Insert Turd Face Here

Ok, so you had to bring up Palin. My feeling is that Palin is a lot like Bush in a lot of ways. I don't believe that either of them is stupid. What I do believe is the following.

1) Both have uncurious minds. Palin clearly had not given any thought to most of the major issues facing our country prior to running for VP. This is bad on two levels. One, from a political standpoint, there's no way you can cram in a few weeks to gain a level of knowledge sufficient to come off as reasonably informed when you've got no base on which to build. The McCain people were starting pretty close to from scratch with her on anything that didn't relate to drilling for oil or getting all mavericky. It's also bad because, even if at some point you can cram enough info in there for such a person to be a credible candidate (as Bush evidently did, for Palin in remains to be seen) it's not a good trait for a President in particular to have. It's pretty clear that Bush simply made up his mind about a lot of things and didn't have any curiosity to investigate either his reasons for that decision in the first place or the information that came after that decision for purposes of possibly rethinking his plan. Most infamously, I think this fits with the run up and aftermath of the decision to go to war in Iraq.

2) Both Palin and Bush have an unfailing and unwavering confidence in themselves that goes beyond reason. Bush is, famously, "the decider." He's never expressed any sentiment that he finds any decision hard to make, nor was he, again famously, able to pick out a single mistake he'd ever made as President as of the 2004 election campaign. Subsequently, he's said that certain rhetoric of his was a mistake, or at least that he regrets the rhetoric, but still, he has yet to my knowledge to admit a substantive mistake he's made as President. As for Palin, she loved to talk about how she "didn't blink" when asked to be VP and has more recently said that she always prays for god to show her an open door that she can then "plow through." I think this is a completely accurate self analysis of hers. She sees an opening and she goes for it without worrying about whether it's the right thing to do. I think her decision to plow through the door of running for VP has probably made it difficult for her to ever successfully run for President at this point (if that was ever going to be a possiblity anyway) as she's left the impression with most of the American public (the Republican base obviously being the exception) that she's a lightweight at best. It's hard to overcome first impressions.

As for Palin's ridiculous assertion that it's not "negative campaigning" to point our Obama's allegedly radical associations . . . I'm pretty sure it's not a "positive" message to say that your opponent "pals around with terrorists." If you're not pointing out your own strengths, but instead pointing out your opponent's negative aspects, that's negative campaigning by definition. Bush may think he can redefine what "torture" means to make certain aspects of what we do not torture, and Clinton may think he can redefine the meaning of "is," but we shouldn't let Palin redefine "negative."