McCain and his crew are brilliant strategists. Palin has become a national fascination, how couldn’t she be? All the questions, all the resulting “huh?” from trying to parse her record with her story.
With no resolution or concrete understanding in sight, the din of the resonating media feedback loop she’s in the center of, and we’re pouring energy into, has hijacked this campaign and stymied the meaningful and very important national discussion about the differences between McCain and Obama, and where each plan to take our country if elected.
To me, I can’t help but think this was exactly the effect McCain et al wanted, and we are all complicit in allowing this to continue.
Of course it is important to know who the VP pick is, and what they stand for, but it’s also essential to know when we’re being played, and to respond accordingly.
A brilliant political maneuver, feeding us Palin, but inciting and leveraging our folksy and ignorant bravura, fears, and addiction to gossip as a means to become president suggests one candidate is doing this not for us, but for himself. If he’s willing to select a VP who’s moment of national fame probably should have come from a brawl with her family on the Jerry Springer show I strongly suspect that his behavior as commander and chief will be equally manipulative and self-serving.
Reaching out to our lesser selves will produce a lesser country.
We’ve already had eight years of that.
I don’t think McCain wants to be our president, I think he wants to preside. There’s a huge difference.
He has an agenda and, based on the way he’s run his campaign and political life over the past several years, seems to be willing to do whatever is necessary to make it to the oval office.
For the sake of our future I think it is essential that we bring the focus of the national discussion surrounding this campaign back to the essential challenges facing our nation, and how the two nominees plan to deal with them.
Taking four years off from working through the serious issues to be potentially amused by the antics of a politically savvy grumpy old man prisoner of war hero, and an inexperienced, say whatever it takes to win politician who seems to really believe not only her own bullshit but the bullshit others write for her, will be, in my opinion, a terrible, terrible mistake.
The more I think about it the more McCain/Palin = Bush/Cheney, and I don’t want four more years of that for you or me.
Less Palin, more (national, global issues)/(McCain v. Obama) = Future.