The MSM, docile for so many years about the Bush administration, has flipped its collective lid about Sarah Palin, making itself the focus of so-called “news” stories while ignoring events of actual substance, like her visits this week with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Sarah Palin can’t win for losing. She’s treated with venomous condescension on the one hand for her supposed lack of foreign policy experience, then excoriated when she meets with heads of state, and why? Because her campaign hasn’t given the press the access they, in their infinite wisdom, believe they deserve.
As far as John McCain’s wish to postpone the first Presidential debate until the negotiations on the infamous bailout deal are over: seems to me that the next President, be it McCain or Obama, really needs to be involved in this, and postponing the debate for a week wouldn’t be the end of the world.
Whether or not McCain or Obama has economic expertise is totally beside the point: that’s not their role. Rather, as the titular heads of their respective political parties, they have to have a seat at the table.
This bailout is historic, both in terms of its size – potentially over a trillion dollars – and its precedent-setting nature. It is a shift to pure socialism in the ravaged, beating heart of world capitalism. It is also at the center of this campaign’s major issue: the state of the economy.
Thus, first-hand knowledge of both the negotiation process and those involved with that process are not just political niceties, they are crucial components in setting the context for the next President’s economic policies.
Anyone who doesn’t understand and support the importance of participating in the development of “corporate memory” probably has never been in a leadership or policy-making position themselves. And, as is the case with Palin, the media’s inability to grasp this is makes me more than a little sick with disgust.
Furthermore, I don’t appreciate the Obama campaign’s temper tantrums in reaction to McCain’s wish to postpone – not cancel – the first debate. It doesn’t portend well for Obama’s ability to roll with the punches or to distinguish between important versus trivial matters in responding to the unexpected. It certainly says nothing good about his leadership abilities.
The Obama campaign’s current emotional overreactions to virtually every obstacle or slight, real or imagined, are wearing me out.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Obama’s original political strategy was the “2010-2012-2016” plan: Governor or re-election to the Senate in 2010, then a bid for the White House in 2012 at the earliest.
Too bad for the rest of us that he didn’t stick to it.