Sarah Palin Vs. the D.C. Beltway Establishment Mindset

If you are a typical D.C. beltway pundit, you are likely to see the selection of Sarah Palin as V.P. as some sort of ludicrous pseudo affirmative action move of a candidate that is wholly unqualified. For the most part, you come to this conclusion because Palin's experience comes from being mayor of a small town and governor of a small state (at least in terms of population) and thus you aren't up to the job of being part of a national ticket. In other words, politics in small towns and states just aren't sophisticated like they are in big states and on a national level. I could find dozens of examples but I will merely mention two. Here is one.

Palin is the epitome of tokenism, exactly what conservative Republicans have always claimed to scorn, until today, as the politics of quotas and political correctness. Even Rush Limbaugh is a feminazi now (at least until Election Day).

But if Palin's résumé is limited, to put it politely, she possesses the only two qualities that McCain now seems to consider essential: She is a right-wing religious ideologue with female gender characteristics. Suddenly that is all anyone needs to qualify as a potential commander in chief of the world's most powerful military. We probably won't hear so much from now on about "experience" and "judgment," McCain's vaunted standard for the presidency until ... today. We certainly won't hear again about the "person most prepared to take my place," the phrase he has used more than once to describe his main criterion for a running mate.

When CNN political correspondent Dana Bash interviewed McCain last April, she mentioned his joke that one of the two main tasks of the vice president is to check on the president's health every day, a job of particular importance in his case. What did he mean by that? It was just a humorous remark, he said. But when she pressed him further, McCain said: "I think about whether that person who I select would be most prepared to take my place. And that would be the key criteria [sic]."

Sometime between then and now, a focus group must have told McCain and his handlers that the experience argument wasn't cutting against Barack Obama, that the nomination of Joe Biden as Obama's running mate had eviscerated it completely -- and that instead he and his consultants had better find a way to corral disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters, or forget about winning come November.

Now, what you will notice is that in this rather lengthy trashing of Palin's record there is not one bit of examination of her record. Here is yet another example.

Newsweek's Eleanor Clift disclosed on the McLaughlin Group -- seemingly without any compunction for how she was outing her fellow journalists as behaving the same way as Barack Obama's campaign staff, but I suppose we already knew that intuitively -- that John McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for VP was greeted by “literally laughter” in “very many newsrooms.”

From the show taped on Friday at Washington, DC's CBS affiliate and airing at various times over the weekend around the nation, mostly on PBS stations:

ELEANOR CLIFT: This is not a serious choice. It makes it look like a made for TV movie. If the media reaction is anything, it's been literally laughter in many places across news- JOHN

McLAUGHLIN, TALKING OVER CLIFT: Where is that? See that? CLIFT: In very, very many newsrooms.

Why were they laughing? It's because Palin had never been interviewed by any of them. Now, I myself am troubled by her lack of foreign policy experience, but I have also examined her record and she has a remarkable record of accomplishment. While Joe Biden is seen as ready simply because he has spent an awful lot of time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, no one ever asks exactly what he did while on the committee. The truth is that while he has been in the Senate quite a while, his record of accomplishment is entire marginal and mediocre. The beltway establishment philosophy says that being part of the D.C. establishment is what matters even if that time is marginal and unaccomplished.

Beltway establishment believes that it is easier to have record of cutting taxes in a small town, than it is to have no record of significance in D.C. After all, what do you think anyone in the D.C. beltway believes about Palin's record of cutting property taxes in Wasilla, Alaska by 40% while she was mayor. To them, Joe Biden merely being head of the Foreign Relations Committee is more important and makes him more qualified than her record of accomplishment in a small town. Th reality is that the few thousand people that saved money on their taxes are a few thousand more than EVER saved money on their taxes by any policies that either Biden or Obama every made any significant contribution to.

I for one think she has plenty of gravitas as this interview on energy clearly points out.



I listened to this interview and I am convinced that on the issue of energy, is that going to be important, she is a lot more qualified and ready than anyone else on either ticket. Her point that both Biden and Obama have a "naive" vision that we can simply move immediately from oil to renewables without finding a stop gap while that technology grows and flourishes is dead on. Exactly what did all of Biden's experience bring him when his entire energy policy based on the naive notion that we'll just invest in nebulous alternative energy sources, wave a magic wand, and suddenly become energy independent.

That of course is the fallacy of the inside the beltway mentality. They want change but think you can only learn something by being around themselves and others like them. Furthermore, the beltway mentality has an antiquated and outdated view of experience. It isn't important what positions you held. Joe Biden has been around for a long time and frankly he's accomplished little if anything. That isn't experience but simply a lifetime politician. This is what we are trying to get away from. Experience should be measured in accomplishments. Sarah Palin has a long history of cutting taxes, decreasing the size of government, and taking on her own corrupt party on corruption. Those are tangible accomplishments, and in my opinion, it is much more difficult to have tangible accomplishments in the small state of Alaska, than have a long list of committee assignments in D.C.

The reality is that her foreign policy resume is small, and she is likely not ready to be Commander in Chief, YET. That's fine because she isn't running for Commander in Chief. John McCain is and he is ready. It won't take much time in the White House for Palin to gain the necessary foreign policy knowledge and sophistication so that she will be ready if called upon. The reality is that in D.C. folks don't believe you can be qualified if everything you accomplished came from some far off place that doesn't attract the "status" of D.C. and that is why folks around the country have grown so cynical of D.C. and the beltway mindset.