The Obama campaign wizards are whistling past the graveyard if they think they can ignore Sarah Palin, because her telegenic impact will help sell her fallacy-filled attacks on Obama to a wide swath of independent, working-class white voters in swing states, and that could be the difference in this election. Right now she is back in Alaska to undergo briefings on foreign policy and a vast range of issues about which she knows nothing, since she is the least well-educated and least politically experienced nominee for the vice presidency since the erstwhile poet William Orlando Butler in 1848 (he had served only 4 years in Congress, before winning notoriety in the war against Mexico). The Obama campaign should take advantage of the hiatus in Palin mediamania afforded by her cramming sessions at home, by running very hard but entirely factual ads debunking her supposed reformist record in Alaska and insuring that voters in swing states know that as a mayor she tried to fire the city librarian for refusing to censor books, has said that she believes the war in Iraq is part of God's plan, and has repeatedly misrepresented her own record and that of Barack Obama in the past few days. If the tone of these ads is "more in sadness than in anger," and they build an accurate picture of this person's unfitness for national office -- based on her alarming views on energy, climate change, and civil liberties, as well as her penchant for trashing her opponents -- the skepticism of a majority of the electorate about her readiness for the vice presidency will harden into rejection, and John McCain's media-mesmerizing attack 'babe' (the word that right-wing talk radio hosts are using for her) can be disarmed.
No comments:
Post a Comment