Palin Uses Repub Convention to Defend Herself

Last night, the world found out John McCain’s running mate is very good at delivering a speech she didn’t write. Fortunately for Palin, the Republican ticket and the Republican Party, Palin didn’t have to talk about McCain’s vision for the United States, or inform the world of her foreign policy experience, both of which would be normal topics for a Vice President candidate at a National convention. John McCain has a clear vision of himself as a brave former naval aviator who spent six years in a POW prison in Viet Nam. And he has a vision of himself as a forceful maverick Senator. But he has no vision for the United States other than the course laid out by the Bush administration for the past eight years. And, of course, his running mate, Sarah Palin, has no foreign policy experience. So luck was on Palin’s side that she could stand before the world and counter, point by point, the claims of inexperience, ineptitude and questionable behavior that have been raised against her, and not betray how naive, inept and callow she would be as Vice President. Palin was good last night. She energized the totally white Republican Convention in St. Paul. And god knows, the sleepwalking, tired, old John McCain needed a shot of energy. The only problem for the Repub ticket is that between the end of the Republican convention and election day on November 4, voters are going to take a sober look at who the Repubs went to bed with: An old man who has mental and physical health problems and a housewife who has more problems in her home than she can handle. Loyal Republican Rudy Giuliani, who had to withdraw from his 2000 bid for the US Senate because of prostrate cancer and because his personal life was filled with scandal, said that no one would dare say that a man should withdraw from a political career because he needed to take care of his five children, one of whom has Down Syndrome, which has been said of Sarah Palin. That is true, Rudy, because for better or worse, the care giving in a family, traditionally has fallen to the women in a family. And that has not materially changed. Look around, who is ministering to elderly parents, children with problems and sickness in the family? It is mostly mothers, grandmothers and aunts. Sarah Palin said the difference between a pit bull and a soccer mom is lipstick and she was wildly cheered. Think about it. That is not funny. It may be true about Sarah Palin. She may be like a pit bull—mean, snarling, vicious, unthinking and unrelenting—but that is not a good thing. And there are thousands of real soccer-moms who are feeling rightfully offended.