Palin and Political Calculations

A lot of Democrats want to fight the political fights above the fray. I get that – I really do. I truly wish we could have elections where families and bystanders were off the table, innocent or otherwise. However, that’s not how our political system or media works. Unfortunately, many Democrats just don’t get that – so, despite reality – our political party tends to try to play it nice, or safe, giving the Republicans a perpetual political handicap, even though they’re the party that’s won the most elections (2:1 in POTUS terms). Enough. We can’t keep fighting from behind: if we have a chance to open things up, we have to take it.

Over the past 24 hours, we’ve had an open source investigation into Governor Palin’s hypocrisy. What have we learned? First, there’s audio evidence that she lied about her role in firing a statie, something that won’t fair well in her investigation by the Alaskan state legislature into alleged abuse of power. Furthermore, we learned she just hired a laywer for firing the cop who refused to fire the cop who was her sister’s ex husband. Second, we learned that the family-values, abstinence-only candidate has a 17 year old daughter pregnant out of wedlock. Third, we learned that this candidate has shown extroardinarily bad judgement as a mother, Britney Spears/Michael Jackson fashion. She chose to deliver her keynote speech before delivering her child, then she chose to take a flight to Alaska from Texas -a dozen hour + ordeal.  Does that sound like someone who’s judgement you’d trust?  

Here’s another way of looking at this political calculation: for a few token shots by Republicans at us pesky bloggers, Americans got to learn that the Palin family values are hypocrisy incarnated and that she has lousy judgement on top of that. This was a huge political win for the day and it’s very likely Palin won’t last the week, in my opinion. It’s Harriet Miers all over again. If we had decided to can this story before it ever saw the light of day, we’d still be hearing about how great a pick Palin was and how she’s revitalizing the McCain ticket.

So, even if the story wasn’t quite as bad as it could have possibly been, the fact that we dug it up has done a huge service for the Obama campaign. Don’t be afraid of a little mudslinging, so long as there’s some truth to it – it’s still better than Rovian tactics, because they just make shit up.  

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