And how about that alleged lack of experience? Governor of Alaska carries more clout than a Junior Senator of just a few short years. Consider the following factors:Palin-hatred is an artifact of who she is rather than anything she's done. Joe Biden famously rose from the working class to the U.S. Senate. Palin became governor of Alaska, but never left the working class — with her old-fashioned beehive hairdo and librarian eyeglasses, with a husband who is a commercial fisherman and works on a North Shore oil field, and with her hobbies of fishing and hunting.
As such, she's the object of the cultural disdain of a left that loves the working class in theory, but is mystified or offended by its lifestyle and conservative values in reality. If there's ever been an exemplar of the rural America that, in Barack Obama's telling, "bitterly" clings to its guns and religion, it's Sarah Palin.
It's her misfortune to be a pioneer with the wrong ideology. So much bile was directed at Clarence Thomas because he was the "wrong" kind of black man. Pro-life, pro-gun and a down-the-line, if populist, conservative, Palin is a traitor to her gender and thus encounters the sort of fury always directed at apostates.
A popular liberal talk-radio host calls her a "bimbo," a Washington Post columnist compares her to Caligula's horse, and the left-wing blogosphere goes on a demented jag about how her fifth son, Trig, is really the son of her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol. The lunacy forced the Palins to issue a statement that Bristol is pregnant, setting off a feeding frenzy from the same press that went out of its way to protect the privacy of John Edwards.
In a less-poisonous atmosphere, Palin might have diminished the intensity of the "mommy wars." Here were traditionalist conservatives hailing a very busy working mom with five kids, including a handicapped 4-month-old. But the same feminists who ordinarily dismiss stay-at-home moms as benighted betrayers of the sisterhood now question whether Palin can juggle her family and political responsibilities. Washington doyenne Sally Quinn worries about putting "the mother of young children in a job outside the home that will demand so much of her time and energy."
A lot of Palin-hatred is couched in terms of her lack of experience. Fair enough, but there's a tone of contemptuous dismissiveness about the experience that she does have — fueled no doubt by her career in "fly-over country" so remote no one really flies over it. The Obama campaign is loath to admit that she's governor of Alaska, pretending instead she's still mayor of tiny Wasilla, and the outraged commentary in the press makes it sound like the vice presidency is an office of such import that it would be better if the newcomer were at the top of the ticket and the wizened pro at the bottom — just like the Democrats.
- Gov. Palin has spent much of her adult life dealing with matters long central to the Alaskan experience and now of surpassing importance to the nation as a whole - namely, energy security and how we can provide for it. Having managed her state's department responsible for oil and gas exploration and exploitation, having negotiated a long-delayed natural gas pipeline through Canada to the Lower 48 and having been married for nearly two decades to a blue-collar worker in Alaska's North Slope oil fields, she knows more about the subject than all three of the others on the two parties' tickets put together.
If Gov. Palin can bring to bear her insights into the need for expanded, yet environmentally sensitive drilling, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) - together with an appreciation of the need to introduce fuel-choice in our transportation sector, the object of the bipartisan Open Fuel Standard Act introduced in both the House and Senate shortly before the August recess - she will demonstrate unsurpassed leadership in what is, arguably, the single most important national security challenge of our time. - Napoleon is said to have declared that "Geography is destiny." That certainly is true of Gov. Palin. Her state is adjacent to Russia, a nation that has in recent years demonstrated a rising aggressiveness towards its neighbors. The targets are not just the relatively weak and formerly enslaved countries on its littoral like Georgia - the scene of a bloody invasion last month aimed at toppling the elected government there. Moscow has also conducted simulated strategic bombing runs with Soviet-era long-range, nuclear-capable aircraft. These offensive missions are designed to penetrate U.S. northern air defenses in a manner reminiscent of the most provocative of Kremlin behavior during the Cold War.
- As it happens, the best of those defenses - including a squadron of America's state-of-the-art interceptors, the F-22 Raptor - are stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage. Governor Palin would not only be intimately familiar with that facilities' vital role in protecting U.S. territory. She would also appreciate its importance in the projection of American power in Asia and beyond as much of the nation's long-range transport aircraft supplying our military operations around the world transit through Elmendorf. Every Commander-in-Chief should have such insights.
- Speaking of geography, Alaskan territory is also along the trajectory of ballistic missiles launched eastward out of Stalinist North Korea. For that reason, among others, Alaska's Fort Greely was selected as the site for the principal U.S. ground-based defense against such missiles. As that state's governor, Sarah Palin would know more by osmosis - if nothing else - about the necessity for U.S. anti-missile systems than either Messrs. Obama or Biden. In fact, the Democrats have reflexively opposed such defenses and promise to starve them of funds if elected. Opinion polls suggest that the support missile defense enjoys among Gov. Palin's Alaskans is shared by strong majorities of their countrymen elsewhere. Her judgment versus Sen. Biden's on the question of whether America should be protected against present and growing missile-delivered threats will be one of the highlights of the vice presidential nominees' debate.
lamestream media and the Democrat Party (but I repeat myself) will spare no expense to trip her up. They have made it their mission to destroy and up and coming Republican candidate.
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