Stuff That Matters In Life

I found this site’s analysis very interesting. it gave me a little more confidence in McCain’s choice for running mate.

Here are some excerpts from Adam Brickley’s posts :

Sarah Palin is an anomaly in American politics. It’s not because she’s a woman, not because of her blue-collar background, and not because of her ability to juggle the titles of “governor” and “committed mother of five”. Forget about all of that stuff for a moment; it’s interesting, but if Barack Obama has taught us anything, it’s that a compelling biography is not a qualification for leadership. Instead, Palin is unique because she can claim one of the broadest bases of support of any leader in our country. Other than the lunatic fringes of Alaska’s kleptocratic political establishment, nobody hates her.

Most politicians rise to power because they represent a certain wing of their party, and even some of their own partisans detest them. Mike Huckabee will never resonate with libertarian republicans, social conservatives cannot support Rudy Giuliani, certain evangelicals will always have a problem with Mitt Romney, and frankly I doubt that hard-core conservatives will ever fully embrace John McCain. That doesn’t make them bad candidates; it just means that they face significant opposition within the Republican Party. Sarah Palin does not have that problem.
I have been working to draft Gov. Palin as Vice President since February of 2007, and I can recount first hand how she has united divergent views among Republicans and is now even gaining Democratic support. The key is that she offers a combination of qualities that make her a hero to many, many different groups. For instance, two of our strongest bases of support have been social conservatives and libertarian republicans, who are normally at each other’s throats.

However, she offered both groups something that they desperately wanted without compromising any appeal to the other. The SoCons loved her pro-life, pro-family, and pro-gun positions, while the libertarians and fiscal conservatives cheered her on as she vetoed hundreds of millions of dollars of wasteful government spending. Getting those two groups to sing kum-ba-ya was enough of an accomplishment, but now it appears that a third group has found what it wants in Gov. Palin: McCainocrats.

(Read the full post here.)

Here is another excerpt from Brickley:

There was thing about Palin that initially worried me – “lack of experience”. She had only been elected governor in 2006, and her only previous experience was as a two terms as a city councilwoman and two more as mayor in Wasilla, AK, population 8,471 in 2005) followed up by a failed campaign for lieutenant governor and a brief stint on Alaska’s Oil and Natural Gas Conservation Commission. This didn’t seem very appealing at first, but then I took the time to look closer at Palin’s history. What I had failed to realize was that she had habitually knocked of powerful incumbent opponents and was a quick learner on the job. In the 2006 gubernatorial election, she rolled over scandal-prone incumbent Frank Murkowski in the GOP primary, then went on to defeat former governor Tony Knowles in the general election – pretty impressive. Further back, she had knocked off an entrenched incumbent to become mayor of Wasilla, then developed a reputation as a hard-nosed, effective mayor. Her performance in Wasilla got her elected president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors and earned her the nickname “Sarah Barracuda”.

(Read the full post here.)