Palin’ in comparison

I feel like a parent now; a parent on the day of academic results. As if my first born has brought me a straight-A report card, while the spoilt, self-indulgent other child brought me yet another note to meet the teacher. I feel like saying, "Why can't you be more like him?" Barack Obama chose a six-term senator to be his running mate, a person who has an actual plan for Iraq, a plan which seems almost like fate now, but was laughed at when Joe Biden suggested it. McCain on the other hand has chosen the governor of Alaska to be a heartbeat away from the leadership of the most powerful country in the world.

Sarah Palin, the republican candidate for Veep has been a governor for sixteen months, before which she was mayor of a town with a population of 9000. On one side is a brilliant statesman running for president with a foreign policy expert by his side, while the other side is making a mockery of democracy by putting together a ludicrous ticket of a warmonger who supports tax-cuts for the very rich with a beauty queen fledgling as his running mate. Do we even need to have an election?

Let us look at the very cynicism of this choice. At the republican convention, Sarah Palin made her first major speech where she ass-kissed Hillary Clinton more than anything while pandering to jilted Hillary supporters by saying that she is looking to shatter the glass ceiling. The GOP is banking on the radical Hillary supporters who are so upset with Obama getting nominated that they might switch sides. They refuse to consider that the woman they have commissioned in the hope of attracting votes simply because she possesses pairs of X-chromosomes has been staunchly pro-life. She has given birth to five kids, the last one being diagnosed with Down's syndrome before birth, and she knowingly did not terminate the pregnancy. She is now running all around the country campaigning leaving the four month old child to the care of the lesser able.

I am of the belief that a politician's personal life is off-limits as long as it does not affect his job performance. Somehow, personal lives have become fair-game nowadays. While running for office, you need to purge the closet of any skeletons because you can bet your life that they will be found. The Republican Party claims to be the clean people, the ones who are monogamous, and have values that the others don't have. This is of course, bullshit because values have little to do with alcohol, cigarettes and promiscuous sex. Values have more to do with honesty, integrity, a sense of duty etc etc. However, if you claim to be the party of values and morals, and look down upon others with more interesting sex-lives than you, then you better not get caught not practicing what you preach. Sarah Palin was pregnant before she got married herself. Her seventeen year old daughter is pregnant and is planning to marry the father of the baby, to save her mother's political career more than anything else. Come on, when a couple of people are irresponsible enough to get pregnant, getting them married seems to spoil the situation further.

Don't get distracted by this though. It is the responsibility of the smart ones to focus on the issues more than anything else. There is nothing worse than getting wet over the mud-slinging opportunities that are presenting themselves instead of attacking the opposition on their foreign policy and economic naiveté. McCain wants more tax cuts for the rich, plans to stay in Iraq for the next hundred years, has no plans to tackle global warming, and is patently inept at uplifting the financial situation of the country as the government plans to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These are the issues that every voter must consider and not the window dressing that is being put out.

As I said before, this election, on the issues is like an India-Bangladesh cricket match. Somehow, one cannot be completely confident of an Indian victory.

(This post was possible due to a lot of help and inspiration from blogger Laksh)