My thoughts: After news of McCain's VP pick hit the wires, my immediate thought was "How odd for McCain, whose central campaign tenant emphasized the issue of experience, to choose someone with the least amount of experience of anyone on the national or international stage." I must admit that while I am indeed a son of the state of Alaska, it has been years since I've been back and relatively estranged from my home state. So in many sense like many of you, I'm just as in the dark about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, self described as an "average hockey mom." So what do we know about her? In addition to as Krunky Munky pointed out dealing with her own troopergate scandal, and being ardently Big Oil, "militantly anti choice and evangelical," Palin's experience and record hardly suggests relevancy to the current national and international stage. This is particularly glaring again in a contest in which McCain has highlighted that very sort of broad experience as a hallmark trait needed in the next administration.
So lets quickly recap Palin's resume:
Palin has been in higher office as Governor of Alaska for exactly half the time Obama has been in the Senate. Before that, she served only two full terms in the City Council, from 1992 to 1996, before running for mayor of Wasilla.
To put this in perspective, Wasilla had a population of only 7,738 people as of 2004. By contrast, as TPM's Eric Kleefeld calculates, Obama's State Senate district had roughly 210,000 people -- about 27 times the number Palin repped in lower office.
And oh right, the elephant in the room: she's a woman. In addition to having zero foreign policy experience, this is whom McCain is proposing be his second-in-command.
In contrast consider Joe Biden's body of experience:
Biden trained as a lawyer and became a senator in 1973 at age 30, the fifth-youngest senator in U.S. history. He has served as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, dealing with issues related to drug policy, crime prevention, and civil liberties. He is a long-time member and current chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and has worked on resolutions concerning the Yugoslav wars and Iraq War.
This leads to my second thought, which is would McCain have chosen the governor of Alaska if she was a he? I think we all know the answer to that one. And with this pick, what does it suggest about McCain's judgment?
So, what we have is a transparent gambit based on novelty and gender pandering in another classic divide and conquer maneuver, which is frankly insulting.
And the notion of a female vice president isn't quite as ground-breaking as it seems. As my friend and regular reader Brian pointed out: "The McCain move is a bold one....and only 24 years after Geraldine Ferraro was the democratic VP pick."
As an Alaskan, I want to feel proud of this moment for my humble state, but I'm not. I would have been much prouder if she had stood up in the moment of McCain's offer, eschewed the me-first politics of Alaska and declined the offer.
Update: Oh yea, and she thinks creationism--you know, that origin story that discounts hundreds of years of proven science--should be taught in our schools. On a personal level this is a fucking insult to all the GOOD real hard science that is actually taking place at the universities and research centers in Alaska.