Skip to main content

Can McCain's Palin Mistake be Corrected?

As in, can she withdraw from the race for one reason or another, making way for McCain to choose someone else? I don't intend to read the rule books to figure that out, but it should be something McCain might have to consider for many reasons. If she does withdraw her VP candidacy, she probably will need to do it before accepting her party's nomination in their convention in a few days. That is unlikely, so this whole post is a futile exercise. Nevertheless, I would like to list the many reasons Palin is the wrong choice for McCain.
  1. Her apparent inexperience in anything non-Alaskan - She has demonstrated that she has no clue about international affairs. Over the last year, she has admitted that she pays little attention to national and international issues because she is too busy governing Alaska.
  2. Untested nationally - She has not been tested on the national stage like Romney and Huckabee. Making the transition from being a 20-month governor of a state with a population of 700,000 to a VP of a nation of 300+ million is an astounding challenge.
  3. Her 17 year-old daughter's pregnancy - It is not totally damaging, but the negative publicity can't help
  4. The bridge-to-nowhere lie - What she advertised as an example of her anti-corruption stance turned out to be false.
  5. Her non-appeal to women - Even tough she was intended to bring it the votes of Hillary's supporters, they could see through the pandering.
  6. Too far to the right - Could she be more "conservative" if she tried? Look at her stance on a lot of social issues. Abortion. Gay rights. Pledge of allegiance in schools. Teaching creationism in schools. Teaching abstinence over safe sex practices.
  7. Environmental policies - While McCain tries to appear like someone who cares about the environment, her view of environmental issues resemble that of Bush in that she thinks they are not real. She does not align with the large majority of Americans who consider environmental issues very relevant. That could hurt McCain.
  8. Shady past - she is under investigation for abuse of power. Reports from an independent investigator are due right before the Nov 4 elections.
  9. McCain does not know Palin - They have no personal history or relationship. He talked to her twice, for a span of 30 minutes before offering her the VP role. That is just nuts by anyone's standards.
Of course, McCain seriously erring on the most important decision of this presidential campaign so far does not bode well for his candidacy greatly. He has to make a decision between sticking with Palin and losing or ditching her to seek a very potent and capable VP like Romney.

Clearly, McCain's decision must have been very impulsive. If his team did serious vetting, they would have thought twice before picking Palin. This really puts their judgment and decision-making abilities in questions. Imagine them making decisions like this in the White House. The world could be in great peril.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Slow Acroread Startup in OpenSuSe 11.0

It takes more than 30 seconds for acroread to load on my Opensuse machine the first time and the startup time gets shorter in subsequent attempts. Why? This is not the first time I have come across this problem of slow application startups in OpenSuse. Apparently a lot of people had encountered this problem and they found a simple solution - uninstalling the version of acroread that comes with OpenSuse and installing one from Adobe site yourself. Fortunately, that prescription seems to have solved the problem. My acroread startup time is a few seconds now. Why does a very good Linux distribution like OpenSuse with its wide support and following make so many of these mistakes?!?! Over the years, I have seen Suse/OpenSuse sending buggy distributions that make you wonder if they do much testing before releasing their distro. Here are a few bugs I have come across: The extremely slow startup of Openoffice in OpenSuse 10.0 was one of the reasons I switched to Fedora Core for a while...
1 comment
Read more

Online Storage Solutions

Problem: I often need to have some files readily available online so that I can access them from any computer. There are many ways to go about solving this problem and each comes with its set of shortcomings: Yahoo! Briefcase - 30MB limit Online storage services like Box.net, Xdrive, MediaMax - usually cost money; signing up is cumbersome Email to myself as an attachment - enough said there It's time to find a home-made solution. The solution I am about to suggest is intended for -- A *NIX user someone with access to a *NIX web server Solution: I am a linux user and I have user level access to a web server. The web server is configured such that the public does not have access to directory structure. So, I would need to write a script that copies my files to the web server and creates an index listing my files. Password protection of the storage would follow after that. Client Side: Use the following script to transfer file to server, make the file readable by public and execu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tax-and-spend Liberal My Ass

This is a continuation of my earlier posts on economic performance of democratic and republican administrations. My earlier posts include: Politics of the Federal Minimum Wage Democrats Have Kept Unemployment Low Democrats care about poor people Truth About Economic Performance of Political Parties I like to think I have shed light on some facts and debunked some conventional wisdom. In this post, I will attempt to examine the tax-and-spend liberal label put on democrats. Republicans often try to label democrats as tax-and-spend liberals who are soft on national security. While the latter point is based on anecdotal evidence, the earlier is amenable to empirical examination. So, I set out to prove or disprove the notion that democrats often tax and spend in a way that does not yield economic growth. The implication of tax-and-spend liberal is one that puts excessive tax burden on its population and finds inefficient (think socialistic) ways of spending that tax reven...
Post a Comment
Read more