Well, the presidential election just got really interesting – or maybe I should say the vice-presidential race did.
The surprise announcement by John McCain that his running mate would be Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin got him a lot of sudden attention, that’s for sure. I hate to admit it, but I’m not sure I would have recognized her if someone had had mentioned “Sarah Palin” before the Aug. 28 announcement.
I Googled her name the other night, just for fun, and 1.8 million links (give or take 20,000 or so) popped up. Wonder how many would have popped up two weeks ago.
Anyway, with Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden, who is no stranger to anyone who’s paid any attention to politics over the last 20 years, as his V.P. candidate, the stage is set for this election.
For folks who were trying to figure out what to do with this election, in which a maverick, war-hero Republican is pitted against a young, charismatic Democrat, the whole ticket on both sides just got juicier.
Biden is an interesting choice for Obama. He definitely has the experience in government that Obama lacks and he’s not Dick Cheney. He was the youngest popularly elected senator in U.S. history when he entered the Senate six terms ago from Delaware at the tender age 29. He’s from a blue-collar background and has a lot of appeal for the working class folks. He commutes to the Senate daily from his home in Delaware. He has a lot of experience in foreign affairs and defense, which Obama, just over halfway through his first term in the Senate, lacks.
One rub against Biden is that his name is still linked in many people’s minds with plagiarism after he was forced out of the 1988 U.S. Presidential race when it was revealed his campaign speeches included plagiarized passages from speeches by British Labour party leader Neil Kinnock and Robert Kennedy. He’s tried twice for the White House and failed both attempts, the most recent last spring when he dropped out of the Democratic primary after a poor showing in the Iowa Caucuses.
So we have the relatively inexperienced but very talented Obama paired with an old warhorse, Biden, who knows the game as few others do.
Palin, on the other hand, has even less experience than Obama. But she’s also a maverick, she’s smart and she’s been very popular in Alaska, a state with a personality that’s a lot more like Oregonians’ than, say, Pennsylvania. She’s had a long history of run-ins with her own party in Alaska, which has led to hard feelings from the rank-and-file. She’s been under investigation from the Republican-controlled state legislature over accusations that she tried to have her former brother-in-law fired from his job as a state trooper and then ordered the dismissal of the state public safety commissioner, who refused to do the deed.
But she’s also exposed a lot more corruption in Alaska than Obama has in Chicago, where it’s historically been a local specialty.
If you’re looking for change from the stodgy, finger-in-the-air-to-test-the-wind Republicans who seem more interested in winning elections than actually going to bat for their constituents, maybe a 44-year-old hockey mom with five kids, and a husband who is a commercial fisherman, is what you want.
I’m sure we’ll learn more about Palin (and Biden) in the next couple of months and it won’t all be pretty, such as the recent news that Palin’s 17-year-old, unmarried daughter is pregnant.
But you have to admit the tickets suddenly have a lot more spice in them for voters than they did Aug. 1.
I was recently in a church where I heard a seminary history professor give a presentation on the history of Christianity in America.
He said a lot of interesting things, but one thought that came to me as I listened was that we are generally pretty clueless about how what we do is going to affect us and those around us down the road.
The job of historians, of course, is to try to figure out what happened way back when. The benefit of accurate history, if we’re wise, is that we learn from it because history repeats itself more than we’d like to think.
Obviously, most of us can’t predict the future with any degree of certainty, so we’re left to guess – or to take a look at history and see if we can see any patterns that might repeat themselves.
In this election, though, we have little precedent to rely on. We’ve never had a serious African-American presidential candidate and we’ve never had a woman for a vice-presidential candidate.
No matter who wins, it’s going to be a new era for the U.S.A. and that’s going to be interesting.