Why Palin Still Matters, Ctd.

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13 Nov 2008 10:55 am

Despite all the grief she's gotten, I continue to think that the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate represents the breaking of a consensual cultural barrier far more fundamental than most people realize. It's not just that she was inexperienced (Spiro Agnew and John Edwards weren't much more experienced than Palin when they ran for VP) but that she was — obviously, transparently, completely — uninterested in and uninformed about national policy at nearly every level. We've simply never seen someone so completely unmoored from the normal requirements of national office before. She was chosen purely at the level of celebrity, and an awful lot of people seemed to be just fine with that.

With one caveat:

Andrew's obsession with Palin was often hard to take, and I sometimes wished I could reach through the screen and strangle him whenever he started talking about Trig Palin again. Still, aside from the "clinically unhinged" crack, I agree with all of this. Disturbing hardly begins to describe what we've gone though with Palin over the past two months.

While Prairie Weather thinks I have the wrong focus:

I think Andrew Sullivan is making a sad mistake. And that's coming from someone who admires him greatly. Palin has gotten under his skin and he's scratching himself bloody.

Palin is Palin -- she's ignorant, ambitious, and annoying. She's far too attractive to right wing yahoos for all the wrong reasons. But jeez, the real problem is with the yahoos, not Palin. The real problem is that a major political party would elevate her, with so little apparent forethought, to a campaign for one of the highest positions in the land. The hot lights should be trained on people like John McCain who remains in the Senate and his campaign advisors who'll be hired by some other candidate.

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