The Clueless Leading The Uninformed

It’s fundamental cluelessness about how the economy works, and a demonstrable inability to conceive of foreign policy in anything but the crudest terms. ~Julian Sanchez

No, he’s not talking about John McCain, but he very well could be.  As you might have guessed, he’s talking about Palin.  This takes us back to what I was saying below.  This fad of “let Palin be Palin” is, among other things, the last in a sorry line of attempts to paint her as the next Reagan.  As far as I can tell, the argument is that she would be a powerful extemporaneous speaker if she just weren’t so heavily scripted.  There is absolutely zero evidence for this view.  These people would apparently prefer for her to engage in some improvisation on the spot, a sort of Alaskan jazz solo, which would surely lead to more off-the-cuff answers about sending forces into Pakistan on those occasions when her remarks made sense.    

Coming back to the first point, the description Sanchez uses could easily be applied to McCain, and the second half of it could be applied to many of his advisors.  The thing that ought to concern voters is not so much that Palin is clueless in her ignorance about the rest of the world, but that McCain and his advisors are clueless despite being supposed experts.  It is embarrassing to watch Palin give meaningless answers about Hamas and democracy in the Near East, but it should be appalling that empowering Hamas through elections was the official policy of the Bush administration.  There is no real excuse for Palin to be clueless, but how much less of an excuse is there for the presidential candidate to understand the world in the same crude terms?  Palin actually does us a favor in that she conveys the boiled-down essentials of McCain’s worldview, and the thing that we should always remember is that there is not much more sophistication or understanding in that worldview when McCain states it.