Sarah Palin, Experience and the Media

Mainstream media can no longer be trusted to report honestly.

by: barrett kalellis | published: 09 04, 2008

Like a needle stuck in the groove, the Democratic chattering class keeps repeating its mantra that Sarah Palin does not have enough experience (whatever this may mean), especially in foreign policy, compared to Joe Biden.  The implication is that Gov. Palin is not qualified to assume the role of president should a President McCain be incapacitated.

Even after her boffo performance at the convention Wednesday evening, the continuing firestorm is divided along strictly partisan lines: Democrat pundits, blog dwellers and editors in the mainstream media are pushing the not-qualified line; Republicans and right-of-center voices are showing enthusiastic support for Palin, who has now completely reinvigorated the McCain campaign.

What is disturbing is the depth of hypocrisy and smear to which rank partisan members of these media, prominent Democrats and the Washington establishment have stooped to sink Palin’s candidacy.

Waiving aside the fact that Gov. Palin has much more executive administrative experience than Barack Obama and Joe Biden combined, they raise the specter of Palin being unable to handle foreign policy issues, in the case of a McCain in extremis.

They have shamelessly dredged up the matter of her teenage daughter’s inconvenient pregnancy, with the further insinuation that as a mother with five children, she shouldn’t try to fulfill her public duties with so many household responsibilities at hand.

Along with the kitchen sink, some diligent dirt-digger found an old DUI citation against her husband, issued 22 years ago – in other words, it’s the pattern of throwing everything that can be thrown at the wall, and waiting to see what might stick.

Never mind the hypocrisy of this approach – since Democrat candidates have not been subjected to these kinds of essentially irrelevant attacks.  What stands out is the complete lack of understanding and misuse of the terms “experience,” “qualifications,” “ready to be president,” and so forth.

When applicants are considered for a job, they must demonstrate that they possess qualifications for the position, based upon their work experience.  Even though the new position might entail new and unfamiliar responsibilities, it is assumed that a qualified candidate’s past experience will allow a transfer of training that will make it easier to handle new challenges.

Apparently, the only strike against Palin’s qualifications is that she has no foreign policy experience, this demurrer would apply to any U.S. governor or big-city mayor who might ran for presidential office.  Since many governors have become U.S. presidents in the past, this would seem to belie this objection. 

In fact, lack of direct foreign policy experience is not important at all.  What is important is having knowledge and understanding about foreign policy, familiarity with the current issues and most of all, good judgment when it comes to evaluating policy options.  It also helps to understand the psychology of your overseas opponents.

Even with Joe Biden’s much-vaunted “experience” as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it still brings into question his judgment, given his wrong-headed past pronouncements on public policy.  Is bad judgment, then, considered acceptable experience in terms of qualifications?

One can question the foreign policy credentials of some of the most prominent politicians, including Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and the hapless John Edwards.  Regardless if they serve on congressional committees, or take political junkets to foreign countries or watch foreign movies with subtitles, these are hardly qualifications, nor do they represent real experience in foreign policy.  Nor does a memorized list of current foreign leaders.

At the executive level, decisions on foreign policy are, in fact, made by committee: the president’s direct advisors, along with input by congressional leaders, present policy options to the president, who makes the final decisions.  They are not made strictly on the basis of one person’s opinion.

Even with experience – as the Bush administration has – there is no guarantee of good judgment and against blind spots.  Most every advisor in the Bush administration, along with most senators and congressmen, knows practically nothing about the real threat of Islam to the U.S. and the West.  So where does this kind of experience lead us?  Into misguided wars and lack of national security initiatives

Sarah Palin could do no worse than the current executive branch in the administration of foreign policy – although this is hardly an endorsement.  And she could do no worse than Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, in my judgment.  So it’s really a non-issue and a media canard.

The mainstream media’s attacks on Gov. Palin are beneath contempt and contaminate objective reporting in favor of blatantly partisan screeds.  This is not an indictment solely against political pundits, but of editors and reporters who deliberately slant news coverage for propaganda purposes to engineer vote outcomes.

This practice has become so widespread and openly engaged in that it represents a continuing danger to the nation at large.  Instead of leading to an informed and well-educated public, it produces rather a confused and ill-informed populace that has been filled with slanted and lopsided opinions masquerading as facts.

In the long run, this can lead the nation to no good, as we attempt to choose our country’s leaders.  Josef Goebbels and his cronies were fond of these tactics in 1933-45 and look what happened to them.

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