 'no thanks' to the 'Bridge to Nowhere' until after
Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for
$223 million in taxpayers' money anyway. Far from rejecting federal
pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share
of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita
average in other states). Though McCain claimed 'she has had national
security as one of her primary responsibilities,' she has never issued
a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her
'executive experience' as mayor, she told her hometown paper in
Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: 'It's not rocket
science. It's $6 million and 53 employees.' Her much-advertised
crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a
bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.
How long before we learn she never shot a moose?
Given the actuarial odds that could make Palin our 45th president,
it would be helpful to know who this mystery woman actually is.
Meanwhile, two eternal axioms of our politics remain in place.
Americans vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. And in
judging the top of the ticket, voters look first at the candidates'
maiden executive decision, their selection of running mates. Whatever
we do and don't know about Palin's character at this point, there is
no ambiguity in what her ascent tells us about McCain's character and
potential presidency.
He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his
vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done
so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. 'God
only made one John McCain, and he is his own man,' said the shafted
Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a
pathetic dupe. McCain is now the man of James Dobson and Tony Perkins.
The 'no surrender' warrior surrendered to the agents of intolerance
not just by dumping his pal for Palin but by moving so far to the
right on abortion that even Cindy McCain seemed unaware of his radical
shift when being interviewed by Katie Couric last week.
That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst
leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about
McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous
personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making
process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct
over facts, potentially reckless.
As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily
vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates
responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article.
After all, The Washington Post had cited McCain aides (including his
campaign manager, Rick Davis) last weekend to assure us that Palin had
a 'full vetting process.' She had been subjected to 'an F.B.I.
background check,' we were told, and 'the McCain camp had reviewed
everything it could find on her.'
The Times had it right. The McCain campaign's claims of a 'full
vetting process' for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical
details they've invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background
check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke
to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did
anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the
center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even
bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper.
Apparently when McCain said in June that his vice presidential vetting
process was basically 'a Google,' he wasn't joking.
This is a roll of the dice beyond even Bill Clinton's imagination.
'Often my haste is a mistake,' McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir,
'but I live with the consequences without complaint.' Well, maybe it's
fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his
country? Should the unexamined Palin prove unfit to serve at the
pinnacle of American power, it will be too late for the rest of us to
complain.
We've already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain
can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might
have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he
out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a
role in 9/11 - even after both American and foreign intelligence
services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of
the supposed evidence of Saddam's W.M.D. and in his estimate of the
number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late
2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn't until months
after 'Mission Accomplished' that he called for more American forces
to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been
prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted
the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.
In other words, McCain's hasty vetting of Palin was all too
reminiscent of his grave dereliction of due diligence on the war. He
has been no less hasty in implying that we might somehow ride to the
military rescue of Georgia ('Today, we are all Georgians') or in
reaffirming as late as December 2007 that the crumbling anti-
democratic regime of Pervez Musharraf deserved 'the benefit of the
doubt' even as it was enabling the resurgence of the Taliban and Al
Qaeda. McCain's blanket endorsement of Bush administration policy in
Pakistan could have consequences for years to come.
'This election is not about issues' so much as the candidates'
images, said the McCain campaign manager, Davis, in one of the
season's most notable pronouncements. Going into the Republican
convention, we thought we knew what he meant: the McCain strategy is
about tearing down Obama. But last week made clear that the McCain
campaign will be equally ruthless about deflecting attention from its
own candidate's deterioration.
What was most striking about McCain's acceptance speech is that it
had almost nothing in common with the strident right-wing convention
that preceded it. We were pointedly given a rerun of McCain 2000 -
cobbled together from scraps of the old Straight Talk repertory. The
ensuing tedium was in all likelihood intentional. It's in the
campaign's interest that we nod off and assume McCain is unchanged in
2008.
That's why the Palin choice was brilliant politics - not because
it rallied the G.O.P.'s shrinking religious-right base. America loves
nothing more than a new celebrity face, and the talking heads marched
in lock step last week to proclaim her a star. Palin is a high-energy
distraction from the top of the ticket, even if the provenance of her
stardom is in itself a reflection of exactly what's frightening about
the top of the ticket.
By hurling charges of sexism and elitism at any easily cowed
journalist who raises a question about Palin, McCain operatives are
hoping to ensure that whatever happened in Alaska with Sarah Palin
stays in Alaska. Given how little vetting McCain himself has received
this year - and that only 58 days remain until Nov. 4 - they just
might pull it off.
Sunday 07 September 2008
»
by: Frank Rich, The New York Times
Palin serves as a distraction in the campaign. (Photo: Kevin Tracy)
Sarah Palin makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he
seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the
time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech -
longer even than Barack Obama's - you half-expected some brazen
younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him
a gold watch and the bum's rush.
Still, attention must be paid. McCain's address, though largely a
repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy,
reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to
bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took
his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to
Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn't smug or nasty.
The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.
As is nakedly evident, the speech's central argument, that the 72-
year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as
president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of
it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with
Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his
party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption
and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops
on the most destructive policies of the president who remained
nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second
most popular love that dare not speak its name.)
Even more fraudulent, if that's possible, is the contrast between
McCain's platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the
man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: 'I've
been called a maverick.' If there was any doubt that that McCain has
fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah
Palin.
We still don't know a lot about Palin except that she's better at
delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant
daughter's right to privacy even as she would have the government
intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of
the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is
fiction.
She didn't say 'no thanks' to the 'Bridge to Nowhere' until after
Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for
$223 million in taxpayers' money anyway. Far from rejecting federal
pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share
of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita
average in other states). Though McCain claimed 'she has had national
security as one of her primary responsibilities,' she has never issued
a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her
'executive experience' as mayor, she told her hometown paper in
Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: 'It's not rocket
science. It's $6 million and 53 employees.' Her much-advertised
crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a
bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.
How long before we learn she never shot a moose?
Given the actuarial odds that could make Palin our 45th president,
it would be helpful to know who this mystery woman actually is.
Meanwhile, two eternal axioms of our politics remain in place.
Americans vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. And in
judging the top of the ticket, voters look first at the candidates'
maiden executive decision, their selection of running mates. Whatever
we do and don't know about Palin's character at this point, there is
no ambiguity in what her ascent tells us about McCain's character and
potential presidency.
He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his
vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done
so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. 'God
only made one John McCain, and he is his own man,' said the shafted
Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a
pathetic dupe. McCain is now the man of James Dobson and Tony Perkins.
The 'no surrender' warrior surrendered to the agents of intolerance
not just by dumping his pal for Palin but by moving so far to the
right on abortion that even Cindy McCain seemed unaware of his radical
shift when being interviewed by Katie Couric last week.
That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst
leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about
McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous
personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making
process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct
over facts, potentially reckless.
As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily
vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates
responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article.
After all, The Washington Post had cited McCain aides (including his
campaign manager, Rick Davis) last weekend to assure us that Palin had
a 'full vetting process.' She had been subjected to 'an F.B.I.
background check,' we were told, and 'the McCain camp had reviewed
everything it could find on her.'
The Times had it right. The McCain campaign's claims of a 'full
vetting process' for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical
details they've invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background
check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke
to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did
anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the
center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even
bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper.
Apparently when McCain said in June that his vice presidential vetting
process was basically 'a Google,' he wasn't joking.
This is a roll of the dice beyond even Bill Clinton's imagination.
'Often my haste is a mistake,' McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir,
'but I live with the consequences without complaint.' Well, maybe it's
fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his
country? Should the unexamined Palin prove unfit to serve at the
pinnacle of American power, it will be too late for the rest of us to
complain.
We've already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain
can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might
have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he
out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a
role in 9/11 - even after both American and foreign intelligence
services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of
the supposed evidence of Saddam's W.M.D. and in his estimate of the
number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late
2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn't until months
after 'Mission Accomplished' that he called for more American forces
to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been
prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted
the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.
In other words, McCain's hasty vetting of Palin was all too
reminiscent of his grave dereliction of due diligence on the war. He
has been no less hasty in implying that we might somehow ride to the
military rescue of Georgia ('Today, we are all Georgians') or in
reaffirming as late as December 2007 that the crumbling anti-
democratic regime of Pervez Musharraf deserved 'the benefit of the
doubt' even as it was enabling the resurgence of the Taliban and Al
Qaeda. McCain's blanket endorsement of Bush administration policy in
Pakistan could have consequences for years to come.
'This election is not about issues' so much as the candidates'
images, said the McCain campaign manager, Davis, in one of the
season's most notable pronouncements. Going into the Republican
convention, we thought we knew what he meant: the McCain strategy is
about tearing down Obama. But last week made clear that the McCain
campaign will be equally ruthless about deflecting attention from its
own candidate's deterioration.
What was most striking about McCain's acceptance speech is that it
had almost nothing in common with the strident right-wing convention
that preceded it. We were pointedly given a rerun of McCain 2000 -
cobbled together from scraps of the old Straight Talk repertory. The
ensuing tedium was in all likelihood intentional. It's in the
campaign's interest that we nod off and assume McCain is unchanged in
2008.
That's why the Palin choice was brilliant politics - not because
it rallied the G.O.P.'s shrinking religious-right base. America loves
nothing more than a new celebrity face, and the talking heads marched
in lock step last week to proclaim her a star. Palin is a high-energy
distraction from the top of the ticket, even if the provenance of her
stardom is in itself a reflection of exactly what's frightening about
the top of the ticket.
By hurling charges of sexism and elitism at any easily cowed
journalist who raises a question about Palin, McCain operatives are
hoping to ensure that whatever happened in Alaska with Sarah Palin
stays in Alaska. Given how little vetting McCain himself has received
this year - and that only 58 days remain until Nov. 4 - they just
might pull it off.
LESLIE DOYLE
Sep 8, 2008, 9:50:02 AM9/8/08
to NEW-YORK-TIMES-E...@googlegroups.com
Highlights of, Jose's, article:
"Sarah Palin makes John McCain look even older than he is.
What was most striking about McCain's acceptance speech is that it
had almost nothing in common with the strident right-wing convention
that preceded it. We were pointedly given a rerun of McCain 2000 -
cobbled together from scraps of the old Straight Talk repertory. The
ensuing tedium was in all likelihood intentional."
"Sarah Palin makes John McCain look even older than he is.
that the 72-
year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as
president, is a non sequitur.
year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as
president, is a non sequitur.
She didn't say 'no thanks' to the 'Bridge to Nowhere' until after
Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for
$223 million in taxpayers' money anyway. Far from rejecting federal
pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share
of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita
average in other states). Though McCain claimed 'she has had national
security as one of her primary responsibilities,' she has never issued
a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her
'executive experience' as mayor, she told her hometown paper in
Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: 'It's not rocket
science. It's $6 million and 53 employees.'
Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for
$223 million in taxpayers' money anyway. Far from rejecting federal
pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share
of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita
average in other states). Though McCain claimed 'she has had national
security as one of her primary responsibilities,' she has never issued
a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her
'executive experience' as mayor, she told her hometown paper in
Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: 'It's not rocket
science. It's $6 million and 53 employees.'
His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous
personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making
process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct
over facts, potentially reckless.
As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily
vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates
responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article.
After all, The Washington Post had cited McCain aides (including his
campaign manager, Rick Davis) last weekend to assure us that Palin had
a 'full vetting process.' She had been subjected to 'an F.B.I.
background check,' we were told, and 'the McCain camp had reviewed
everything it could find on her.'
The Times had it right. The McCain campaign's claims of a 'full
vetting process' for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical
details they've invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background
check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke
to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did
anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the
center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even
bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper.
personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making
process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct
over facts, potentially reckless.
As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily
vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates
responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article.
After all, The Washington Post had cited McCain aides (including his
campaign manager, Rick Davis) last weekend to assure us that Palin had
a 'full vetting process.' She had been subjected to 'an F.B.I.
background check,' we were told, and 'the McCain camp had reviewed
everything it could find on her.'
The Times had it right. The McCain campaign's claims of a 'full
vetting process' for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical
details they've invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background
check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke
to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did
anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the
center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even
bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper.
That same month he
out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a
role in 9/11 - even after both American and foreign intelligence
services found that unlikely.
He
out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a
role in 9/11 - even after both American and foreign intelligence
services found that unlikely.
He
has been no less hasty in implying that we might somehow ride to the
military rescue of Georgia.....
What was most striking about McCain's acceptance speech is that it
had almost nothing in common with the strident right-wing convention
that preceded it. We were pointedly given a rerun of McCain 2000 -
cobbled together from scraps of the old Straight Talk repertory. The
ensuing tedium was in all likelihood intentional."
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