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September 1, 2008
Exclusive: Sarah Palin: A Bold Choice
To be quite honest, I find myself somewhat torn about John McCain's selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate. Her lack of a public record (at least through Saturday, when this was written) on the major foreign policy challenges facing the country is troubling. How can anyone gauge one way or the other whether she would be capable of serving as commander-in-chief if something were to happen to a President McCain? At least in the short term, making the case that she can do this will have to be the McCain campaign's top priority.
Put that tremendous caveat aside for just a minute, however, and you find that there are other reasons to like the Palin selection. Attractive and charismatic, she is probably the most conservative person to run on a Republican ticket since Ronald Reagan, and one of the things I admire most about her has been willingness to take on members of her own state Republican Party whose ethics have been questionable. She has also left Democrat Party feminist apparatchiks fit to be tied - in much the same way as President George H.W. Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court angered people on the political Left like the Congressional Black Caucus, who seemed to believe that the "black seat" on the court should be the exclusive domain of liberal activists like Thurgood Marshall.
For example, veteran Washington lobbyist Debbie Dingell, a big-time Hillary Rodham Clinton backer during the primaries (and wife of Democrat Rep. John Dingell of Michigan) fumed that she had spent all day Friday talking to women who felt "insulted" by McCain's selection of Palin. "This is just sheer political pandering," Mrs. Dingell fumed. "I don't think women are going to buy it." This angry, petulant reaction highlights one of the things I like about the Palin selection - it reminds people who the Left-liberal activists who dominate the Democrat Party really are: angry, bitter people with an outsized sense of political entitlement. Many backers of Democrats Barack Obama and Joseph Biden can't contain their anger over the fact that the Republicans have a decent chance this year to elect a female vice president. This is a painful reality to people who made 1992, the year Bill Clinton was elected president, the "year of the woman" and have long taunted Republicans about the "gender gap." For years, the political Left has prided itself on its success at class-warfare, "mascot" politics - in other words, emphasizing people's membership in particular racial, ethnic and gender-based groups over the fact that we are all Americans.
The Democrat Party, coming off a big electoral victory in 2006, is poised to make big gains in the House and Senate this year, and should be on the verge of a landslide victory in the presidential election as well. But Obama and Biden are in real danger of losing - and a large part of the reason why the Republicans are so competitive this year is mascot politics, and specifically the brutal political warfare during the primaries between Obama and Hillary. Politically and philosophically, the differences between these two politicians were marginal at most. While the specifics of their political agendas differed, the essentials were basically the same. Both were high-tax, big-government liberals who favored vast expansions of federal social-welfare spending and/or mandates on the private sector. Both opposed the troop surge in Iraq and voted to undercut it time and again in the Senate. Both seemed to blame President Bush (and not Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or craven Western politicians like Jacques Chirac) for international hostility to the United States. The primaries were a bitter struggle between the Clintons and the feminists on one side, who thought they were entitled to have their candidate as the party standard-bearer, and hard-core liberals and black activists who thought they were no less entitled to have a black nominee, Obama, carrying the torch for the Democrats. In the end, Obama ran a much better campaign and won the nomination - but only after a bruising political struggle that divided the Democrat Party and has given the Republicans a fighting chance to keep the White House.
Now, with the Palin selection, the feminist Left is hit with the ultimate indignity: Hillary won't make history this year, at least as far as winning an election is concerned. And even worse, the woman who may win national office isn't the pro-abortion-rights feminist who tolerated her husband's serial infidelities for more than 30 years in order to become president. Instead, it's a much younger pro-life conservative with a stable family life - a mother of five with one son in the U.S. Army and another who is an infant with Down syndrome. Sarah Palin is a repudiation of everything the feminists on the political Left have stood for. And she may be about to win – unlike Hillary. whose own party rejected her. Put all of these things together, and there are powerful reasons to like McCain's choice of Sarah Palin.
Yet, despite all of this, I have a number of concerns, because Sarah Palin's views on some key national issues remains a mystery. For example, there is the issue of illegal immigration. I spent hours searching without success for any writings or statements about illegal immigration. As best as I can tell, none exist. Should we therefore assume that her position on the issue is identical to that of McCain - who has generally been a strong supporter of open borders? People who follow this issue very closely have no idea about Palin's views on the issue, and given McCain's past collaboration with Teddy Kennedy in support of mass amnesty, the mystery is troubling.
But by far the biggest issue about Palin will be foreign policy. Get ready for an onslaught of news reports on the major networks and articles in the Washington Post and New York Times comparing her unflatteringly with Biden - articles that will tout at great length his foreign-policy experience. The point of the pieces will be: "Sure, Obama is an ingenue who got Iraq completely wrong. And yes, he has only been paying attention to the stuff for a few years, but he has a lot of smart advisors around him. And even though he has a lot less experience than John McCain when it comes to foreign policy, Obama's inexperience is compensated for by the fact that Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has 35 years of foreign policy experience, while Palin has none." This could gain traction for the Democrats unless Palin in the coming weeks begins to give interviews explaining her own worldview (think about a very compressed version of what former California Gov. Ronald Reagan did between 1975 and 1979) and contrasts it with Obama- Biden.
Sarah Palin is about as experienced on foreign policy as Obama was when he came to the Senate three and a half years ago. That could be a political problem unless McCain is willing to do something that goes against his instincts: have his campaign drive home the point that on so many of the foreign policy issues he has addressed during his Senate career, Joe Biden has simply been on the wrong side of history. In 1972, for example, he was elected to the Senate at age 29, running as an anti-war candidate, as John McCain's time in the Hanoi Hilton was about to end. Biden should be asked about his opposition to the war and what happened after the United States was defeated in the spring of 1975 - including the horrific sagas of the "Boat People" and Cambodian genocide. Perhaps Mr. Biden could talk about his advocacy of President Carter's SALT II Treaty and his opposition to the Reagan defense buildup of the 1980s that helped win the Cold War: Mr. Biden was tireless in working against it, and he also opposed President Reagan's efforts to fight communism in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Biden also fought tooth and nail against the 1991 Gulf War that drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Although he voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq in 2002, Biden has spent much of the past five years or so mobilizing opposition to what the United States has been doing in Iraq, including the very successful surge. He has been a strong advocate of dialogue with Iran. And he has opposed efforts to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to ensure that the United States can eavesdrop on foreign terrorists operating outside the United States without obtaining warrants beforehand.
The bottom line is that much of Biden's experience consists of pursuing policies that have undermined U.S. strength in the world. If McCain and Palin are unable or unwilling to make this case, Biden will continue to have a free pass when it comes to foreign policy. And he will try to use it to pound Sarah Palin (and McCain's hopes of winning the election) right into the ground.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Joel Himelfarb is an editorial writer for The Washington Times. The views expressed here are his own. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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