The Snarky Liberal

Now, maybe that’s not entirely fair. She was, after all, the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska from 1996 to 2002. But let this serve as an illustration of how idiotic it is to compare Palin’s level of experience with Obama’s. Palin served as “executive” for a population of less than 6,000 people, little even by small-town standards. Obama’s state senate constituency, by contrast, was made up of at least 45,000 people–and those are just the ones who voted for him.

Let’s look at where they each were in January 2007. Palin was the newly elected governer of a state inhabited by 683,000 souls. Obama had already logged two years in the U.S. senate representing a state of about 12.8 million. Okay, since each state has two senators, let’s call that a constituency of 6.4 million. It’s still nearly ten times larger than the entire state of Alaska. Ten times larger!

The internet didn’t know who Sarah Palin was in 2001. And except for those 5,469 parka-clad Wasilla residents, neither did the nation. Thankfully, the country is finally starting to see through the McCain campaign’s attempts to turn Palin’s molehill of a resume into a mountain of experience.

Be sure to tune in to the VP debate Thursday night. Watching Palin squirm while trying to defend her inch-deep experience will be uncomfortable but definitely worth it.

No wire hangers!

Obama had it right when he told the press to back off Sarah Palin’s soap opera of a family–but for all the wrong reasons. When you parade your children around as campaign props, not to mention issue press releases about them, you can hardly take offense when the media start discussing them. It’s not because of some misguided sense of chivalry that the mainstream media and the liberal blogosphere should cut it out.

Her personal life should be “out of bounds,” as Obama urged, because every time we take aim at Bristol or analyze Palin’s skills as a mother, the monster that is the Palin Phenomenon grows a little bit stronger. With each jab at her all-too-public home life, Palin gets to cry sexism–sometimes even legitimately, like when we speculate whether she can handle raising five kids and being the VP. Would we ask the same question of a male candidate?

An official notice to those who are freaked out by the thought of a Palin America: stop playing along! When she trots out her youngsters or cites her mom credentials as candidate credentials, don’t take the bait. She has Joe and Jane American on her side when it comes to folksy family anecdotes. Don’t fight her on the issues she’s sure to win–they’re the issues that didn’t matter in the first place.

The ONLY way to beat Palin is to quit letting her (and, by extension, the Republican party) define the debate. Forget the identity politics. Let’s deal with the issue politics, because that’s where she’s far out of the mainstream. The majority of Americans disagree with Palin on a whole slew of subjects, but how will they ever know when all we talk about is her uterus?