Sunday Must Reads: McCain/Palin v. Obama/Biden

This morning, there are a lot of local issues worth our attention, which I’ll get to shortly, but looking at Sunday’s papers, it’s difficult to tear our gaze away from the main national event: the presidential race.

Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, predictably wrote about McCain and Palin they both have intriguing things to say, although RICH is the true must read.

(But also read on for columns about: 1. 2008’s tendency for story over subtance in the LA Times, 2. a comparison of press treatment of Sarah and Hillary in the WaPo, and 3. why Republicans are ready to “lock and load” for Palin…in the Dallas Morning News.)

Here’s Rich. He is harsh and to the point, and difficult to dispute with….you know….facts:

As is nakedly evident, the speech’s central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night.

[SNIP]

Even more fraudulent, if that’s possible, is the contrast between McCain’s platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: “I’ve been called a maverick.” If there was any doubt that that McCain has fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah Palin.

We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction.

She didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her “executive experience” as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.

[SNIP]

That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless.

As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article.

[SNIP]

The Times had it right. The McCain campaign’s claims of a “full vetting process” for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical details they’ve invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper. Apparently when McCain said in June that his vice presidential vetting process was basically “a Google,” he wasn’t joking.

Given, as Rich puts it, the “actuarial odds that could make Palin our 45th president,” it would behoove all of us to want to know the truth about Palin—beyond simply her good looks and her telegenic—but ever more demonstrably false—personna. Read the rest. Rich is angry, serious and, as far as I can see from my river-soaked perch, doesn’t pull a punch or falsify a fact.

Here’s DOWD. It’s a clever column, sort of—in an incredibly unfunny and frightening kind of way.

You know what I’m thinking, because you’re thinking it, too.

If Barack Obama had chosen Hillary Clinton as his running mate, we would now be looking forward to the greatest night in the history of American politics: the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate between Ma Barker and Sarah Barracuda.

As for the POV of Palin fans, much of it is summed up by this ROD DREHER’S column for the Dallas morning news, a perspective that is so devoid of any concern for the genuine problems facing America—starting with the economy (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac anyone?) that it is breathtaking. It’s titled: Palin’s a fighter – and worth fighting for Here’s the opening:

Does the Angry Left really want to launch a culture war over Sarah Palin? Fine. Lock and load.

Read the rest…and weep. There’s more where this came from.

In the LA Times, novelist DIANA WAGMAN talks about story over substance in the 2008 campaign.

And finally at the WaPo ANNE KORNBLUT contemplates what is fair game for reporters to ask Palin—by thinking about what would have been—and has been—asked Hilary Clinton. As we hear much shrieking about the so-called liberal press going after Palin unfairly, any honest commenter needs to try this excercise on for size.

Here’s a snip:

What if, back in the 1990s, Clinton had announced the pregnancy of an unmarried, teenaged daughter? Would the Republicans have declared it an off-limits family matter and declined to judge her, or would it have turned into a national scandal that hurt her chances as she decided to pursue her own career in elected office?

What if, instead of the GOP’s new vice presidential candidate, Clinton had been the one to run for national office without any international experience to speak of? (After all, Clinton’s rivals diminished the relevance of her eight years as first lady, saying they counted for little on her résumé.)

And what if Clinton had rejected questions about her record by calling such lines of questioning sexist? What if she had refused to name any national security decisions she had made, as a spokesman for Sen. John McCain did on Palin’s behalf last week, on the grounds that the question was unfair?

What if, simply, the roles had been reversed?

Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s former communications director, said he is confident that the Republicans “would have attempted to destroy her” if she were in Palin’s shoes