Prudence as principle

In today's complaint at the perceived inexperience of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, the inimitable E.J. Dionne elevates prudence to the level of principle.  Say's Dionne,

This week's convention will be overshadowed not only by a hurricane but also by McCain's choice of Palin. The Republicans once hoped to use their gathering to persuade Americans not to trust Obama. Now, as the speakers here make their case, the media will rightly be doing their job, trying to figure out who Palin is. Palin, not Obama, will be the issue, in a way that Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty or some other well-known figure would not have been.

But that's a matter of politics. There is also the question of principle. In picking Biden as his running mate, Obama made a prudent choice. 

My, my.  How principled of Obama.  Maybe it's just me, but aren't we setting the bar a bit low by calling the selection of known plagiarist and Senate fossil Joe Biden "principled" only because it is somehow the safe choice?  It's an odd column that laments the inexperience of Sarah Palin while it extols the prudence of Obama for admitting his own.  Experience is what Biden is supposed to bring to the Obama ticket.

But Dionne's attack on Palin is intended as an attack on McCain's decision to choose her.  Reckless, thinks Dionne.  Of his fourteen paragraphs Dionne devotes seven of them to a comparison of Sarah Palin to -- are you ready? -- Harriet Miers. 

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- By all rights, there should be a revolt at this week's (now-delayed) Republican convention against John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate -- for the same reasons so many Republicans opposed President Bush's selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.

It's apparently Dionne's hope and belief that the choice of Sarah Palin by John McCain will be similarly received by the conservative base as was Harriet Miers' selection for the Supreme Court by George Bush.  One flaw in Dionne's thinking is to argue an equivalence between selecting a vice president and appointing a justice to the Supreme Court for life.  And he doesn't seem to notice that Palin's positions and her biography really resonate with the conservative base.  But he goes ahead and compares Miers' and Palin's respective experiences anyway.  Whatever.

Dionne seems to think the presence of Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket throws the experience advantage to the Obama-Biden ticket.  For Dionne, Palin is the unknown while Obama, by virtue of having successfully engaged in the longest presidential primary campaign in U.S. history, has established his positions.

Conservatives have complained that we barely know Obama. This is nonsense. Obama has been put through the journalistic wringer since he entered the public spotlight four years ago.

Right.  About that journalistic wringer.  Let's see what Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell thinks of it, the journalistic wringer that forged Obama's foreign policy convictions.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell was supposed to give “closing remarks” during this afternoon’s Shorenstein Center-sponsored panel discussion with all three Sunday show moderators — NBC’s Tom Brokaw, ABC’s George Stephanopoulous and CBS’s Bob Schieffer — but instead, he opened up a can of worms about bias in 2008 election coverage

"Ladies and gentleman, the coverage of Barack Obama was embarrassing," said Rendell, in the ballroom at Denver's Brown Palace Hotel. "It was embarrassing."

Rendell, an ardent Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter during the primaries, now backs Obama in the general election. Brokaw and Rendell began debating campaign coverage, including the on-air comments by Lee Cowan, and when MSNBC came up, Rendell went after the cable network.

“MSNBC was the official network of the Obama campaign," Rendell said, who called their coverage "absolutely embarrassing."

As Dionne concludes in his column, "the media will rightly be doing their job, trying to figure out who Palin is."  Yes, the media, so solicitous of Obama, will rectify their lapse by doing their very best to skewer Palin.  For today though, Dionne's target is McCain and his reckless pick.  But by picking Sarah Palin, McCain stepped all over Obama's post-convention bounce and ground it right into the dirt.  That by itself makes it a brilliant choice.  Dionne will have much work to do if he hopes to resuscitate Obama's bounce.  He's not off to a good start.

Comments

[David M]

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the - Web Reconnaissance for 09/03/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.

[scyllacat]

Really, I keep getting links to this because you call it "Libertarian Leanings," but I don't know why, because you're just an apologist for the right and haven't even flashed a single libertarian principle my way. I won't be back.

[Tom Bowler]

Who's apologizing?