Posts Tagged ‘Vice President’


A Note About Vice Presidential Candidates

August 29th, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy

As far as I’m concerned, the running mates of the major party candidates are a complete wash. Barack Obama picked an old, white man. John McCain picked a young woman. Two Vice Presidential nominees, two attempts at appealing to swing voters who might have been leaning in the direction of the other party. Both choices so horribly transparent, if you stood one in front of the other, you could still see the jungle through both of them.* Can we go back to talking about the candidates now?

* If it panders, we can kill it.

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Decision Reached

October 2nd, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy

I won’t be liveblogging the Vice Presidential debate tonight. It turns out I’ve got too much else to do tonight. If I come up for air long enough that I can even watch the debate, the last thing I’ll feel like doing is typing the whole time.

I hope that Biden is his usual crazy self. I really hope that he doesn’t go soft on Palin because she’s a woman. The misplaced chivalry that leads a male politicians to back off a female opponent is well-intentioned, but ultimately does her a disservice.

If Palin is qualified to be Vice President*, she has to be capable of holding her own in a debate without any special treatment. Let her succeed – or crash and burn like the Tunguska meteor – on her own terms. We can’t coddle her, and we can’t let her get away with any bullshit that we’d set on fire and ram down the throat of a male opponent.

Enjoy the spectacle, folks. I expect at least one new catchphrase to enter the cultural continuum by tomorrow morning.

* Very few sentences simultaneously make me want to laugh, puke and cry. Good show, Senator McCain.

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Perfect Palin

October 3rd, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy

I finally get it. I have seen the light. Sarah Palin is the perfect Republican candidate. She is the future of the party. She is the distilled, fortified and artificially sweetened essence of all the farcical faux-populism that the party has cultivated since the 1960s.

She is everything that Bush aspires to be. Home-spun, aw shucks, just folks. Where Bush is a millionaire Ivy League graduate playing redneck, Palin actually is a rural girl. Uneducated, unsophisticated, unconcerned with anything more complicated that the feelings of her moose-fed gut. Palin appeals to the bedrock narcissism of red state voters, who can’t abide being governed by anyone with more intellectual ability than them. Educated people are the enemy, and Sarah Palin will smite them with a spear fashioned entirely from small-town charm. 

She is the solution to the ultimate political equation. She manages to wed the “one stoplight and a general store” narrative to actual charisma. She’s the lady who, with a wink and a “darn right,” could wrangle the middle class into voting for the party of unfettered greed and unregulated business. If they can’t make it to the polls, they will write their choice on the back of their foreclosure notices, and mail them in as absentee ballots.

Palin is the perfect front for the Republicans. She is the tempura icing on a cardboard display cake in a wedding catalog. There is nothing of substance, not even empty calories, but the look is all that matters.

In order to stay in the White House, The Rove-publicans have tapped that woman who makes it her life’s work to take over the PTA, who quits the book club in a huff because that Amy Tan is just too naughty, who writes letters to the newspaper when the library won’t get rid of Heather Has Two Mommies, and made her a national politician. They have gambled that, in the event that John McCain’s coal-fired cyborg heart finally gives out, this person can lead the most powerful nation on Earth. And we’re falling for it.

Our only hope is that the Rapture makes it here before election day.

If I manage to get through this election without a serious cardiac event, it will be a small miracle.

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I’ll See Your Question, And Raise You A Completely Unrelated Answer

October 7th, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy

If you get a little bit of nerd wood when someone assembles data into a useful form, I have a link you’re going to love. Izzibeth of Nicest Girl & Destroyer of Planets managed to stay awake during the soporific snorefest that was the Vice Presidential debate. She then compiled a handy chart of the questions, and whether each candidate bothered to answer them. (Hint: one of the candidates is in the “No” column a lot more than the other.)

It’s a pretty revealing look at the horrible, black innards of political debates, which are all about skillfully avoiding the question without sounding like an entire box of tools. In this respect, I disagree with some bits of the chart. I think, on some questions, Biden rambled just as far afield as Palin, but he was smoother about it.

I love seeing it all laid out so neatly. Go take a look, and help me convince her to make similar charts for the rest of the Presidential debates.

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