The Wise Man and the Fool

This is precious:

September 01, 2008, 1:10 a.m.

Don’t Call Her ‘Harriet’
There’s more to Palin than her plumbing.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez

St. Paul — Contrary to popular pundit belief, Sarah Palin is no Harriet Miers.  

And it’s a funny thing: When conservatives like myself opposed Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court on the grounds that she was under-qualified and an affirmative-action pick, we were slammed as being sexist and elitist. Does that mean the Left and others railing against Palin are sexist and anti-Eskimo (her husband is part Eskimo)? 

Of course not. That would be silly — as it was in the case of the Miers debate. Instead, lefty columnists and pundits should admit they don’t like her because she’s a conservative, not because they’re concerned about a rot in the conservative movement. 

The choice of Sarah Palin is not like Harriet Miers in a number of debatable ways — including that Palin has executive experience, something Barack Obama lacks — in one big and clear way: There were no real alternatives. 

That’s not entirely true, of course. If the McCain campaign had been adult about it, they would have made Mitt Romney the vice-presidential nominee. He made a lot of sense as McCain’s Number Two. He wins the experience debate, having much more than Joe Biden — he’s been an executive in the corporate world and in the political world, and he cleaned, fixed, and ran the Olympics in Salt Lake. He would have helped electorally, particularly in Michigan. And he would have handled some blind spots for the McCain administration, most especially on the economy. Despite some campaigns against him, he’d have reassured many on the Right who saw him as a full-spectrum conservative, as National Review did. 

But John McCain wasn’t going to pick Mitt Romney. All you have to do to understand that is rewind to the Florida primary. If John McCain’s motto is “country first,” he’d have a hard time standing with Mitt Romney, who McCain (rather insultingly) described as having led for profit, not patriotism. 

And so once you take the most qualified and obvious choice out of the equation — realizing that former Florida governor Jeb Bush was not an option because of his name, and that Joe Lieberman would have been a disaster for the party (pace Bill Kristol and others) — Sarah Palin is not an outlandish choice. 

Was she picked because she’s a woman? Of course it played a role. Does that annoy me? Yes, especially if she doesn’t drop the glass-ceiling talk. Was it smart politics though? Maybe. Was it, most importantly, an acknowledgement that the Republican ticket needed to show itself to be future-oriented? In choosing a young conservative like Palin, John McCain acknowledges that there is a whole movement, a key component in the Republican party’s base, that he does not well represent on his own — and that there is a whole segment of the population that listens to Five for Fighting and gets their news online and is married to their high-school sweetheart and are struggling to balance it all, while enjoying every minute of it. If my conversations this past weekend in the Twin Cities are any indication, the choice of Sarah Palin isn’t insulting identity politics, but clever reality politics. Like the widely understood reasoning behind Barack Obama choosing Joe Biden — Obama needed some foreign-policy thinking on his ticket — Sarah Palin fills gaps for the 73-year-old “maverick.” 

And save for one vice-presidential candidate who (shamefully) wasn’t going to happen, unlike in the case of George W. Bush’s second Supreme Court choice, there really isn’t a list of could-have-beens. Far from being another Harriet Miers, Sarah Palin has no Sam Alito waiting in the wings. John McCain has made his choice, and it’s one conservatives can run with. 

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.

That’s right. The Editor of the NRO can only argue “there was nobody else” – and so Palin is not a Harriett.

Wow. You would think that she would wait a bit, gather at least a little evidence, and then state her premise – even if it is so heinous. Are we to believe that the Republican party is in such disarray – has fallen so low, that the only person they have that’s fit to be VP is a no-name amateur from Alaska? One with a long list of issues, at that?

It’s pretty amazing. I’d wager that there are lots of Republicans out there that would disagree, and might find somebody else that they think is actually suited to the job.

Or is this truly the state of the Republican Party? There is nobody else? Really?