WHAT WILL PALIN DO TO BE PRESIDENT?

Have you thought about that? From the moment Sarah Palin was tapped for McCain’s Vice President, Sarah Palin has thought of nothing but becoming President of the United States. A bit of fantasizing is in all of our lives. I have been known to write an Oscar-acceptance speech in my head. But Sarah Palin has decided she WILL be Prez. McCain’s shaky health is one factor. However Palin is so hopeful that McCain will pull out of the race for president before the election in November that she has already started to undermine him by countering his decisions with ideas of her own. He shouldn’t have pulled out of Michigan, she says. She wants to go to Michigan and save it for the Repubs. This morning in his Op/Ed column in the New York Times (“Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain”), Frank Rich says: “There’s a steady unnerving undertone to Palin’s utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right G.O.P. base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder.” Rich goes on to say, “Charlie Gibson asked whether she thought she was ‘experienced enough’ and ‘ready’ when McCain invited her to join his ticket. Palin replied that she didn’t ‘hesitate’ and didn’t ‘even blink’ — a response that seemed jarring for its lack of any human modesty, even false modesty. In the last of her Couric interview installments on Thursday, Palin was asked which vice president had most impressed her, and after paying tribute to Geraldine Ferraro, she chose ‘George Bush Sr.’ Her criterion: she most admires vice presidents ‘who have gone on to the presidency’... Hours later, at the debate, she offered a discordant contrast to Biden when asked by Gwen Ifill how they would each govern ‘if the worst happened’ and the president died in office. After Biden spoke of somber continuity, Palin was weirdly flip and chipper, eager to say that as a ‘maverick’ she’d go her own way.” It is so easy to forget that people like George Bush and Sarah Palin--narcissists—do not have the same responses that people without that severe mental defect have. They feel no empathy or sympathy. They can approximate the response they see in others but they cannot feel it themselves. They are good actors and copiers. But they have no heart in their heart-of-hearts. Rich said this morning, “But the debate’s most telling passage arrived when Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Palin’s perky response — she immediately started selling McCain as a 'consummate maverick' again — was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis’s notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being 'raped and murdered.' If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.” Frank Rich wonders how long it will be before Palin pleads with McCain to get out of the way (her way) and pull out of the race. But were I in McCain’s shoes, I would immediately hire a food taster and monitor all my meds very carefully. Sarah Palin is capable of anything because she feels nothing. As Rich said in his tag line: “Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.”