My Take on Sarah Palin

When John McCain announced his choice of running mate several weeks ago, I think I had the same reaction as most people. "Who???!!!" Granted, she is a governor, but how many governors can you name, let alone the governor of one of our least populous states (ahead of only North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming)? Since that time, I have been doing everything I can to learn more about her. I do not like what I have found. There is a lot to say about Sarah Palin, and very little of it is good. Plainbellied already wrote about this on her blog, but I thought I'd give my two cents as well.

Let us examine some of the issues at play:

1) Experience. The McCain campaign spent all summer telling us how inexperienced and dangerous Barack Obama would be if elected. Then, he chose Sarah Palin, who spent two terms as a mayor of a town with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants and 20 months as governor of the 47th most populous state. Immediately the McCain campaign changed its tune and declared that her "executive experience" outweighed Barack Obama's eight years in the Illinois State Senate and four years in the US Senate. To put it bluntly, I believe that Sarah Palin is woefully unprepared to be anywhere near the Presidency of the United States. Remember what happened with the last governor we elected?

2) Record. Over the past few weeks I've noticed a number of worrisome trends in Sarah Palin's record. The main problem I see is her penchant for fiscal irresponsibility. In Wasilla, the tiny town she controlled, she inherited a situation in which there were real infrastucture problems with things like sewage treatment, and she focused her attention not on these issues, but on the building of a sports complex for the community. While it was intended to bring more money into the municipal coffers, the plan for this structure was poorly designed and executed, and it was constructed on land that the town did not clearly own. Years and millions in legal fees later, most recognize the complex as a money pit. While mayor, she hired a Washington lobbyist to bring earmarked funds to Wasilla, succeeding in getting some 27 million dollars for the town. Even so, she left the town, which had about 1 million dollars in debt at the beginning of her term, more than 24 million dollars in debt. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal has exposed this problem. Why? Big ticket items like the sports complex and parks, leaving things like a sewage treatment plant undone.

As governor, Palin has proclaimed herself a maverick and a reformer. Neither is true. It is true that she launched herself into the limelight by exposing the unethical behavior of a rival who was using his government office and time to campaign. Of course, she did the very same thing while she was mayor. This, along with numerous other examples from her political career show her to be a conniving opportunist who does not play by the same rules she sets for others. While she did raise taxes on the oil industry, she also continued the practice of getting huge amounts of government earmarks, including championing the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere."

Since she joined the campaign, the level of untrue attacks has risen alarmingly. While both campaigns have distorted their opponents' record to some extent, the McCain campaign has aggressively sought to present a totally incorrect image of Obama and his record. When the McCain campaign quoted factcheck.org (a nonpartisan group) in support of its ads, factcheck denounced the ads as false and misleading. The campaign has also misled the public on Palin's record, having to admit that she never traveled into Iraq and stopped in Ireland only for refueling on her trip.

3) Ethics. Governor Palin is currently under legislative investigation for ethics violations. It appears that she fired the state Public Safety Commissioner for refusing to fire her ex-brother-in-law, a state trooper. While the trooper in question is clearly problematic, he was suspended for some of his activities, and the Commissioner considered the matter closed. When Palin was elected governor, she almost immediately began (along with her husband and numerous staffers) pressuring the Commissioner to fire the trooper. When he would not, she fired him. Before she was chosen as McCain's running mate, Palin agreed to fully cooperate with the probe. Once McCain made the announcement, her aides pulled out of scheduled meetings with the legislature's investigator. Today she announced that she would not cooperate. This is a terrible precedent. The current president and his staff have done the same thing by invoking "executive privilege" to avoid answering congressional subpoenas. Do we want more government secrecy in the future?

Speaking of secrecy, Palin and her aides also championed the use of personal email accounts as a way to circumvent open records laws, even though this is an egregious violation of the law and the public trust. One of the reasons we don't know much about Palin's dealings with her aides is her use of private, unaccounted-for email addresses.

Equally troubling is the record of how many people she has fired. In her time both as mayor and as governor, Palin has wielded executive authority as a weapon to silence her critics and promote her allies. In Wasilla, she totally gutted the town's leadership, seeking to fire the librarian, and successfully firing the local museum director, plus the police chief and some of her own advisors who opposed her policies. Those who oppose her are branded "haters" and eliminated as soon as possible. Not only does she fire her enemies, but she appoints unqualified friends to important positions, such as her friend that she hired as the head of the State Division of Agriculture whose primary qualification appears to be her childhood love of cows.

Just a few months ago she said she didn't know what the Vice President does.



More recently, she couldn't explain her position on the Bush Doctrine. (I wouldn't have known the answer either, but I'm not running for VP!) Notice how totally surprised Charlie Gibson was when she couldn't answer his question:



After all is said and done, what do those close to Sarah Palin think? Well, one of her friends from Wasilla wrote an email for her friends outside of Wasilla who kept asking about Palin. The message has been confirmed by numerous sources to be true. If you want to know more about the type of person we have running for Vice President, go ahead and read it.

In beginning the process of learning about Palin, I tried very hard to be dispassionate, but having learned more about her, I must conclude that she should not be placed a heartbeat away from the presidency. If nothing else, such a reckless and unconsidered choice must reflect badly on John McCain, who has a penchant for high-stakes gambling. This time, he's not gambling with his wife's millions. He's gambling with our future.