Why I Don’t Care for Sarah Palin

After looking through all the media coverage of McCain’s VP pick, Governor Sarah Palin, I have started to form my own opinions on the nominee. First, I have no sympathy for the news coverage of Palin’s policies, her views, her history or her family. The coverage she has received is no more than any other candidate has received, during this campaign season or in any other since Clinton and the Republican takeover in 1994. The Gingerich crowd essentially discarded the civility of political discourse and ultimately laid the foundation for Palin’s current ordeal. They initiated the process of replacing reasoned, intellectual sparring with the “win at all costs mentality”, even if it means lying, cheating or “swiftboating” your opponents. While the Democrats are fully engaged in it now, the fact is that a return to a form of polite, but forcefully reasoned 18^th century debate will only return when one party martyrs itself and takes the higher moral road. That won’t be the Republicans any time soon: their constituency is great at talking values, but ultimately likes their opponents served raw.

So, while I have no sympathy for the hypocritical stance of the Republican whiners, that aside what can I objectively make of Sarah Palin?

She elected to have her Down ’s syndrome child and raise it instead of making the other choice and aborting it. I commend her for that decision. However, her ability to see that decision through successfully in the context of being politically and economically endowed is a far cry from being able to see it through successfully as a member of the more common lower class in America. Raising a Down’s syndrome baby probably has little or no effect on Palin’s ability to afford a house, send her offspring to college, or compete with her career – at least not to the extent such decisions would affect your typical northeastern California teenager. Those decisions have far greater implications at our level of economic status than at hers – and the actual decision becomes far more complicated. The fact that Sarah Palin has no intention of granting another woman the opportunity to weigh the same decision in her own educational, economic and historical context, and reach a different conclusion, smacks of the very elitism supposedly hated so fervently by the Christians McCain needs to appease. The fact that she expects those who do not hold her own theological beliefs to abide by them simply embraces the beginnings of American theocracy welcomed by Christian fundamentalists and hated by freethinkers like myself.

As a scientist and educator, I also cannot accept her limited view of science and intellectualism. She clearly supports creationism as an “alternative” to evolution and would favor its inclusion in public schools. Admittedly she did not pursue a course of action while governor, but her other religious views and statements seem to confirm that her fundamentalist religious beliefs would ultimately trump reasoned policy. More to the point, as a creationist, she can’t be trusted to leave the matter to science educators. The Discovery Institute (and Ken Ham’s Creationist Museum) would be pulling at her skirt constantly to fund its advertisement campaign against science and reason and I have no doubt she would cave. Similarly, Palin’s limited knowledge of the science of climate change does nothing to convince me to support her. Again, she seems to prefer a “belief” that industrial humans can’t possibly be responsible for climate over the “science” that suggests otherwise.

I do happen to agree with her stance on gun control – although I doubt she’d like the fact that I, like others, think atheists and the non-religious should embrace the second amendment with a fervor that puts the NRA to shame. On the other hand, her only answer to the energy crisis appears to be “lay more pipe” and “drill more holes”. A short-sighted response. I also wonder if her view on foreign policy will be driven less by intelligence and reason than by a library of John Wayne movies.

In the end, however, I have to give kudos to Sam Harris for describing the ultimate realities of a McCain/Palin ticket:

Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves…This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages – and loses – both necessary and unnecessary wars.

Like Harris, I’m tired of seeing uneducated country bumpkins leading this country.