Seriously.
Long ago and far away I went to a high school where we learned that we were a nation of immigrants whose identity as a nation lay in our Constitution and our laws. We were to make necessary changes within the framework they laid out. Our country was a child of the Enlightenment, built rationally by founders who recognized human weakness and tried very hard to make room for it in the structure of our government with its system of checks and balances, the tools they gave us. In European countries, indeed, in most areas of the world at the time, most people had long ethnic roots in their areas. Of course there were wars and such and migrations, but nothing at all resembling the way the US was settled. The people with long roots in the US were pretty much exterminated by the Europeans.
Steeped in Enlightenment philosophy and tested in a real-life cauldron of revolution and political struggle, our founders birthed our nation as a republic, a nation of laws. And they feared "the masses". Which we may not want to admit, but they did: they feared the judgment of mobs. So we have a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. And in fact the founders, at least some of them, preferred educated white males who owned property, since these qualifications would tend to, they hoped, create a voting class with better judgment and a greater sense of responsibility than the masses who were not, in their minds, so educated, so experienced, .
They would roll over in their graves if they could see our country now.
It's excellent that we became more democratic than they envisioned, and probably they would agree that it is what should have happened. It's bad that we abandoned the idea of an informed citizenry, that a meaningful education in our history and in our Constitution -- an education in civics -- is essential to responsible voting and a functioning democracy. We have strayed so far from this ideal that we now find many scorning our need to be educated to participate in our democracy; they mock the very sorts of people our founders would have envisioned as leaders: people steeped in the Constitution and the law at the same time they are tempered by real-life struggles.
Obama and Biden epitomize leaders our founders would have admired.
McCain and Palin, indeed the Republican Party in general not only do not, but in fact they disrespect the very qualities admired by our founders and needed in these difficult times. The Republicans depend on people acting like the very mob our founders feared: a mob not educated to ask rational questions, a mob swayed by demagoguery and fear.
Here we have a presidential candidate who did poorly in school and who has not shown much interest in examining his own beliefs. His beliefs appear to be shaped in a haphazard manner, not thoughtfully. That's why he's a maverick. He's a man who talks as if he has a trigger finger. A man who doesn't really seem to have core governing principles. A man, like George W., who goes with his gut
He has chosen for his vice president a woman of meager experience: to compare her experience to Obama's is like saying a person who is a licensed practical nurse is ready to do brain surgery.
Her appeal (aside from being pretty in a Televangelist way) is exactly the kind of appeal we should be avoiding.
Perhaps I am being unfair. I would like to know: Does she ever examine any of her beliefs about what she should do as a leader with an understanding of the Constitution and laws of our nation? Would she determine her actions from her religious perspective without considering whether they were in line with the laws of the country? What does this woman read in order to expand her horizons?
Our heritage was drawn from the Enlightenment. Our founders were thinkers of a rational sort: some were scientists. Look at Franklin and Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton. What would they say to having someone who was a Creationist a heartbeat away from decisions on climate change and resource use, energy and health care? What would they say to someone who did not understand the idea of biodiversity or of the recklessness of nonstop oil drilling? What would they say about someone who did not recognize that religious freedom meant religious freedom for people with different views from hers: thus, a faithful Jew might not see any reason whatsoever to think a human being exists "at conception," and that therefore abortion in the first trimester was not murder. Or what would she think of an agnostic, a scientist, who recognized that conception did not occur all at once at a single moment?
This is a woman who chooses to shoot wolves from a helicopter. How humane!
The Republican Party and its leaders should be called the Anti-Constitution Party, the party of mobocracy.