Sarah Palin is, among other things, the latest shiny object the GOP is using to distract attention from their candidate for President of the United States - John McCain.
It seems to me that, no matter who was selected to be the GOP vice presidential nominee, we must do all we can to prevent John McCain from assuming the presidency.
Why? John McCain may not be his own man. Why not? The Stockholm Syndrome.
What do we know about John McCain?
- John McCain was broken by his Vietnamese captors.
- John McCain has embraced George Bush after being cruelly treated by the Bush campaign in 2000.
Richard Davis, McCain's campaign chief for his 2000 run, explains in this Boston Globe article how the McCain's adopted child became the basis for a smear.
- John McCain's ambition is to be seen as president, not for what he might do as president.
"I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. . . . In truth, I'd had the ambition for a long time."
- John McCain has reversed course on many policy issues in order to agree with GOP orthodoxy and secure the nomination.
Kowtowing to the religious right, tax cuts, lobbyists, campaign finance, torture, alternative fuels, off shore drilling, and abortion to name a few. The Carpetbagger keeps a list.
- John McCain did not select, but accepted the selection of Sarah Palin.
By many accounts, John McCain intended to select Lieberman. "For weeks, advisers close to the campaign said, Mr. McCain had wanted to name as his running mate his good friend Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democrat turned independent."
We do not yet know whether Palin is an incompetent or an accomplished albeit not very experienced leader, but we do know she appears to be a rightwing extremist (abortion, creationism, global warming, Alaskan separatist movement). In any case McCain's acquiescence to her nomination reveals he did not make a principled stand. The imposition of Palin on McCain shows he is either not the moderate he claims to be, he does not care about the security of the nation by risking an incompetent president, or he has lost the moral courage to reject her as a running mate.
The Stockholm Syndrome
From wikipedia:
Loyalty to a more powerful abuser — in spite of the danger that this loyalty puts the victim in — is common among victims of domestic abuse, battered partners and child abuse (dependent children). In many instances the victims choose to remain loyal to their abuser, and choose not to leave him or her, even when they are offered a safe placement in foster homes or safe houses. This mental phenomenon is also known as Trauma-Bonding or Bonding-to-the-Perpetrator. This syndrome was described by psychoanalysts of the object relations theory school (see Fairbairn) as the phenomenon of psychological identification with the more powerful abuser. A variant of Stockholm Syndrome includes cases of abusive parents and abusive siblings in which the victim, even after entering adulthood, still justifies the family abuse.
The Stockholm Syndrome notion helps me understand what we know about John McCain. The evidence suggests that John McCain may not be the maverick leader he claims to be, rather a loyalist to a more powerful abuser - the failed Republican Party of which he is the nominal head. Sarah Palin is the evidence of that overriding loyalty.
Electing John McCain risks placing the office of President of the United States of America in the hands of his abusers.