McCain’s Judgement

McCain’s judgement is seriously in question. It appears that he picked Palin without much of a vetting process – not even checking historical newspaper articles about her in the town where she was mayor.

Former Bush speechwriter and columnist David Frum says:

“McCain’s supporters argue that he is more serious about national security than Barack Obama. But the selection of Sarah Palin invites the question: How serious can he be if he would place such a neophyte second in line to the presidency? So this is the future of the Republican party you are looking at: a future in which national security has bumped down the list of priorities behind abortion politics, gender politics, and energy politics. Ms. Palin is a bold pick, and probably a shrewd one. It’s not nearly so clear that she is a responsible pick, or a wise one.”

In contrast, Obama points out that he chose Joe Biden because Biden is ready to become president immediately if required and that Biden has plenty of experience that Obama can call upon.

I feel sorry for the enthusiastic Republicans. McCain has let them down with his poor choice and exposed his desperation, his values and lack of judgement. All the commentators on TV are struggling with to make sense of this decision, especially the die-hard Republican supporters who see the folly but defend it anyway.

Six things the Palin pick says about McCain

The selection of a running mate is among the most consequential, most defining decisions a presidential nominee can make. John McCain’s pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says a lot about his decison-making — and some of it is downright breathtaking.

We knew McCain is a politician who relishes improvisation, and likes to go with his gut. But it is remarkable that someone who has repeatedly emphasized experience in this campaign named an inexperienced governor he barely knew to be his No. 2. Whatever you think of the pick, here are six things it tells us about McCain:

1. He’s desperate. Let’s stop pretending this race is as close as national polling suggests. The truth is McCain is essentially tied or trailing in every swing state that matters — and too close for comfort in several states like Indiana and Montana the GOP usually wins pretty easily in presidential races. On top of that, voters seem very inclined to elect Democrats in general this election — and very sick of the Bush years.

McCain could easily lose in an electoral landslide. That is the private view of Democrats and Republicans alike.

McCain’s pick shows he is not pretending. Politicians, even “mavericks” like McCain, play it safe when they think they are winning — or see an easy path to winning. They roll the dice only when they know that the risks of conventionality are greater than the risks of boldness.

The Republican brand is a mess. McCain is reasonably concluding that it won’t work to replicate George W. Bush and Karl Rove’s electoral formula, based around national security and a big advantage among Y chromosomes, from 2004.

“She’s a fresh new face in a party that’s dying for one — the antidote to boring white men,” a campaign official said.

Palin, the logic goes, will prompt voters to give him a second look — especially women who have watched Democrats reject Hillary Rodham Clinton for Barack Obama.

The risks of a backlash from choosing someone so unknown and so untested are obvious. In one swift stroke, McCain demolished what had been one of his main arguments against Obama.

“I think we’re going to have to examine our tag line, ‘dangerously inexperienced,’” a top McCain official said wryly.

2. He’s willing to gamble — bigtime. Let’s face it: This is not the pick of a self-confident candidate. It is the political equivalent of a trick play or, as some Democrats called it, a Hail Mary pass in football. McCain talks incessantly about experience, and then goes and selects a woman he hardly knows, who hardly knows foreign policy and who can hardly be seen as instantly ready for the presidency.

He is smart enough to know it could work, at least politically. Many Republicans see this pick as a brilliant stroke because it will be difficult for Democrats to run hard against a woman in the wake of the Hillary Clinton drama. Will this push those disgruntled Hillary voters McCain’s way? Perhaps. But this is hardly aimed at them: It is directed at the huge bloc of independent women — especially those who do not see abortion as a make-or-break issue — who could decide this election.

McCain has a history of taking dares. Palin represents his biggest one yet.

3. He’s worried about the political implications of his age. Like a driver overcorrecting out of a swerve, he chooses someone who is two years younger than the youthful Obama, and 28 years younger than he is. (He turned 72 Friday.) The father-daughter comparison was inevitable when they appeared next to each other.

4. He’s not worried about the actuarial implications of his age. He thinks he’s in fine fettle, and Palin wouldn’t be performing the only constitutional duty of a vice president, which is standing by in case a president dies or becomes incapacitated. If he was really concerned about an inexperienced person sitting in the Oval Office we would be writing about vice presidential nominee Mitt Romney or Tom Ridge or Condoleezza Rice.

There is no plausible way that McCain could say that he picked Palin, who was only elected governor in 2006 and whose most extended public service was as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (population 8,471), because she was ready to be president on Day One.

Nor can McCain argue that he was looking for someone he could trust as a close adviser. Most people know the staff at the local Starbucks better than McCain knows Palin. They met for the first time last February at a National Governors Association meeting in Washington. Then, they spoke again — by phone — on Sunday while she was at the Alaska state fair and he was at home in Arizona.

McCain has made a mockery out of his campaign’s longtime contention that Barack Obama is too dangerously inexperienced to be commander in chief. Now, the Democratic ticket boasts 40 years of national experience (four years for Obama and 36 years for Joseph Biden of Delaware), while the Republican ticket has 26 (McCain’s four yeasr in the House and 22 in the Senate.)

The McCain campaign has made a calculation that most voters don’t really care about the national experience or credentials of a vice president, and that Palin’s ebullient personality and reputation as a refomer who took on cesspool politics in Alaska matters more.

5. He’s worried about his conservative base. If he had room to maneuver, there were lots of people McCain could have selected who would have represented a break from Washington politics as usual. Sen. Joseph Lieberman comes to mind (and it certainly came to McCain’s throughout the process). He had no such room. GOP stalwarts were furious over trial balloons about the possibility of choosing a supporter of abortion rights, including the possibility that he would reach out to his friend.

Palin is an ardent opponent of abortion who was previously scheduled to keynote the Republican National Coalition for Life’s “Life of the Party” event in the Twin Cities this week.

“She’s really a perfect selection,” said Darla St. Martin, the Co-Director of the National Right to Life Committee. It is no secret McCain wanted to shake things up in this race — and he realized he was limited to a shake-up conservatives could stomach.

6. At the end of the day, McCain is still McCain. People may find him a refreshing maverick, or an erratic egotist. In either event, he marches to his own beat.

On the upside, his team did manage to play to the media’s love of drama, fanning speculation about his possible choices and maximizing coverage of the decision.

On the potential downside, the drama was evidently entirely genuine. The fact that McCain only spoke with Palin about the vice presidency for the first time on Sunday, and that he was seriously considering Lieberman until days ago, suggests just how hectic and improvisational his process was.

In the end, this selection gives him a chance to reclaim the mantle of a different kind of politician intent on changing Washington. He once had a legitimate claim to this: after all, he took on his own party over campaign finance reform and immigration. He jeopardized this claim in recent months by embracing ideas he once opposed (Bush tax cuts) and ideas that appeared politically motivated (gas tax holiday).

Spontaneity, with a touch of impulsiveness, is one of the traits that attract some of McCain’s admirers. Whether it’s a good calling card for a potential president will depend on the reaction in coming days to what looks for the moment like the most daring vice presidential selection in generations.

From Politico.com

Sarah Palin is a Mistake

John McCain has made a serious mistake choosing Sarah Palin as his VP for many reasons, but none as simple as this: if McCain suffers ill health, which is entirely foreseeable, then Sarah, who has no national experience, will become the president.

She has a degree in journalism and a minor in political science – what does she know about running the most powerful country in the world????

What experience does she have with fixing the economy? Why would McCain choose a covergirl over someone like Mitt Romney when the economy is in such a poor state?

If McCain has a stroke, the likes of Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will make mince meat of Sarah. Is she up to being Commander-in-Chief?

Personally, I think she should wait until her five children have grown up before going to Washington. She gave birth to her fifth child in April, five months ago, who has Downs syndrome. She says she is Christian, but won’t make time to raise her family, and she enjoys killing animals in her spare time.

Clearly, McCain has demonstrated very poor judgement. Sarah may be capable in Alaskan politics, but beyond the boundaries of Alaska she’s a novice, a nobody. Sarah who??? It seems that McCain has chosen her to get votes for himself. It would have been better if he picked someone with realistic credentials to run the country. This looks like McCain putting his own self-interest before the interest of USA.

In contrast, Barrack Obama has proven himself with his heroic fight, defeating the mighty Clinton political machine, to become the presidential nominee. Joe Biden’s long record and foreign policy experience speaks for itself.

(To me she looks like Andrea Zuckerman from Beverly Hills 90210)

Klein: Obama’s Speech ‘Very Tough’

From Time.com

Barack Obama’s acceptance speech tonight wasn’t what people have come to expect from a Barack Obama speech. It wasn’t filled with lofty rhetoric or grand cadences. It did not induce tears or euphoria. It didn’t have the forced, kitschy call and response tropes — “and that’s the change we need!” — that defaced nearly every other major speech at this convention. At 43 minutes, nailing his dismount at 10:53 pm, it wasn’t even very long. It was lean, efficient, practical and very very tough.

It was the perfect speech for a skeptical nation. In some ways, the heart of it was near the end, when Obama directly confronted a country that has lost faith in government — and an opposing party that preys on that cynicism:

“I know there are those who dismiss such beliefs as happy talk. They claim that our insistence on something larger, something firmer and more honest in our public life is just a Trojan Horse for higher taxes and the abandonment of traditional values. And that’s to be expected. Because if you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.

You make a big election about small things.

And you know what — it’s worked before. Because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn’t work, all its promises seem empty. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it’s best to stop hoping, and settle for what you already know. I get it.”

He delivered that, “I get it,” perfectly, conversationally: It said, “I know what you guys are thinking.” And the rest of the speech — every sentence, every paragraph — reflected that knowledge. His mission was to win over a doubtful nation, to convince us that he was a pragmatist, not a dreamer. Indeed, he used the word “dream” only once or twice. He didn’t even talk about the “American Dream.” He called it the “American Promise.” He didn’t tell us that he was different from Martin Luther King and the civil rights generation of black leadership; he showed us.

He began by setting the predicate, with a sleek précis of the Bush failures and John McCain’s complicity. “Eight [years] is enough,” he said. It was time for a change. His stories of the problems of the people he met along the way, the collateral damage of the Bush presidency, came closest to cliché — they weren’t nearly as convincing as the stunning parade of Average Americans that preceded his speech, including a laid-off factory worker named Barney Smith who delivered the immortal line, “We need a government that cares more about Barney Smith than Smith Barney.”

But Obama went through his domestic policy solutions to their problems without making it seem like a laundry list — and then he simply hammered John McCain on McCain’s perceived strength, foreign policy. This is something that Republicans do and Democrats shy away from — challenging their opponents on perceived strength. At a moment when Americans are sick of the foreign entanglements that John McCain seems to seek at every turn, it seems a potentially profitable maneuver for Obama.

Obama went bluntly up into McCain’s grill, time and time again — challenging him on the sort of campaign he was running, and especially on the sleazy tactic of questioning Obama’s patriotism:

“The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America – they have served the United States of America.

So I’ve got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first.”

He delivered that line well, too.

In a normal year, a year when the public would have a week or two to digest this night, my guess is that this speech would have a dramatic impact on the race — and it still might. But by tomorrow night, it won’t even be the lead story on the evening news. McCain’s vice presidential selection will be. And then McCain will have the luxury of going second — batting last — next week, staging a convention that will, no doubt, lacerate Obama and the Democrats and then climax with McCain telling his incredible life story. By this time next week, Obama’s speech will be a distant memory to those of us in the media. By this time two weeks from now, I wouldn’t be surprised if John McCain were ahead in the polls.

But Barack Obama laid down an important marker at Invesco Field — and he may have convinced more than a few white working-class skeptics to give him a closer look when the debates roll around. He stood there not as an orator, but as a plausible chief executive. His message was as tight as a power-point presentation, but far more elegant. And tough — above all, tough: not an egghead, not Adlai Stevenson. No, tonight Barack Obama was a politician from the south side of Chicago, ready for the brawl of his life.

Dowd: McCain “Cheapening” POW Experience

My mom did not approve of men who cheated on their wives. She called them “long-tailed rats.”

During the 2000 race, she listened to news reports about John McCain confessing to dalliances that caused his first marriage to fall apart after he came back from his stint as a P.O.W. in Vietnam.

I figured, given her stringent moral standards, that her great affection for McCain would be dimmed.

“So,” I asked her, “what do you think of that?”

“A man who lives in a box for five years can do whatever he wants,” she replied matter-of-factly.

I was startled, but it brought home to me what a powerful get-out-of-jail-free card McCain had earned by not getting out of jail free.

His brutal hiatus in the Hanoi Hilton is one of the most stirring narratives ever told on the presidential trail — a trail full of heroic war stories. It created an enormous credit line of good will with the American people. It also allowed McCain, the errant son of the admiral who was the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific during Vietnam — his jailers dubbed McCain the “Crown Prince” — to give himself some credit.

“He has been preoccupied with escaping the shadow of his father and establishing his own image and identity in the eyes of others,” read a psychiatric evaluation in his medical files. “He feels his experiences and performance as a P.O.W. have finally permitted this to happen.”

So it’s hard to believe that John McCain is now in danger of exceeding his credit limit on the equivalent of an American Express black card. His campaign is cheapening his greatest strength — and making a mockery of his already dubious claim that he’s reticent to talk about his P.O.W. experience — by flashing the P.O.W. card to rebut any criticism, no matter how unrelated. The captivity is already amply displayed in posters and TV advertisements.

Continued at the New York Times.

Click on picture to enlarge

Lion

Sub-Personalities

Recently, I have been learning about sub-personalities which apparently is popular in Jungian psychology. The particular aspect that I have learnt about is Voice Dialogue created by Drs Hal and Sidra Stone and I have to say I’m very impressed with it.

We all have sub-personalities and I think I can best explain it with an example: Imagine a woman with a strong mothering instinct. She mothers everyone and treats everyone like children even when it is not appropriate, she knows it but can’t help herself. This is one aspect, a sub-personality, dominating her and with Voice Dialogue she can learn to allow other parts of her personality to come forward when appropriate.

Sub-personalities may also be unconscious or disowned. A person may be unaware or out of touch with parts of their personality such as anger, selfishness, criticism or spirituality, compassion, creativity. These parts will show up in their lives through people around them. For example, a Christian might say, “I am a good man. I do good works and am nice to people. Why do I always attract into my life angry, selfish people?” Answer: his own anger and selfishness wants to be recognised.

A seriously disowned self would be Rev Graham Capill and his vehement campaigning against pedophilia when he himself was a pedophile. Or pro-lifers who murder abortionists.

If we are unaware of our sub-personalities then they can control us and cause us to act compulsively. For example, someone may be compulsively drawn to drugs, alcohol, workaholism, sexaholism and be totally unaware of the sadness/fear/anger etc within that drives them. When we regain awareness of these parts, then we regain choice, balance and happiness.

To find out about your own psyche, make a list of the qualities in other people that annoy you. Perhaps you are critical or uncomfortable around people who are emotional, intellectual, self-centered, weak, opinionated, not generous, not loving, successful, lazy, party-goers, sexually liberated…. Perhaps you have nothing nice to say about rich people?

Drs Stone say that in relationships we are attracted to our disowned selves. For example, a woman who continually finds herself in abusive relationships – she is disowned from her power. A man who is unconsciously attracted to angry women – he is disowned from his anger.

So if you want to know the state of your unconscious mind – take a look at what is happening in your world right now and the people around you. Life is an innocent mirror of who we are.