Unconventional Wisdom

Senator McCain found himself stuck between a rock and hard place - put there by hurricane Gustav. If he went ahead with his convention during a developing disaster he would face a wrath that would make the post-Katrina finger pointing festival look like a playground game of tag. If he canceled or postponed the convention to focus hurricane relief he would sure be raked over the coals for doing it out of nothing but political opportunism.

I'll give him credit, he chose the hard place and canceled all but essential functions and went to do what he could - no doubt very little - on the gulf coast. There was probably a lot of political calculation and opportunism involved in the decision - but at least he's doing something.

It has been an interesting week for McCain. He made a huge splash with his pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. It was an interesting choice. From what I have been able to learn about her over the past few days I have to say McCain chose well. A  principled conservative with a strong libertarian streak. We could - and have - done a lot worse for VP. Heck both our alternatives for president are a lot worse.

The interesting thing for me was that all of the things I like about Palin - the independence, the willingness to not put party first - are traits she shares with Senator McCain.

I don't fault the Senator for going against party, I admire his willingness to stick to his principles. I fault him for some of the things he has done while doing so.

I don't think I can cast a vote based on the Vice President - except on the notion that if we could survive four years of President McCain/Fiengold there would be a great candidate waiting in the wings.

Over the last couple of days the left side of the blog world has gone insane over Palin. I think she has them really scared. Their first line of attack via the Daily Kos and Andrew Sulivan (I'm not going to link any of their trash) was to spread the rumor that Palin's four-month old son was really the child of her oldest daughter. The Governor, according to these morons, faked her pregnancy to protect the girl. Photographic evidence was quickly uncovered that proved the whole story to be complete BS. This did not stop the howling lunatics. Who went so far as to suggest that the original story that prompted their derranged conspiracy fest was planted by Karl Rove so that they would run with it and then look bad when it proved false.

Then came the announcement from the Palins that their oldest daughter, 17, is five months pregnant. That really put an end to the story of her being the mother of the four-month-old baby.

Now there is general hysteria over what this does or doesn't mean in terms of the election. And for the first time in the campaign I find myself in partial agreement with Barack Obama.

He issued the followiong statement:

With one caveat, Obama is right. However if member of the candidate's family is an active and visible part of the campaign then they are part of the game. Obama himself didn't seem to have any trouble taking on the spouse of his opponent in the primaries.

None of this is going to impact my voting decision. But given that according to every state by state poll Obama is leading Connecticut by a large margin I'm not sure my voting decision would have much of an impact anyway.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 08:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment