National Review columnist says Palin is unqualified and should withdraw
I briefly interrupt this brief hiatus to let you know that Kathleen Parker at
National Review Online has
called on Sarah Palin to resign from the vice presidential nomination. Here is her reason:
Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.
Paul Mulshine discusses the Parker column
here. Mulshine says, inter alia,
Sure she’s attractive and shoots moose, but could she actually run the country…?
Parker’s recommendation that Palin withdraw from the race would not come as a complete surprise to regular readers of Parker’s column (of which I am not one). It’s true that from the start she had no problem with the Palin nomination on the basis of the illegitimate pregnancy of her 17 year old daughter, the exposure of the daughter’s situation to the nation by Palin’s acceptance of the nomination, her campaigning for vice president with a five month old special needs baby, and the damage to conservative values that resulted from conservatives approving everything about Palin’s situation. These were my main reasons for opposing her nomination.
Instead, Parker expressed doubts, from the start, about whether Palin is qualified.
Then on September 19 she said this:
Whatever happens, we may deserve what we get. On the other hand, maybe there’s still time to wise up: Obama boots Biden and taps Clinton; McCain dumps Palin and picks Romney. It’s a concept.
So she already had these concerns about Palin’s abilities before the Couric interview.
While I said that Rod Dreher”s headline calling Palin’s interview with Couric a “debacle” was overstated, if the interview has made an NRO columnist say that Palin is unqualified and should leave the race, clearly it was a debacle. However, a further qualification is called for. While Parker seems to have some conservative leanings, it is not clear to me that she has even been identified as either a conservative or a Republican. Her remark, quoted below, that she “loves” Barack Obama, along with some other of her comments that I’ve quoted, would suggest something other than a conservative orientation. In which case Parker’s column today does not represent a conservative defection from Palin and is not as significant as it first appeared.
Here are some excerpts from Parker’s previous columns on Palin over the last month:
September 3:
Bristol Palin, too, quickly became a humanizing symbol for reckoning and prioritizing. Most Republicans rolled up their sleeves the way families do when trouble comes. Such is life.
To social conservatives within the party, the Palin situation merely underscored the family’s commitment to life. Bristol is marrying the father—and life, indeed, goes on….
Politicizing Bristol Palin’s pregnancy, though predictable, is nonetheless repugnant and has often been absurd. It may be darkly ironic that a governor-mother who opposes explicit sex ed has a pregnant daughter, but experienced parents know that what one instructs isn’t always practiced by one’s little darlings.
We try; we sometimes fail. There are no perfect families and most of us get a turn on the wheel of misfortune.
Were it not for the pain of a teenager who didn’t deserve to be exposed and exploited, the Left’s hypocrisy in questioning Palin’s qualifications to be vice president against the backdrop of her family’s choices would be delicious. Instead, it leaves a bad taste.
Would anyone ever ask whether a male candidate was qualified for office because his daughter was pregnant?
Some also have questioned whether Palin, whose son Trig has Down syndrome, can be both a mother and a vice president? These questions aren’t coming from the Right—so often accused of wanting to keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen—but from the Left.
Did someone switch the Kool-Aid?…
There may yet be reasons to find Palin an unacceptable vice-presidential choice, but making pro-life decisions shouldn’t be among them. Her candidacy, meanwhile, has cast a bright light on the limitations of our old ideological templates.
September 10:
She gets small-town America because she is small-town America. The question is, does she get the Great Big World? And can she lead it, if necessary?
McCain seems to think so. Or does he? Whatever the case, his political judgment in selecting the Alaska governor was keen. With that singular flourish, he signaled the Republican base that he isn’t a RINO (Republican In Name Only) after all. And, he co-opted the Democrats’ claim to represent women’s interests by picking a woman who makes feminists look like sissy-girls.
Both a frontier woman and beauty queen, the square-jawed Palin not only neutralized the sisterhood, but she animated the brotherhood. Men are suddenly riveted as never before by the frontal lobes of the vice- presidential candidates….
Like all caricatures, the elitist and the redneck are based on partial truths, but there’s enough substance to justify some of the contempt from both sides. Obama does have that little chin-lifted, smile-down-his-nose, teacher-pet look that says, “I know better than you.” Palin does exude the kind of biblical certitude last observed in a president by the name of George W. Bush.
September 19:
Confession: I love Barack Obama and I love Sarah Palin—both for different reasons. They both also scare me to death.
I love Obama for his style, grace, intellect, and his way with words. I want the healing power that an Obama presidency could deliver to this country.
I love Palin for her chutzpah, courage, maverickness, and her authenticity. As a woman, I want her to be fantastic. I want her to expose the fraudulence of identity politics and show the world that Woman is not just one thing.
But my inner eye is watching. And my inner voice is saying: These are not good enough reasons.
I worry.
I worry that Obama isn’t serious enough about terrorism and free markets. I worry about his out-of-touchness with the people who, he says, cling to guns and religion because of frustration and anger. I worry about a worldview that may have been shaped in part by a spiritual mentor who damns America in church and thinks the government invented the AIDS virus to kill blacks.
I worry about Obama’s over-intellectualizing—that he will get lost in a maze of deep thoughts and fail to be decisive when necessary.
I worry that Sarah Palin won’t set foot in that maze.
I worry that she won’t intellectualize enough. I worry about her certitude and her slight offness. Whatever her charms, anyone in public office who thinks out loud about banning books might be missing some aces in her deck.
I worry about a worldview that might have been shaped in part by a minister who believes that Alaska someday will be home to Christian renegades arriving for the Rapture.
I do not worry about her small-town values, which are mostly Main Street’s values. Or even her social conservatism, which is driving Democrats insane. Most Americans are more worried about a crumbling economy and the next terrorist attack than they are about what motivates Palin to have a baby others would abort.
Even were Palin to become president and in a position to fill Supreme Court openings with pro-life justices, the likelihood that Roe v. Wade would be overturned is slim. Such a dramatic shift in U.S. law would require an unlikely alignment of stars, including Senate confirmation of the nominees. Moreover, it is not clear that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito would line up with such a campaign.
With so much to worry about, we are left with two not-great choices that, frankly, do not lend themselves to sound sleep. There is still much to know about Palin and not much time to know it. Was she the most qualified person in McCain’s field of running mates?
Clearly not. There was once a man named Mitt Romney who might have been handy to have around as the economy collapses….
Whatever happens, we may deserve what we get. On the other hand, maybe there’s still time to wise up: Obama boots Biden and taps Clinton; McCain dumps Palin and picks Romney. It’s a concept.
- end of initial entry -
Paul Mulshine writes:
By the way, I think you get credit for first conservative to come out against her. My “Palin doesn’t pass the laugh test” column didn’t run until the Thursday of the convention and you had already weighed in. Of course, Wednesday night was the supposedly brilliant speech that bowled everyone over and I had filed before it, so you can imagine the heat I took over the next few days. Unfortunately, Roman Hruska really was onto something. Mediocre people really do want to be represented by their fellow mediocrities.
LA replies:
I wrote on the Sunday night or the Monday morning after the Friday of the announcement that with her five month old special needs infant she should not be a vice presidential candidate. I posted that a couple of hours before the news about Bristol’s pregnancy was revealed
While I demur from your Hruska quote, at least it relates to pro-Palin VFR readers, there is a lot of grounds for applying it to the Palin situation generally, given all the people who have said that we should support Palin because “She’s just like us,” and “We all have family problems just like hers.”
LA writes:
Here are some comments at Lucianne.com about Parker’s column:
Reply 10—Posted by: wyowumin, 9/26/2008 8:22:41 AM
This isn’t the first time I’ve been disappointed in Kathleen Parker. She’s sort of like Peggy Noonan. Paid for pretending to be a Conservative/Republican but in fact just another elitist bonehead.
Reply 12—Posted by: jar, 9/26/2008 8:23:24 AM
Leftist brainwashing has gotten to Kathleen. Don’t forget the Gibson and Couric interviews have been carefully edited to make Sarah look as bad as possible. For the same reasons Biden can’t drop out, Palin can’t—nor should she. Has Kathleen not given thought to how bad McCain would look if Palin used the flimsy excuse of suddenly deciding, this late in the game, that she needs to spend more time with her newborn? McCain would be a laughing stock.
Reply 17—Posted by: Munzberg, 9/26/2008 8:31:59 AM
Must be something personal, but at any rate Parker is just plain wrong.
My brother and his wife, for example, have always been stereotypical San Francisco Bay Area Democrats but they’re voting for the Republican presidential ticket this year for the first time ever. Why? Sarah Palin. As my brother says, she’s honest and of the four presidential contenders she best represents average people.
Reply 18—Posted by: Evocatus, 9/26/2008 8:32:10 AM
Kathleen, Kathleen, Kathleen (sigh),
You don’t get it. Saracuda just doesn’t speak the inside the Beltway 16-second soundbite game. Yet. She’ll learn. Unfortunately.
Right now, she walks like us and talks like us.
Kathleen (honey), you need to get outside the Beltway every once and a while. There’s a whole country out here.
Reply 30—Posted by: trentamj, 9/26/2008 9:29:20 AM
I don’t know why anyone is so surprised by this article. Ms. Parker has always been a fair-weather conservative, whose so-called principles wilt in the face of even the mildest bad meteorological report coming from the Left. Ideological ”friends” like Ms. Parker are worse than 10 straight-up ideological opponents.
LA writes:
I thought Sarah Palin had good instincts, good political instincts. But her reiterating and insisting on her ridiculous notion that the Alaska governship is significant foreign policy experience showed shockingly poor judgment on her part. Even if, in the world of reality, it actually were the case that being governor of Alaska entails significant foreign policy activity, no one believes it, and she looks foolish—absurdly small-time—when she argues that it is so.
It’s almost on the level of some comedy sketch where a hairdresser from Queens is running for president and says (add a Queens accent), “Oh, yes, I know a great deal about foreign policy, because I do the hair of customers from so many different countries!”
The fact that Palin, notwithstanding her good political instincts, made such a clumsy mistake suggests that she’s not on her game, because she’s out of her depth. She may be a wiz in Alaska, but suddenly propelling her onto the national stage before she was ready for it was not right, was not good for her, as I’ve said over and over.
* * *
How then should she have handled the foreign policy question? NOT by referring to her non-existent “experience,” but by speaking about her interest in various foreign policy questions. Show that she cares about Iraq, Islam, Russia. Then say, “many governors have become president and vice president who previously had not dealt directly with foreign policy. We all know that there is no real preparation for the presidency. But I have a strong sense of America and America’s place in the world, and I look foward to helping John McCain.”
As for Alaska’s proxmitiy to Russia, she could have said something like this: “Alaska is very different from the rest of the country in that we have this proximity to Russia, and, of course, Alaska was once owned by Russia. I’m not saying that being governor of a state that is near Russia is foreign policy experience, but it does give me a different feeling for things which is part of my world view.”
.
September 27
Ray G. writes:
Kathleen Parker is a fine columnist but she’s very much a political moderate. A few months ago she gushed how she thought Obambi could “heal the nation”. Heal us from what?
What drivel?
LA replies:
I agree. Parker’s attack on Palin seemed extraordinary because published at NRO, so I played it up. But the reality is that Parker has never really been even notionally a conservative, so her column is not, as I initially thought, indicative of a turn of conservatives against Palin.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 26, 2008 12:57 PM | Send