But they did it through a very special white lady.
Now that John McCain’s campaign is winding down into a sad shadow of Bob Dole’s former self, it’s time to wonder: how best to protect Sarah Palin from the terrible, terrible mistake that was John McCain’s presidential run?
The first step is to declare that this entire “running for president” nonsense demeans her.
The complaint against the Alaska governor, at its most basic, is that she doesn’t qualify for admission to the national political fraternity. Boy, that’s rich. Behold the shabby frat house that says it’s above her pay grade.
Congress has the lowest approval rating ever registered in the history of polling (12%!). She isn’t the reason polls are showing people want the entire Congress fired, with many telling pollsters they themselves could do a better job.
Sarah Palin didn’t design a system of presidential primaries whose length and cost ensures that only the most obsessional personalities will run the gauntlet, while a long list of effective governors don’t run.
These rules have wasted the electorate’s time the past three presidential elections, by filling the debates with such zero-support candidates as Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Al Sharpton, Duncan Hunter, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden (8,000 total votes), Wesley Clark and Alan Keyes.
This is so stupid as to beggar words. The half-term governor of Alaska, who chose to accept John McCain’s invitation to be on the ticket, is suffering from the injustice of a system that didn’t make it clear that her prodigious talents of holding guns, wearing jackets and hating knowledge were exactly what about 30% of a nation in need was desperately crying out for. Simply put, the system was gamed against people like her by virtue of the fact that crazy elves and massive xenophobes decided to run for a position she didn’t want.
That’s the warmup, though. After you declare her the victim of an awful process, you then turn her into the greatest victim the world has ever known, with a life so terrible that Barack Obama would crumble to dust. Let’s learn more: