Sunday, August 31, 2008

About Sarah Palin and "experience"

There has been a lot of commentary about whether Sarah Palin is qualified to be President should she and John McCain be elected, and should something then happen to McCain.

Elizabeth I became Queen of England in 1558 when she was 25 years old. She did fairly well by her country.

From what I’ve seen and read of Sarah Palin so far she’s got as good a prospect as any of the four in the running to do okay if she should suddenly become President at 45 years old. Aside from her experience in government, a woman who has successfully juggled a full time job and five kids ranging in age from one year old to late teen age while staying on good terms with a 20 year husband knows quite a bit about delegation, decisionmaking and practical crisis management.

Very few of our presidents have been anywhere close to “qualified” by experience for the job. The good ones have exhibited good judgement. Some of the worst ones have been the best qualified on paper.


Update - Jonah Goldberg at National Review posted a great letter from a reader on this issue:

"Who would you hire?

To borrow from Ross Perot (not always a good idea), would you hire any of these people as a manager at your company?

Palin you'd offer the job to right away, and then you'd sweat until she accepted it.

McCain would seem like a decent choice, but wouldn't make or break you either way.

You'd wonder how Obama possibly thought he was qualified, and you'd leave him to be hired by some other company where they fall for people who say all the right things.

And you'd be telling stories about Biden's interview, and making jokes about it, for years."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It appears that they stopped focusing on Palin's experience and are now moving on to trashing her family.

Apparently, the GOP had to announce the daughter's pregnancy because of the sordid rumors that were circulating all over the Internet regarding photos of Palin's 17 year old daughter holding an infant. The rumor was that the infant belonged to the daughter and not Palin and that Palin was fraudulently claiming the infant to be her own.

What a pathetic thing to do to a young girl just so they can get at the mother.

I feel sorry for the fact that Palin's daughter has to be held up to so much scrutiny at such a young age and hope that this will not have a detrimental effect upon her pregnancy.

***

Sully said...

anon,
Politics is a rough sport but I think the lefty bloggers and the media are overreaching with this attack on Palin's daughter.

You're right that it sure is a rough way to grow up suddenly at 17 years old but she is already at five months, so the tough part of telling her parents and coming to terms with the way parenthood is going to change their lives was already behind her. And at least so far it seems as though the father is going to do the right thing.

On the plus side, Palin is very popular in Alaska, so in their hometown environment they have supportive people who won't be very accomodating to outsiders making life difficult for them.