The Half-Time Show
August 30, 2008 at 6:11 am 5 comments
The Democrats closed their Presidential Convention Thursday and the Republicans begin theirs this coming week. John McCain has set things up for a much more interesting GOP Convention than had he not named Sarah Palin as his choice for Vice President.
The purpose of this web log is voter education, by way of both the blog posts by the author and the comments by readers. What sort of education can we provide for one another?
What we have this weekend is a brief pause between the big conventions. It’s time for major spin. Sarah Palin has drawn much attention because she seems to have come out of nowhere, plus she is youthful and articulate. She was not considered to be on John McCain’s short list with Mitt Romney and the others. She is not well known throughout the United States. She is even newer to the national consciousness than Barrack Obama.
If the announcement of her nomination was intended to steal the thunder from the Democrat’s Convention in Denver, it has certainly done that. Obama outlined his hopes for what he would like to accomplish in great detail, while staying within the confines of the his Party’s Platform positions. Now it is all out there and there is nothing to do but talk about his goals and the likelihood of whether the new Congress will allow him to achieve them. People can even speculate on how the promises he laid out will be received and how he intends to accomplish them.
Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is known only to Alaskans. People inside the Beltway must get to work to find out more about her in order to have somethng to talk about. In the meantime, commentators and pundits can do nothing but speculate the air time away. Voters can decide what they see in her, based on what little is currently in the national record.
All of Obama’s cards are on the table, leaving nothing really new to talk about.
McCain has chosen a relatively unknown running mate, leaving a nothing BUT new things to talk about.
This is the half-time show, ladies and gentlemen!
It will last 3 full days (barring disaster in the Gulf). Let us hope that this political half-time show DOES last the 3 entire days, and let us not overlook the significance of Labor Day.
Who will get the most air time on television and radio? Who will get the most column-inches in newspapers? Who will be on the covers of magazines? Who will be more discussed on the “interwebs,” Obama or Palin?
Would another announcement from McCain have allowed for a different conversation? Would there have been more retrospective review of the previous week in Denver? Would there have been the same kind of preview of the convention in St. Paul?
Maybe the discussion of John McCain’s running mate would be just as dominant had it been someone else. The fact that it is Sarah Palin just makes it more fascinating, whether you like her or not. Yes?
Entry filed under: Voting. Tags: .
1. eggsoregano | August 31, 2008 at 3:06 pm
One can easily find out who Sarah Palin is, and why she is a remarkable person. Her mettle will be tested forthwith, by both legitimate inquiry as well as by the smear merchant machinery, each of which is, of course, inevitable.
Personally, I fiind her resume compelling. Briefly, Sarah Palin’s rise in politics has indeed been mercurial, but certainly not unimpeded. She is the incumbent Gov. of Alaska and to get there Sarah Palin ran against an incumbent Republican Governor, which meant that she had to run against the deeply entrenched state Republican apparatus. This is quite an achievement, and given the corrupted nature of that state’s Republican bosses, i.e. Frank Murkowski and Ted Stevens, her successful campaign represents an opportunity for Republicans in Alaska to clean up their act and image. I hope they have someone who can fill the considerable void Ms. Palin’s national candidacy leaves for them. She is the mother of five children, the last of whom is a downs baby. True to her beliefs, Sarah Palin chose to have that child, unlike 90% of women who choose to terminate such a pregnancy when they become aware in a timely way. This speaks volumes about her and her husband. By themselves, these two aspects of Palin’s life demonstrate that she is a strong, courageous, self-made person whose values are genuine, and whose commitment to purpose is exemplary.
As for you assessment that Obama’s “cards are on the table”, that, in fact, simply isn’t so. For what ever reason, the msm has decided, for the most part, to shirk its responsibility to exercise due diligence in its assessment of who excatly is Barack Obama, and where has he come from, and with whom has he associated himself and in what context. All one needs to do to get at least a partial answer to these questions is to find out who Stanley Kurtz is, and then to ask oneself why did the Obama campaign take extraordinary measures to prevent Kurtz , first, from gaining access to public information at the Univ of Illonois, then try to stop him from appearing on a WGN radio program in Chicago last week, and then failing to prevent that appearence, why the campaign issued a call to action among Obama’s supporters to subvert that program and smear the reputation of Kurtz. These events are well documented and found easily, even though they have generally gone unreported.
A review of just this one sequence of events clearly will show that not only are the cards not on the table, the Obama campaign is trying to stack the deck.
2. Web Pixie | August 31, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Thank you for your comment, eggsoregano. I hope it sparks more conversation and examination of the candidates. Do you happen to know what Stanly Kurtz had to say on WGN last week that got the Obama campaign so riled?
Oh, regarding “cards on the table:” I was referring to the fact that he had made his speech so there was not much guessing to be made about what he might say anymore. …something like that.
Still, I am curious to know more about Stanley Kurtz besides what the Hudson Institute has to say about him. You mention that it’s easy to find out what we need to know, but I must just not know enough to be able to figure out where to go to find what you’re talking about.
Again, thanks for commenting and please forgive me for being an idiot when it comes to SEARCH.
3. eggsoregano | August 31, 2008 at 10:23 pm
http://www.nationalreview.com/
WP: If you take this link to NRO, you will find information on Stanley Kurtz. Use the search function from the top menu and then to authors, which will produce a list among the names of which you will find Kurtz. Read his bio, and then read his latest article in the archive. Subsequent to writing that article, Kurtz did gain admittance to the Annenberg Chicago Challenge files, and Milt Rosenberg, who has a long-running radio program on WGN in Chicago, invited Kurtz on as a guest to talk about this particular experience that Kurtz had getting into the files at the Univ.of Ill, and also to ask what he had found in those files. The Obama campaign tried to intimidate the station to not put Kurtz on. They did this with a barrage of phone calls and emails from their attorneys and Obamaniacs. Of course the show did air, and I’m quite certain you could get a podcast at WGN’s web-site.
The point is, for me anyway, why did they try to stop this man from accessing and then from talking publicly about the connection between Obama and Bill Ayers? What are they afraid will be discovered. Remember that Obama described Ayers as an English professor who simply was a neighbor. Kurtz is still working the files at the UofI, but at a minimum, he has already demonstrated that Obama was intentionally misleading in trying to minimize his knowledge of Bill Ayers. Anyway, if you are interested to find the truth about Obama/Ayers, you have plenty to start with. Stanley Kurtz is a bona fide scholar whose reputation the Obama campaign is trying to destroy. We probably haven’t heard the last of this matter, so they will get much more vicious no doubt. Do a little reading and then decide for yourself.
4. Palin: Here’s My Take - Bang the Drum | September 2, 2008 at 10:28 pm
[...] understands that if Democrats make this a contest of personalities, they’ll lose. Barack Obama gets that, too, which is why he so masterfully shouted out [...]
5. Web Pixie | October 21, 2008 at 7:48 pm
I listened to the WGN broadcast with Milt Rosenberg at eggsoregano’s suggestion. I wish I knew if the program ever did a follow-up on that broadcast. Seems there were some people ill-prepared for the interview, but I suspect eggs hear it another way.
He’s on twitter, I think. I should go ask him.