Palin 2012: David Loftus

It would be nice to believe Ms. Palin was being honest, but if she were, she’d acknowledge that she could never be right for the country and therefore should put away any ideas about running. Has there ever been a Presidential candidate who had less experience as a public servant? The sum total of her work in the public sector consists of four years on a city council, two three-year terms as mayor (both for a town with a population of less than 10,000), about a year on a state commission (Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation, from which she resigned because she couldn’t work with the other members), and less than three years as governor (much of which she spent running for national office, and then resigned). This does not strike me as Presidential material, and I know I’m not alone.

She handles the English language even worse than Dubya (which is pretty pathetic for a former college journalism major), she’s a decent stump speaker but hasn’t offered a single idea of her devising for a domestic or foreign policy program (as opposed to crowd-pleasing slogans and jingoism), and her record as a public servant is, at best, mediocre. The latest Palin faux pas concerns the pair of backcountry cabins she owns with her husband and has apparently never reported on her income tax returns and therefore never paid property taxes on. I mentioned on Monday seeing a story about this in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last Friday and provided a link to it. The story was repeated in the Los Angeles Times, but so far I’m not seeing it getting further traction. Perhaps after state tax officials have completed their investigation, we’ll hear more about it.

Her inability to handle even simple policy questions from interviewers (after the Feb. 6 tea party speech, she participated in an on-stage interview in which she read from notes written on her palm) makes me tremble at the thought of her dealing with leaders of foreign nations. If she were to be elected (an impossibility most horrid to imagine), the image of the United States among the community of nations would plummet again. As a thinking, old-school liberal Democrat, there’s a part of me that would love to see her run just because she would guarantee so much entertainment with her subnormal political intelligence and malapropisms. On the other hand, it would be very expensive entertainment, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing . . . in other words, even worse than “Avatar.”