In a Handbag

Every day I vacillate between disgust and perverse fascination with this ridiculous campaign, not to mention politics in general. I realize politics is at its heart seedy and unseemly. At any level beyond that of local activists committed to working single-mindedly on one local issue, politics and political speech are, by their very nature, filled with half-truths, exaggeration, 'spin,' disingenuousness, diversion, outright lies and, all too frequently, the overturning of conventionally accepted dictionary denotations. It is the realm of inappropriate alliances, indefensible trade-offs, slanderous smear campaigns, absurd rationales, contrived difference, cultivated insularity and groupthink, and outrageous posturing. It is, frankly, sickening.


Here is my 'political' stance on a few of the 'political' issues of today:
-I don't care that McCain is in his seventies.
-I don't care that Palin is a woman.
-I don't care that Obama is African-American.
-I don't care that Biden is a 'Washington Insider.'

As to the 'experience' issue that both sides make much of, here is the list of individuals with the necessary experience for the vacancy in question:
-Jimmy Carter
-George H.W. Bush
-Bill Clinton
-George W. Bush
Other than them, whoever gets the job is going to be getting a big promotion. That is, of course, the trajectory of the American Dream: onward, upward. Not stuck in the dishpit forever, not condemned eternally to Triple A when you have the chops to make it in the majors.

And nobody has the qualifications to run the country perfectly, not even to the universal acclaim of his own supporters.

So none of the Presidential or Vice-Presidential candidates are qualified, or ready, any more than anyone else receiving a promotion is. To me, it is obvious that that is the nature of a promotion, even of a lateral move: the person is going to do something different. It may be similar to the old position in numerous ways, but because he hasn't done it yet, he is not experienced at it. What we do when we promote someone is consider his intellect, his skills, his aptitudes, his personality, his potential, his overall suitability, and his likelihood of rising to the new demands. In the case of a politician running for office, we must also consider whether his values align with ours, his allegiance thus far to those values, his level of dishonesty, his policies, whether we have reason to believe he will continue to represent the best interests and stated desires of the polity he might come to represent, and we must attempt to distinguish the genuine from the political, the sincere from the machinating, and the honest from the demogogic in his campaign rhetoric. --On the other hand, we could dismiss out of hand any candidate who has ever written a book, learned a second language, taken vacations outside the U.S., gone to a selective university, or studied Constitutional Law as 'uppity' and elitist and stick with candidates whose hobbies we share.