When the 2008 primary season narrowed to two candidates, Dems had a choice between two flavors of premium, handchurned, high-fat-content (16%) ice cream: Chocolate Dream and Valiant Vanilla. Life seemed filled with sweet possibility way back then.
One problem with eating ice cream is that if you're not careful, brain freeze can set in. For some Democrats, brain freeze was prompted very early on by Jesse Jackson Jr. For other Democrats, brain freeze hit like a Mack Truck when Obama caved on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But those events now seem like child’s play compared to the recent global financial meltdown sparked by Wall Street’s stunning failures.
I watched the Obama/McCain debate last night, and this is what I learned: President Obama will “kill bin Laden and crush al-Qaeda.” President McCain will know when to send “America’s most precious asset, American blood, into harm’s way.” After all was said and done, however, I learned something much more profound. Just to be safe, I double-checked the debate transcript to make sure I had heard right.
Obama: “Everybody knows now we are in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression”; the environment, climate change, and green jobs are “one of the biggest challenges of our times”; we can’t deal with the “climate crisis if our only solution is to use more fossil fuels that create global warming”; “Georgia is on the brink of enormous economic challenges”; we have to do something about the “health care crisis that so many families are facing”; the next commander-in-chief needs to make “sure” he can “see some of the twenty-first-century challenges and anticipate them before they happen”; we have to be “much more strategic if we’re going to be able to deal with all of the challenges that we face out there”; the “nature of the challenges we’re going to face are immense”; and they won’t be the challenges we expect: They will be the challenges we don’t expect.
McCain: American workers are the “innocent bystanders” in the “biggest financial crisis and challenge of our time”; heath care is one of the “really major challenges that America faces”; how the economic crisis affects our peacemaking abilities is “one of the challenges that America faces,” but knowing when America can “beneficially affect the outcome of a crisis” is a challenge; as is Russia; as are the Iranians who “continue on the path to acquiring nuclear weapons.” The “challenges that we face are unprecedented,” and “there are challenges around the world that are new and different.”
As a kid, I attended public schools in Ohio, and they occasionally served ice cream in the school cafeteria. We had a choice between chocolate or vanilla. It came in the form of a small block of deep-frozen dairy product wrapped in paper, or in a small cardboard cup with a difficult-to-yank-off cardboard lid. Either way, we were given a wooden toungue depressor in the shape of a spoon to eat it with. In order to partake of the delicious dessert, we had to chisel off dime-sized pieces of the rock-hard substance, and if those chunks didn’t fly off the spoon onto the floor, we could savor each tiny nugget as it finally melted on our tongues. The trouble was, no matter which flavor you chose, it always tasted like the wooden spoon.
After watching the debate last night, it’s clear to me that the question has changed since the primaries. The question now facing us seems to be: What flavor wooden spoon do we want?
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Even without kids, she’s no slouch. In 2007, Palin went to Kuwait to visit Alaskan troops, cancelled the bridge to nowhere and cut her state’s 100 federal earmarks in half with a goal of whittling them down to a mere dozen:
“We really want to skinny it down,” said Karen Rehfeld, Gov. Sarah Palin’s budget chief.
Rehfeld recently wrote a memo to all state commissioners telling them that to “enhance the state’s credibility,” federal earmark requests for money should be only for the most compelling needs.
They should have a strong national purpose, Rehfeld told the commissioners, not just to fill funding gaps in the state budget.
Palin has leadership credentials not limited to her home state. She has firsthand experience with education and energy issues, which are transferable to the federal level. And unlike the Bush administration, she seems to believe in the concept of oversight.
But the kicker? Palin can shoot a gun.
Yesterday, CNN repeatedly showed a video clip of Palin at a shooting range and mingling with American troops. They played it over and over and over and over. And over and over. Wikipedia mentions her early morning moose hunting expeditions with her dad when she was a kid. Articles are already calling her a gun-toting beauty queen. So I started thinking about that image of Palin shooting a gun.
Because we all know gun-toting + beauty queen = sexy. Think about Angelina Jolie being a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Suddenly, it hit me: McCain is not pandering to disaffected female Hillary voters. If McCain is pandering to anyone, he is pandering to men. I say this because of the TPM posts already calling Sarah Palin a babe. I say this because of the subliminal effect of media images that bombard us. I say this because research shows that if you want to win the presidency, you need to win a majority of the white male vote more than any other demographic. How cunning of the Republicans, therefore, to rile up the distractible Democrats with PUMAs and Paris while secretly selecting a talented all-American female for the second-highest job in the land.
]]>We hope the Iranian people understand that their leaders need to make a choice between cooperation, which would bring benefits to all, and confrontation, which can only lead to further isolation.