Go Home McCain (and Palin first)

Sarah Palin, is not just an intellectual lightweight. She is practically a dunder head or no head at all. Let's brush aside Charles Gibson's interview as unduly condescending and the interview with Sean Hannity as typical hack job similar to what other interviewers did with Obama, molly-coddle the candidate. The most recent interview with Katie Couric was pure disaster. Asked about foreign policy credentials we get plain nonsense (not even varnished) . Reading the following exchange, I (a McCain supporter) just shook my head in disbelief:

COURIC: Explain to me why that enhances your foreign policy credentials.
PALIN: Well, it certainly does because our– our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They’re in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia—
COURIC: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?
PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth. We– we do– it’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where– where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is– from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to– to our state.

If THAT is an answer my reply is "Go Home Palin, go back to skinning moose".

Yes we have heard quotes about Vice presidency not being worth a bucket of spit. We know how FDR treated Truman like chattel and kept him in the dark about the Manhattan Project. Those days are gone. A VP is not just a heart beat away from the Presidency, he / she is the first sounding board of a president. Bill Clinton and Al Gore were a great team that way. Dick Cheney's influence will be debated for decades. Its better having a schemer like Dick Cheney than a dunder head like Palin. Remember the VP is also the President's life line to the Senate as chairman/woman of the senate. Al Gore delivered the crucial vote in ushering Bill Clinton's economic policy. Palin has no chance in hell of delivering a matching performance.

John McCain, on the other hand has shown very uncomfortable impetuousness in his way of handling the crisis. His grandstanding was just baloney. He could not even stick to his threat of not showing up for the debate sans a deal, he blinked when Obama called his bluff. Imagine McCain as president hastening to add the weight of the presidency to dealing a crisis without forrethought and rushing in headlong, then failing utterly not just in convincing his opponents but even his own party. If Obama's faux pas on meeting with rogue leaders without pre-conditions is justifiably excoriated, we are equally flabbergast at how McCain would make a mockery of Presidential power by rushing in where angels fear to tread.

If Obama wins by a landslide, its not only because the events played into his hands, it would also be because he was adroit in capitalizing them. Questions linger about Obama but the McCain camp has given answers that push us to consider Obama more carefully only because we think the answers from Obama cannot get any worse.