Posted on 09/11/2008 3:03:21 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is certainly one of the more interesting and controversial characters to emerge in the national political scene of late. Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) selection of her to be his running mate was widely reported to be last-minute, a compromise choice when advisers and party insiders expressed concern over his preferred pick, independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman. The pick smacked of desperation, and it seems clear now that McCain's camp didn't have time to vet Palin in the way it might have liked.
But it may ultimately go down as a serendipitous oversight—and provide guidance to future candidates to eschew the overly risk-averse vetting process and be willing to take chances—to look outside the Beltway establishment for political talent. Palin wowed the GOP convention last week, may have united the party, and won begrudging praise from the very punditocracy and media elites she skewered in her speech.
If Palin helps McCain get elected, he'll of course have no regrets about having selected her. But it's worth wondering whether if McCain's campaign had vetted Palin more thoroughly, she'd have made the cut. I suspect not.
It's now been widely reported that McCain's biggest selling point on Palin—that she's been a trailblazer on pork-barrel spending, one of McCain's pet issues—was off-base. Palin did eventually oppose the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere," but only as of late last year, only after initially supporting it, and only after the two Alaska politicians most associated with the bridge—Republican Sen. Ted Stevens and Republican Rep. Don Young—were under federal investigation. Palin then still took the money for the bridge, she just diverted it to other projects. This was hardly political courage.
Over the course of her brief career, Palin has also had no qualms about working with Young and Stevens to procure federal dollars for local projects—at least until she was savvy enough to realize that public sentiment had turned sour on the process. Under Palin's stewardship, Alaska still leads the nation in per capita spending on federal pork projects, and under her tenure as mayor, the town of Wasilla raked in $26 million in federal earmarks.
Now, you could argue that a governor or mayor who's able to deftly game the earmark system to the advantage of her constituents is only doing what's expected of her. The problem, of course, is that McCain introduced Palin as a maverick reformer of the earmark process—someone who risked her career to fight waste and abuse and to take on Alaska's GOP establishment. That simply isn't true.
But perhaps Palin has learned from the experience. She is at least on the right side of the issue now. And as a libertarian, there's plenty I like about Palin. I don't agree with many of her culturally conservative positions, but she has for the most part declined to enshrine those views in public policy. Her lack of experience doesn't bother me much at all. Washington's in desperate need of fresh blood and fresh ideas, not the promotion of another five-term senator who's found a permanent home in the Beltway morass.
But what I like about Palin should bother McCain. Palin actually has staked out unorthodox positions on a number of interesting issues, and they're issues that McCain and the Republican base that has embraced her would probably find troubling. Palin's taken a lot of heat, for example, for her (relatively loose) ties with the Alaska Independence Party, an organization that favors a vote on whether the state should secede from the union. Palin has also been friendly with the state's Libertarian Party. Palin's willingness to engage pro-liberty, deeply anti-federal political organizations—even fringe ones—is refreshing. But it's wholly at odds with John McCain's "country first" nationalist fervor.
Palin was also one of just three governors in the country to issue a proclamation in support of "Jurors' Rights" day, an event sponsored by the Fully Informed Jury Association, which encourages the doctrine of jury nullification. Nullification is an idea abhorred by tough-on-crime conservatives.
Palin also comes from a state whose constitution has one of the strongest privacy provisions in the country. Alaska's traditional reverence for privacy and personal autonomy is reflected in a number of issues that would likely be at odds with the national Republican Party—or at least the Bush administration—including a rejection of the Real ID Act, and the de facto decriminalization of marijuana.
Palin supported both the Iraq War and the surge, but in the past she has said she also supports a defined "exit strategy," an approach explicitly rejected by McCain, who has said we may well be in Iraq for decades.
Palin's persona thus far seems to be more in the tradition of Alaska's frontier, individualistic conservatism than John McCain's Weekly Standard-style national greatness conservatism. It's a philosophy that's skeptical of government, instead of what Repubilcans stand for now, which is to embrace government, so long as Republicans are running it.
Of course, John McCain is still at the top of the ticket. If he's elected, it will be his policies and philosophy that determine public policy, not Palin's. And there's the strong possibility that Palin's views will morph during a McCain administration to align more with his—indeed, on foreign policy that seems to have already happened.
But of all the aspiring politicians McCain could have boosted into the national spotlight of a presidential campaign, he could have done a lot worse than Palin. If she manages to hold on to her more individualist, limited-government instincts, she'd be a welcome force in a party that has generally abandoned its "leave-us-alone" constituency—thanks in no small part to the man at the top of the ticket. She's certainly a world away from Joe Lieberman, McCain's reported favored pick.
In short, John McCain may have actually made a good pick this month—in spite of himself.
This guy seems to have swallowed the drive-by media’s talking points whole.
He’s right. Should they hold out for perfect?
Why should any person who uses reason care anything about what the right wing, irrational hippies of "Reason Magazine" say?
Geez, I thought it said “Librarians.” Wonder where my mind is....
It's a philosophy that's skeptical of government, instead of what Repubilcans stand for now, which is to embrace government, so long as Republicans are running it.
WOT to one side, that pretty much sums up the Bush years.
If the Libertarians like the ticket because of Palin, I'll take their votes and be happy about it. If Palin can get McCain to remember some of the Conservative core principles of less government and reduced spending, I'll be happy with that too.
They’re not going to like her neoconish foreign policy...
For crying out loud. We’re going to be lectured by a Libertarian about the importance of picking a candidate with a wealth of political experience? When is the last time the Libertarians did that?
My problem with the Libertarian Party (well, one of my problems), has always been their arrogance in going for the Presidency without first establishing any type of record in terms of running a city or state.
Show me what you can do on a lower governmental level and maybe I’ll take a look at you for higher office. But I’m not going to hand the nuclear arsenal to a party that’s never run even a city.
As opposed to, say, Barry Obama's and Plugs Biden's votes (plural) for the same pork barrel project.
My comment is that if Palin is a traditional small government, pro-privacy, pro-individual rights conservative - and not the more recent variety of so-called conservative that merely replaces liberal spending decisions with something a bit less unpalatable, and which also says "screw individual rights, esp. the RKBA" - well, then, Sarah will be fine. We're not going to go from where we are now back to a miniscule government in 4, 8 or 20 years. It took generations to get here, and it'll take generations to get back.
But I'll be THRILLED if Sarah will lead the charge to repeal various gun laws like the Lautenberg Law and Section 922(o) and some of the more onerous provisions of the '68 GCA. THAT is when you know your government trusts you, when they let you buy guns: "The right to buy weapons is the right to be free." A. E. Van Vogt in "The Weapons Shops of Isher"
Who cares what loosertarians think?
Well, thanks for the insult, but I've never, ever (and know lots of other Libertarians who haven't) used a single illegal drug in my/their lives; more than I can say for the Ms. Palin. (Damn...those simplistic, knee-jerk generalizations are a bitch, ain't they?.....)
..and I know lots of Libertarians, including myself, who are supporting the McCain/Palin ticket (in some cases, admittedly, just to piss of the libs/media.....but still), so give it a rest...
Notice one of the things the liberaltarians like about Alaska:
“the de facto decriminalization of marijuana.”
And how many times on FR threads have we seen the liberaltarians deny they are dopeheads?
Here in Alaska we have quite a number of hippies from the left coast, who have escaped to the “last frontier,” not carrying on the pioneer fronteirsman tradition as the writer of this article infers, but they are here so they can practice their degenerate hippy lifestyle in the bush.
These left coast derelicts aren’t content to corrupt their neighboring western states, they have come here and are corrupting the Alaskan last frontier too. They are a plague here...and in the other neighboring states (Idaho, Montana, etc.). Politically, almost to a man, these hippy dopeheads are liberaltarians.
they may have started out as libertarians but once they have political experience, they don’t end up as libertarians.
I consider myself a libertarian, and I think the Libertarian Party is completely wrong in its opposition to the Iraq war. There's nothing about being a libertarian that says the government should not defend the citizenry from our hostile enemies, and I think the War in Iraq was a legitimate expression of that just power of government.
Also, I think the Libertarian Party is out to lunch on its open borders position, since 1) it is well within the scope of legitimate government power to protect the nation's borders; and 2) there is no such thing as a human right to live in the United States.
“Who cares what loosertarians think?”
Well, I’m not sure what a “loosertarian” is, but Ronald Reagan gave a damn about what “Libertarians” thought:
“Libertarianism is the heart and soul of conservatism” - Ronald Reagan.
Go ahead and google the quote, that is if your Nanny State Masters will allow you the freedom to do it.
Not one of the three idiots you mentioned would hold up in a vetting process.
There are plenty of decent Libertarians -- true. But not the elites of your group. Reason magazine is supposed to be the moderate voice of Libertarians and they spout utter nonsense and a good portion of their readership is anti-Semitic.
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