Cynicism Express

As usual, the election is getting caught up in the spectacle and what is being lost is the central issue. It is unfortunate that Palin's daughter is pregnant, but I don't think this disqualifies her from being Vice President. The truth is that Republicans tend to have troubled kids. Reagan had a daughter who he didn't speak to for years (who posed in Playboy). Bush's daughters were huge partiers, though one has admittedly changed her ways. Bush himself is the son of a president and though he "won" the presidency, was a huge partier who floated through life with little success until he became president -- and maybe did more to destroy undermine America domestically and globally than any president in history. And now we have Palin.

But the real question in the country is whether we can afford more of the same. That is what McCain is offering. Obama is offering change: a new tone in Washington, a more reasonable tax system, diplomatic relations with the rest of the world, a sensible energy policy and a plan to get us out of Iraq. McCain appears ready to do the opposite: continue giving tax breaks to corporations and the rich, pretend Iraq was a good idea and that we won, do little to end our addiction to oil and show a general disregard for the average American. This is most clear to me in the decision to pick someone clearly not ready to become President, a woman he didn't seem to even vet with any seriousness. Instead he chose someone who offered the only path to his victory -- a surrogate for disaffected Clinton supporters who don't care that this woman is no advocate for women. Can't we define leadership at least partially by who someone picks as their surrogates? McCain has entrusted the very people that helped sink his campaign 8 years ago, the same people that he once excoriated for the campaign strategy he now embraces. He works with a number of lobbyists that he once sought to attack (and may have had an affair with one of them). And he picked a woman who has less experience than the opponent he attacks for his lack of the same.

An op ed in the Washington Post today makes the point that Palin is not the maverick we have been led to believe: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/01/ar2008090101716_pf.html. It turns out she had a lobbyist as mayor and actually tacitly supported the "bridge to nowhere" she was purported to reject. Maybe that is why McCain like her so much -- she is a hypocrit just like him; hopeful to move in no direction except backwards (to a mythical past where people only had sex to make babies, we forget about science and evolution and God becomes the mediator of all social relations).

Bush is to speak tonight and it will be interesting to see how McCain tries to dance around his verisimilitude to the man he must simultaneously embrace and reject. We will have to wait until Thursday for the dance, but we are already seeing the radical left attempt to remind Americans that they should not trust liberals. A number of anarchists have shown up and been arrested for throwing benches, breaking windows and attacking squad cars. I am for radical social change -- but why these people want to relive the 60s, throwing their angst around at the wrong enemies (the police and a city that has been a source of a number of iconoclastic politicians in the past 40 years) is beyond me. In my mind, the left should be embracing the message of change and ensuring that Obama does not move too far to the middle.