In the same article, Dr. Fleming remarked on Palin and Robert Stacy McCain’s defense of her:

Dan Larison on his Eunomia blog now on AmCon has drawn attention to our old friend Stacy McCain’s defense of ignorance.  Palin and her supporters are virtuous, he is arguing, precisely because what they don’t know won’t hurt them.  I fear, however, that it will hurt us.  This is worth an entire issue of the magazine.  Since Socrates (at least) we have understood that to pilot the ship of state requires skill, not just a good heart, especially when that ship is no longer a simple republican skiff but a nuclear powered submarine armed with missiles carrying nuclear warheads.  Besides, it is easier to make a judgment of someone’s experience and competence than of the soundness of his heart.

McCain has responded to the effect that her lack of competence in national and international issues, which is at the heart of the critique of her candidacy, is a mark in her favor:

Sarah Palin is the governor of Alaska, a very popular and for all I know a very good governor. She apparently focused her attention on the job she was doing and, prior to being chosen as McCain’s running mate, had paid little attention to the national and international issues that the presidential campaigns were talking about. Very good, I say — I wouldn’t want my governor to be obsessed with presidential politics, but rather to concentrate on doing his job as governor.

Palin’s honest ignorance of presidential-level issues was held up as evidence that she is, or was, unprepared for the vice-presidency — as if years of studying such issues were in itself qualification for the office. Evidence contradicts this idea.

Study of such issues might not prepare someone to be in such a position, but a lack of knowledge about them cannot be considered a recommendation.  Indeed, it must be considered a serious and probably disqualifying deficiency.  When a person applies for a post in the upper reaches of a firm, an academic department or, for that matter, a magazine, don’t we expect that the person to have not just relevant experience but the requisitive knowledge to fulfill his responsibilities?   

As a New Mexican, I can appreciate the point about wanting one’s governor to do his job and not go galivanting around the globe or the country to aggrandize himself, but a focus on state priorities should not require someone to be oblivious about everything else.  It is debatable whether she is a particularly good governor, as her main accomplishments to date have been spending other people’s money (which I am reliably informed by a certain Vice-Presidential candidate is tantamount to socialism) and negotiating a pipeline that apparently cannot be built without the cooperation of the very oil companies whose taxes she raised in order to buy the love of the people with rebate checks.  Of course, we cannot know what she might have done had she not been catapulted onto the national stage after barely a year and a half in office, but that drives home the point that it remains to be seen whether she is a successful governor, much less whether she is capable of the responsibilities of the Presidency that might fall to her in the (increasingly unlikely) event of a McCain victory.   

There is something in all of this I don’t understand.  On the one hand, we are supposed to believe that Palin is being treated unfairly because she does not have the establishment’s preferred educational pedigree and, by implication, that her education was sufficient, but at the same time we have the acknowledgement, indeed celebration, of the fact that Palin really does not know much concerning national and international issues.  Which is it?  As Mr. Bush’s example reminds us, it does not necessarily follow that going to elite universities leads to any broader understanding of the world, nor does it necessarily spur interest in the rest of the world, but what this seems to prove is that Palin would not be qualified for the post she is seeking even if she had gone to all the “right” schools.  The exact same arguments could have been used and were used to defend Mr. Bush’s candidacy in 2000, and I would suggest that the results of giving him the benefit of the doubt have been nothing short of calamitous.  If it is true that experts, self-appointed and otherwise, helped to plunge us into the Iraq debacle, it is also true that Mr. Bush did not have the wit, knowledge or wisdom to reject their supposedly expert advice.   

While there should always be a healthy skepticism of experts, in part because many of those claiming or receiving the title do not necessarily deserve it, the failure of so many experts in connection with Iraq should make clear to us that the experts who supported the war were wrong and were evidently not quite the experts they claimed to be, but not that expertise is undesirable.  We ought to be careful to notice the distinctions between government officials and establishment pundits on the one hand and experts who question and challenge government policy on the other.  It should tell us something that Palin, purveyor of pseudo-populism, has sided repeatedly with the former, which is not surprising, as she is in her current position almost entirely because certain establishment insiders and pundits promoted her.      

McCain keeps invoking the dread specter of Jeb Bush as one reason why we should reconcile ourselves to Palin.  First, why is Palin the most likely to thwart the return of the Bushes?  Second, why exactly is Palin preferable to Jeb Bush anyway?  Like his brother, he is pro-amnesty, but then so is she.  He was the successful, twice-elected governor of a large state, and he is well-versed in a number of national issues.  There is no question that preventing another Bush dynasty restoration is highly desirable, but why should we think that Palin is the one to do it and why do we think that she would represent an improvement?