Not an Idiot......Really

Probably the only Big Gulp she's had in years (WSJ video)

Politicians, like parents, always seem a lot smarter after they're out of power. No longer must they state their positions in 15-second sound bites or be afraid to acknowledge that some of the opposing arguments are valid.  No longer will they have to defend party members whose personal behavior is indefensible. They can reveal nuance, flexibility, and self-deprecation.

One politician whose public persona was a media caricature is Sarah Palin. (To be even-handed, another is Joe Biden, the current butt of late night humor.)

Your humble observer is of the opinion that comedy requires at least some intelligence, which Sarah Palin displayed at the recently concluded Conservative Political Action Conference.

At one point, Ms. Palin paused in her rabble-rousing speech to take a big sip from a Big Gulp she pulled out from behind the podium. “Bloomberg’s not around, our Big Gulp’s safe,” she said, a dig at the New York mayor’s attempted ban on large soft drinks. [snip]

She joked that young Republicans ought to be “thinking Sam Adams, not drinking Sam Adams.”

During her defense of the Second Amendment, she spoke admiringly of the gun rack her husband, Todd, bought her for Christmas and the gun she bought him to stock it. “He’s got the rifle. I got the rack,” she quipped.

Mrs. Palin won't be on a national ticket again, and it's anyone's guess where she'll settle in. But just as her VP nomination startled in 2008, she'll surprise us before she's done. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

Me, Myself, and I

Peggy Noonan reviews the State of the Union speech:

[President Obama] too often in making a case puts the focus on himself. George H.W. Bush, always afraid of sounding egotistical, took the I's out of his speeches. We called his edits "I-ectomies." Mr. Obama always seems to put the I in. He does "I implants."

That's a funny observation, but the President is a smart guy who wouldn't continue to put the focus on himself if it wasn't working. The majority of the public may not like his policies, but they like him personally. (Heck, count me in the majority.)

Can he be beaten in 2012? Depends on how bad things get, foreign events being the wild card, and who the Republican nominee is. That sounds obvious, I know, but my sense is that Sarah Palin is damaged goods and Mitt Romney is vulnerable because of health care.

Today I'd vote for Governor Christie or General Petraeus over President Obama, but both say they're not running. As everyone is saying about the events in Egypt, the situation is very fluid. 

More Education Needed

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach [marvelous name!] says that Sarah Palin's use of the term "blood libel" is justified. 

Despite the strong association of the term with collective Jewish guilt and concomitant slaughter, Sarah Palin has every right to use it. The expression may be used whenever an amorphous mass is collectively accused of being murderers or accessories to murder.

The abominable element of the blood libel is not that it was used to accuse Jews, but that it was used to accuse innocent Jews—their innocence, rather than their Jewishness, being the operative point. Had the Jews been guilty of any of these heinous acts [murdering children] the charge would not have been a libel.

In recent years we have seen words like "genocide" and "holocaust" applied to acts, which, while horrible, are on a much smaller scale or less redolent of evil than the original events that gave rise to these terms' widespread use. Hyperbole goes uncontested, while an appropriate use of an historical term is criticized. Perhaps Governor Palin is not as ignorant nor her critics as educated as we have been led to believe. 

Incompetence

When Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats swept into office two years ago, they misread their mandate. A large majority voted for the Democrats in 2008 simply because they were not Republicans. Nearly everyone was tired of George Bush, tired of his wars (although Iraq did appear at last to be turning the corner) and fearful of a collapsing Wall Street. The 2008 Republicans did not deserve to be re-elected, and most independents and even many Republicans agreed. The GOP’s message of “I’m bad but the other guy’s worse” had predictable results. The Democratic wave that began in 2006 crested in 2008. The Democrats would probably have won anyway, but the fact that they had an attractive candidate sealed the deal.

The President and his party immediately began pursuing the liberal agenda: much greater government control of the economy, more government assistance for those viewed as “not rich”, and an end to the Iraq war. The voters, however, mainly wanted him to save the banking system from collapse and let the resilient economy recover like it normally does within 18-24 months.

All the President had to do was not make things worse. By November, 2010, with the economy and jobs on the upswing, the mid-term elections could well have made the Democratic Congressional majority even more lop-sided.

The large banks and Wall Street did survive—one cheer for that—but the pursuit of the liberal agenda birthed a health-care monstrosity filled with consequences unknown and unintended. The entire health-care sector and employers everywhere hesitated to hire as the citizenry tried to digest the health care bill. (Plopping 2,700 pages of far-reaching legislation into the economy’s midst is like Microsoft slamming 2,700 pages of code into Windows 7 without any testing.)

Once a derogatory meme takes hold—witness Gerald Ford and Sarah Palin's example—it becomes impossible to shake. The President’s supporters in the media are doing their best to tamp it down, but after the slow reaction to the BP oil spill and the failure of the stimulus package, the whiff of incompetence has become inescapable.

A Story With No Legs

Sarah Palin, speaking to a Canadian audience, talked about the irony of how her family chose a Canadian hospital when confronted with a health-care emergency. (Gov. Palin has spoken out against Democratic health-care plans, which critics and even some supporters claim will make the U.S. system resemble Canada's.)

As a six-year-old child she obviously had no input to her parents' decision, and equally obviously a lot of things have changed since the 1960's. The important question is, what would Gov. Palin do today?

In a medical emergency most people place their top priority on speed, with quality and cost being secondary considerations. If the nearest hospital is Canadian, every American parent I know would head there without hesitation. Ideology goes out the window when our kids are involved.

A word about the policy issue: if the Canadian system produces decent health care and short waiting periods at lower cost than ours, we shouldn't close our eyes to adopting its elements.

At this point we should again dust off the project triangle.

Only two of the three objectives are simultaneously possible.

The very best organizations try to hit the mark with all three. With government programs we're lucky to get two. (In some cases, e.g. the DMV and post office, Americans would take one.) One of the best government organizations, the U.S. military, is quick to respond and is extremely competent, but controlling cost has defied half a century of effort.

A government that rarely achieves two points of the good-fast-cheap triangle is asking us to believe that for the first time it can get to all three. IMHO, Governor Palin, Tea Partiers, and for that matter the majority of Americans are quite justified in their skepticism. © 2010 Stephen Yuen

Better Than That

Novelist Jonathan Raban critiques Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father”:

To build a political base in his adopted city, Obama had to write a book, but it's a measure of his seemingly unbounded confidence in his abilities that he set his sights on making the book a work of literary art. "Dreams" is less memoir than novel: Most of its characters are composites with fictional names; its total-recall dialogue is as much imagined as remembered; its time sequences are intricately shuffled. It has an old-fashioned plot, as it charts the progress of its hero, first met as a 21-year-old loner for whom "my solitude" was "the safest place I knew," on a Ulyssean quest for identity and community. Like a Trollope novel, "Dreams" ends with a wedding scene, in which all the warring fragments of Obama's life -- black and white, Hawaii and Indonesia, Kenya and Chicago -- finally cohere into one like pieces of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. Married to a South Side native, and, by inference, to the South Side itself, the wandering hero has at last come home, in -- as it so happens -- the very heart of [Illinois representative] Bobby Rush's political bailiwick.

Obama is a skillful realist. By day, the I of his book is a vigilant listener and watcher, a hoarder of contingent details, who hugs his observations to himself, then broods on them late into the night. It's in the insomniac small hours when -- alone except for his burning cigarette -- he comes into his own as a restless thinker, figuring out his world in passages of eloquent interior monologue. Three o'clock in the morning is a recurring time in "Dreams," the hour at which patterns reveal themselves, resolutions are made and the reader enjoys the illusion of unhindered intimacy with the author.

But the book really takes wing when Obama wriggles out of the constraints of the first person singular and, like a novelist, imagines his way into the skulls of other people. Early on, he tries to see Kansas in the 1930s through the young eyes of his white grandparents, "Toot" and "Gramps," when they were courting. Later, his 7-year-old self is playing with Lolo, his Indonesian stepfather, in the backyard of their house in a Jakarta suburb when Obama catches sight of his mother, watching them from behind a window. For the next five pages, he leaps inside her head to observe himself and Lolo through her eyes. It's a bravado performance, as the writer feels on his own pulse the pain of his mother's expatriation and her budding estrangement from her new husband, so troublingly different in his native Indonesia from the student with whom she fell in love in Honolulu.

It’s tempting for Barack Obama’s critics to dismiss his memoir as the expanded product of a college creative writing course.

[Digression: In the past decade there’s been too much tearing down of good and talented individuals in the furtherance of political ends. Speaking as one who is for the most part on the right side of the aisle, I can understand the urge to repay the criticisms and calumnies that have been heaped upon conservatives (did you forget so soon the condescension and mocking regard of the Governor of Alaska, the comparisons of the current President and Vice President to the worst mass murderers in history, the gleeful recitation of one side’s sexual misconduct and corruption and deathly silence about the other side, at least until after the election), but as I tell my children, you are better than that.]

“Dreams from my Father” is light reading, but it’s not lightweight. It can be read quickly as narrative, but also has layers of complexity---should one look for them—that cause it to rise to the level of art. To write well requires thinking, dedication (because of the world’s distractions), and introspection. That’s what’s amazing about our next President. He rose to the top of the rough-and-tumble world of politics, while

the solitary existence of the writer, recasting the world alone in a room, generally unfits him for the intensely sociable, collegial life of practical politics.

I still harbor many doubts, but there’s a chance that Barack Obama may just be the new man foretold half a century ago. He continues to surprise and amaze, and who knows..... © 2009 Stephen Yuen

Typo of the Day

"...Palin had gone completly rouge" Not the "completly" but the "rouge", (HT Mark Steyn, NRO)

A Teaching Moment

The Sarah Palin story won’t stop moving. Jeff Goldstein chronicles the crazy narratives that the win-at-any-cost leftists are throwing up on the wall in the hope that one of them will stick to the Alaska governor. The rumor that even most Obama-Biden supporters wouldn’t touch was the one that had Governor Palin covering up an out-of-wedlock birth of a son to her 17-year-old daughter Bristol by claiming Trig as her own.

Today the McCain campaign confirmed that Bristol is pregnant and will marry the father of the child. As one commentator remarked, Astounding!

The good news for Palin supporters is that there’s no question that Trig is Sarah’s child. It’s biologically impossible for Trig to have been born in April to Bristol and for Bristol now to be five months pregnant.

Nevertheless, Bristol’s pregnancy is a troubling distraction at best. It could raise a host of questions and commentary on the Palins’ parenting abilities, Bristol’s decision to have the baby and get married (if abortion is not an option, why not give the baby up for adoption?), what their religious beliefs say about this situation, the wisdom of joining a Presidential campaign when all this is going on in one’s family, etc.

It is also possible, however, to look at the Palin predicament as one of life’s teaching moments, the unforeseen kind that usually arises when one is presumptuous enough to make plans. The Palins are trying to be true to their faith by walking a much more difficult path, in one case carrying a Down’s Syndrome baby to term and in another case not terminating a teenaged pregnancy. The needs of the other--the child--outweigh the needs of the self.

Political opponents may characterize evangelical Christians’ support of the Palin family as hypocritical expediency, much as feminist groups rallied around Bill Clinton despite his serial womanizing. But that characterization would be wrong; it simply shows how far removed from reality is the media stereotype of sincere Christians as burn-em-at-the-stake Cotton Mathers.

Christians, whether liberal or conservative, Protestant or Catholic, rich or poor, know that they have all sinned and yet are forgiven. I have never heard a Christian (whom I personally know, not the ones on TV) pass judgment on the personal failings of others (violent terrorist actions, such as suicide bombing, I have heard condemned, but that is in a different league from what I’m talking about). This condemnatory caricature tars a whole group by the actions and words of a very small minority.

To the extent that they think to pray about these matters, I hope and expect the vast majority of Christians to put politics aside and pray for the health and welfare of Sarah Palin’s family, as they would for Barack Obama’s, Joe Biden’s, and John McCain’s. There are more important things in life than winning an election. © 2008 Stephen Yuen