McCain/Palin:  Brilliant Breakthrough or Moronic Mess

by Dr. Robert Dickson Crane


  The reliable base of conservative politics is rejoicing over McCain’s pick announced today of Sarah Palin as his running mate for the presidency of the United states, because she opposes every one of McCain’s liberal leanings and will surely lock up those ultra-conservative Republicans who might have sat out the vote this year.  It will also reinforce McCain’s pitch that he is not a creature of Washington politics, because only two years ago Sarah Palin was as far away from Washington as anybody could be on this planet, namely, as the mayor of Wasilla, a two-bit frontier village in Alaska half way to the North Pole. 

  As the author forty years ago of a lengthy study, entitled “The Paleo-Ecology of the Arctic Sleddog,” I have nothing against Wasilla.  It fact, it happens to be my favorite village, because I knew it thirty-five years ago when it consisted of only two houses within sight of Denali (Mount McKinley) on the way north to Fairbanks.  Its only claim to fame until today has been that it is the center of sleddog training for the 1,100-mile Iditarod sleddog race, which I introduced as an idea back in 1967 and started to train for at Earl Norris’s 200-dog Siberian Husky racing kennel two miles south of Wasilla when Sarah Palin was only six years old.

  Palen’s strong suit is that she has a reputation as a ruthless fighter against corruption.  She won the Alaskan governorship as a candidate out of the blue because she was pro-Alaskan, meaning that she was against the oil companies and other special interests that were ripping off people in her village.  Now she is supposed to do the same thing at the national level. 

  And, of course, she is a “drop-dead” beauty, the kind of woman every “virile man” would love to marry.  The only drawback is that she is a lot smarter than all these virile men, who, like most men, prefer dumb wives who will make their husbands by comparison look smart. 

  The women of America also will love her husband, who could win any contest for “the world’s sexiest man,” sort of like a modern Paul Bunyon.  Reportedly he is part-Eskimo as a result of a liaison of his grandfather with an “Eskimo princess,” which can clinch the support of a major interest group in Alaskan politics.  Together they are quite a combination as a dream couple, compared with an aging McCain with a super-wealthy socialite who would fit perfectly into the Washington cocktail circuit.  But, will it sell outside of Alaska?  The very contrast highlights McCain’s weaknesses.

  The question is whether the next three months will show that this choice for the vice-presidency was a brilliant breakthrough for the Republicans or whether it served only to produce a moronic mess.  As a ripped-off Republican, whose party was hijacked for eight years by a totalitarian ideology, and as a wannabe Alaskan frontiersman with all the values of America’s pioneering Founders, my hope is that something good can come of McCain’s great gamble, God willing.

See also:  McCain takes a gamble on newcomer Palin http://news.aol.com/elections/article/mccain-takes-gamble-on-newcomer-palin/154019