Davos Newbies

Some of my go-to blogs on foreign policy are aghast that Sarah Palin clearly has no idea what the Bush Doctrine is. See, for example, Ilan Goldenberg:

Clearly Palin did not have the foggiest idea what Gibson meant.  This is absolutely huge.  The Bush doctrine of preemption and the National Security Strategy of 2002 was the central element of debate for almost 2 years in the foreign policy community and in the country during the run up to the invasion of Iraq and in the years after.  It was probably the single greatest shift in U.S. foreign policy in a generation.

There were pages and pages of ink spilled on this and it took up hours of debate.  It was a central issue in the 2004 campaign.  For her to not know what it is, raises serious questions about her experience and preparation to potentially be the leader of the free world.

I’m sure, if any of the mainstream media pick this up, the McCain campaign will say it’s just the kind of thing that foreign policy elitists care about. Most Americans don’t know and don’t care. That’s true. But most Americans shouldn’t be president or vice-president. Yet further evidence, if any were needed, of McCain’s absolute dereliction of duty in picking Palin.

Stunning graphic from Gristmill:

So that’s not much help.

Why does the best interview with McCain that I’ve seen come from a newscaster in Portland, Maine? All those national broadcast “stars” should watch and learn. Bring this guy to the big leagues.

The brilliant Run of Play:

West Ham are about to make Zola their new manager, at least if the rumor can be believed. At first, I thought Balzac would be a better fit for the post, but then it occurred to me that Balzac still has traces of sentimentality, and what West Ham need is exactly the kind of unflinching sense of systemic inhumanity and cruelty that only Zola can provide.

Foreign Policy provides 20 questions and the Anchorage Daily News offers nine. The Foreign Policy questions would be a good list for John McCain as well. I fear ABC’s Charlie Gibson won’t be so incisive.

Douglas Muir on Fistful of Euros writes about Serbian politics, but he also provides a wonderful new acronym for American politics: OPNP. That stands for Obnoxious Populist Nationalist Party. According to Muir, all Balkan countries have one. The sad thing is the US has one too.

Some friends think I’m too quick to see the absurdity of McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as running mate. We’ll see. But it doesn’t take much of a crystal ball to predict the outcome of her speech to the Republican National Convention tonight.

She’ll do a good job. The hall will be utterly ecstatic with enthusiasm and multiple, lengthy ovations. The talking heads on cable will say she exceeded all expectations. The Republican spinmeisters will say the response shows just how canny and clever McCain was to single Palin out.

What none of it will do is erase the completely impulsive decision making behind the choice. It won’t provide any response to Palin’s abhorrent (to my mind) views on teaching creationism, denying the human role in global warming, and opposing abortion in any circumstances. Despite the bloviating about her having more “executive experience” than any of the senators in the race, she’ll still have the thinnest set of credentials of any candidate in the last hundred years. It’s a joke. But none of that will be pointed out by the media guardians tonight.

Yikes. If US Weekly is laying into Sarah Palin, it really is all over bar the shouting. I’ve long held to the political science truism that vice-president picks don’t have much influence on people’s votes, but there are always exceptions.

As many observers are noting, the issue isn’t so much Palin as McCain’s utterly bizarre lack of preparation and judgment. When we select members of my sons’ school’s board of directors, we do more vetting than McCain did. And we certainly make certain that we’ve met the people more than once.

So where does McCain go from here? I wouldn’t be shocked by an announcement in the next week or so that Sarah Palin decided to withdraw her own candidacy because of the “unwarranted intrusions” into her family’s private life. Of course that would throw McCain’s inadequate, impulsive decision into even harsher relief, but one can imagine the spin machine going into action against “Democratic smear campaigns”. And McCain could actually pick someone who was credible.

The great likelihood, of course, is that the Republicans will stumble on with McCain-Palin. Hallelujah.

Blood and Treasure reacts to the reports of Sarah Palin’s membership in the Alaskan Independence Party:

And let’s not forget that the US would be a lot less trouble to everyone else if it split up into small, eccentric countries, each whittling on its own stump. Interesting wars, too.

I’m watching an absurd discussion on Newhour with Jim Lehrer. A supposedly serious question is posed to an Alaskan writer: “What can you tell us about her achievements on the city council and then as mayor?” There was no real answer to that, as might be expected. Sarah Palin was mayor of a small town, and more recently governor of a physically vast state, with very few people and an extremely simple economy based on oil extraction.

When I was involved with Davos some of the invited public figures were presidents or prime ministers of small countries. It rapidly became apparent that rising to the top of the political establishment in, say, Bermuda, is not equivalent to rising to the top of the political establishment in a country of more than 66,000 people (Bermuda’s population). There were highly targeted issues where the Bermudan prime minister might have heft — the re-insurance industry, for example — but outside that it was like meeting the mayor of a smallish town.

Scale counts.