I don’t get the “Sarah Palin has no foreign policy experience” argument

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I don’t get the “Sarah Palin has no foreign policy experience” argument

Saturday, August 30th, 2008 | Politics |

Governors don’t have foreign policy experience. Carter didn’t. Reagan didn’t. Clinton didn’t. Bush 2 didn’t. Noting a lack of foreign policy experience is a mighty weak attack against a governor.

Meanwhile Palin - a two-term mayor and Alaskan governor for the past two years - has more executive experience than McCain, Obama, or Biden.

Voters haven’t elected a Senator to be president since JFK in 1960, yet the Obama-Biden ticket has two of them. The pattern for the past 30 years is that Americans vote for the ticket with a governor and a Senator, though it’s usually the governor for the presidential slot and the Senator for the veep slot. In that sense McCain has set up the classic winning ticket that voters like.

McCain chose well.

UPDATE: I’ll be honest and say that I’d prefer a veep candidate with more experience. The bar keeps going lower (Dan Quayle) and lower (John Edwards).

That said, I’ll take Palin’s resume over Obama’s, which consisted of a couple years of low-level state stuff and two years in the Senate spent running for president. And then there’s the obvious point that Palin’s running for vice-president while Obama is running for president.

Is Palin a strategic pick based on the fact that she’s a woman? Absolutely. She wouldn’t have been picked otherwise. But that’s the election we’re in right now. Obama wouldn’t have been nominated for president if he hadn’t had black skin. Many of Hillary’s supporters wouldn’t have gotten behind her if she weren’t a woman. 2008 is the year of identity politics and McCain is adapting to the election his opponents have created.

2 Comments to I don’t get the “Sarah Palin has no foreign policy experience” argument

joe d
August 31, 2008

It is to the detriment of political debate in this country when the word “experience” is used in such a shallow, dishonest way by so many on both sides of this presidential contest. Should “judgment” not actually be what you consider important? Does it matter how long somebody has been in office if they continually make decisions that harm our country?

McCain voted against against the latest intelligence bill, which included a ban on waterboarding, he opposed the latest GI Bill, saying it was “too generous” to veterans. He says our troops could be in Iraq for 100 years (when our reason for going to Iraq in the first place proved to be based upon a lie).

And now McCain chooses Sarah Palin as his vice president, because he knows that most Americans are fools when it comes to politics. Some Hillary Clinton supporters will say, “it’s a woman!” and vote for her despite the fact that she is the New York senator’s ideological opposite. Some, like you, will say, “she has more executive experience than Obama!,” despite the obvious fact that more years of service does not equal better judgment (see McCain examples above, and almost all of George W. Bush’s EIGHT years in the white house).

If you choose to bandy about the word “experience” in a way that makes you feel cozy and comfortable despite the Bush administration having spent the last EIGHT years defecating on your argument, then be my guest.

But, to summarize:

Bush (6 years as governor, 8 years as POTUS):
$284B surplus turns to $400B deficit, ignores actual terrorist threat to focus on pointless quagmire in Iraq, loses thousands of young Americans’ lives for nothing.

Palin (6 years as mayor, almost 2 years as governor):
leaves town of 9,000 people $20M in debt

McCain (a trillion years in the senate):
agrees with GWB 90% of the time.

Is that enough “experience” for you?

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