Well, I've been waiting for this. The Old Gray Lady has its first editorial about McCain's pick of Sarah Palin.
It is blunt...they do not like it.
If John McCain wants voters to conclude, as he argues, that he has more independence and experience and better judgment than Barack Obama, he made a bad start by choosing Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.
More after the fold:
The Times says that McCain's choice didn't show his maverick meme, but his impulsive streak, and they go after him for bowing to the right wing of the party:
To us, it says the opposite. Mr. McCain’s snap choice of Ms. Palin reflects his impulsive streak: a wild play that he made after conservative activists warned him that he would face an all-out revolt in the party if he chose who he really wanted — Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.
Why Mr. McCain would want to pander to right-wing activists — who helped George W. Bush kill off his candidacy in the 2000 primaries in a particularly ugly way — is baffling. Frankly, they have no place to go. Mr. McCain would have a lot more success demonstrating his independence, and his courage, if he stood up to them the way he did in 2000.
They continue that McCain squandered most his arguments against Obama with the pick and they go after Palin for not just her lack of experience, but what's in her political past:
As far as we can tell, Mr. McCain and his aides did almost no due diligence before choosing Ms. Palin, raising serious questions about his management skills. The fact that Ms. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant is irrelevant to her candidacy. There are, however, very serious questions about her political past and her ideology, including her links to a party advocating Alaska’s secession from the nation.
If Mr. McCain wanted to break with his party’s past and choose the Republicans’ first female presidential candidate, there a number of politicians out there with far greater experience and stature than Ms. Palin, who has been in Alaska’s Statehouse for less than two years.
Before she was elected governor, she was mayor of a tiny Anchorage suburb, where her greatest accomplishment was raising the sales tax to build a hockey rink. According to Time magazine, she also sought to have books banned from the local library and threatened to fire the librarian.
For Mr. McCain to go on claiming that Mr. Obama has too little experience to be president after almost three years in the United States Senate is laughable now that he has announced that someone with no national or foreign policy experience is qualified to replace him, if necessary.
It continues on for several more paragraphs like that and the end is devestating:
To address those many problems, this country needs a leader with sound judgment and strong leadership skills. Choosing Ms. Palin raises serious questions about Mr. McCain’s qualifications.
I am convinced that certain media- the Times, the Washington Post...old time standards are setting off to take this ticket down. I hope I'm right.
UPDATE: Wow!! Thanks for all the tips and recs, even though I'm just sharing the message. You can post comments in reply to the Editorial on the Times site. I just did that very thing:
Thank you New York Times!!
This editorial puts in all in a nutshell. Not only is Sarah Palin competely unqualified for the Vice-Presidency, her choice make many incredibly concerned about John McCain's judgement.
A couple weeks back, Sen. McCain said that Sen. Obama was running for the White House out of pure ambition. It becomes obvious that McCain should have been talking about himself.
His snap desire to tow the line of the most radical, extremist wing of the GOP shows, with no doubt, that he seeks the Presidency not just out of sheer, unbridled ambition, but only for the sake of being able to say he is President.
McCain's arrogance makes him believe that he can use his 40 year old POW experience as crutch to answer any question he really doesn't want to answer. His arrogance makes him believe that any woman on his ticket will convince all woman to vote for him. His arrogance makes him believe that he can get away with choosing for a running mate, a person with little experience, with pretty much no vetting and the American people will march along lockstep.
Sorry, Senator. It does not work that way. You and your story have jumped the shark.