Breaking my Palin promise

I’ve just about stopped reading news of the presidential campaign since, unless I’m struck deaf and blind, I’m going to be inundated with it anyway. Still, I like to peruse the headlines over at Real Clear Politics just to get a sense of what’s being said about the campaign, and this morning I came across “Messianic Pretensions” by Canadian columnist David Warren.

Having thought most of the diatribes about Obama’s “messianic pretensions” were past, I wondered if this one offered anything new. As it turned out, the two statements that cut through my morning haze had nothing to do with messiahs.

Addressing the depth of anti-American sentiment across the world, Warren noted that a recent poll in France registered support for John McCain at one percent! Can a poll show a number that small? Margins of error are usually a couple of points at least. Did just one person express support for McCain? Or was it a statistical assumption that if McCain was one of the options, somebody must have at least thought about him? I have no idea, but after following U.S. political polls for the last two years, seeing a number like one percent in any poll about anything was intriguing.

However, it was this comment that left me dumbfounded:

In his [McCain’s] appointment of Sarah Palin, for all the sneers of the urbane and over-educated, he has suggested a way forward in which America retrieves her ‘core values,’ which include cutting through the blather of conventional ‘expertise,’ and distinguishing right from wrong. And she can articulate what McCain mumbles.

Incredible. Palin can “articulate”? Who knew? She has shown the world repeatedly that she can’t articulate her way through a grocery list! She’s the most embarrassingly inarticulate public figure I’ve ever had the misfortune of witnessing.

Nor do I want to think, even for a moment, that Palin’s way of doing things represents America’s “core values.” As for expertise, a little “conventional expertise” in the White House would be nice for a change. (Anyone against expertise, raise your hand.) I won’t even go into her ability to distinguish right from wrong. (Ethics violations and abuse of power, anyone?)

I swore I’d never again write about Sarah Palin. It was just too depressing. But David Warren made me. His assessment of Palin, and of McCain’s choosing her as a running mate, was just too far “out there” for me to ignore.