DrewM. passes on Michelle Malkin’s post and column noting that the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller by a white “Christian” got scads more media commentary and more intense presidential attention than did the murder of Private William Long and maiming and attempted murder of Private Quinton Ezeagwula by a black “Muslim.”

It’s a fair point and very much worth noting that there are craziest on both sides.

At the same time, the first shooting naturally fit into an ongoing storyline whereas the second seemingly comes out of the blue.  Malkin’s done yeoman work over the years in rounding up little-reported incidents by leftist extremists targeting American troops but it remains a tiny, disaggrated fringe movement whereas the anti-abortion movement is massive and even its extreme elements, like Operation Rescue, are rather large and public.

Nutcases aside, there’s been a loud and bitter debate over abortion going on since at least decision in Roe v. Wade some thirty-six years ago. So, naturally, when an abortionist gets murdered, there’s a ready frame into which to plug stories, sidebars, and commentaries.  Columns from 1986 can be dusted off and re-run by changing a few names and throwing in a new quote or three.

By contrast, those who genuinely dislike American soldiers are so far into the lunatic fringe that they’re not part of the public debate.  Just about every liberal male politician over the age of 50 — John Kerry, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, George McGovern, Ted Kennedy, Charlie Rangel — served in the military.  Hell, so did Jeremiah Wright.

To be sure, there are liberals who hate the way our military is used.   Others hate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  But, by and large, those are handled as debates over public policy.  It’s presidents who are the object of that wrath, not American soldiers.  Indeed, when someone dares criticize soldiers — as in the General Betray Us flap — they’re roundly slapped down, even by other liberals.

All that said, I agree with Michelle on the much narrower points.  Yes, President Obama should have said something about the recruiting station incident, especially after his comments on the Tiller murder.  He’s commander-in-chief, after all.  And it would have been good politics, too, earning credit for taking on left-wing crazies without alienating a significant part of his coalition.

And, yes, the press should have used the occasion of the latest shooting to point out that this was not a totally isolated incident.  The press really needs to get beyond its tired story frames and do broader reporting more often.

Photo by Flickr user DRB62 under Creative Commons license.

Sunday’s WaPo put together a collection of half-baked ideas by smart folks, designed to generate controversy and discussion more so than shed serious light on policy ideas.  Thomas Ricks’ suggestion to close the service academies and war colleges got the most attention, overshadowing the abject silliness of Jeremy Lott’s column advocating doing away with the vice presidency, an idea not worth a warm bucket of piss.

The framers of the Constitution got many things right. But when they got things wrong, they were seriously off. Compromising on slavery, for instance. That’s a bad one.

Except for the fact that the Southern states wouldn’t have signed on and we’d have been stuck with the Articles of Confederation, of course.

Fourteen of our 44 presidents started on the bottom of the ticket, a high proportion with ill effects on American politics. The vice presidency has provided a springboard to the nation’s highest office for individuals unlikely to have made it there on their own.

From 1952 to 1972, only one election went by without Richard Nixon on the national ballot. For all his legislative smarts, Lyndon Johnson was an awkward bully who turned off many voters. George H.W. Bush was an also-ran who never would have reached the Oval Office had Ronald Reagan not kept the seat warm for him. (And would George W. have made it if his father hadn’t?)

The vice presidency has also put troubling and divisive men only a heartbeat away. Aaron Burr, Henry Wallace, Al Gore and Dick Cheney came too close for comfort.

Um, Richard Nixon was a respected United States Senator who thrice got his party’s nomination for president, winning two landslides and losing the other in one of the closest contests in history.  Johnson and Bush were the second place finishers in their nominating contests.  Bush would have almost certainly beaten Carter on his own merits.  Further, we’ve had plenty of “troubling and divisive” people get elected to the presidency without a stint as second banana.

Sure, a few vice presidents who get the top job do it well. (Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman come to mind.) But the downsides outweigh the standouts. That’s not surprising, since the office was poorly thought out and has been subject to three constitutional amendments (the 12th, 20th and 25th, for those keeping score).

Only the 12th — which (in effect) makes the VP part of the same ticket as the president rather than the second-place finisher in the presidential race — deals directly with the vice presidency; it was ratified 205 years ago.  The 20th and 25th deal with arcane matters of presidential succession.  The latter of which, incidentally, recognizes the dreadful possibility that the president is killed or incapacitated and there’s a vacancy in the vice presidency and remedies that.

It would be better if the president’s understudy were separately elected by voters,

This is insane. Seriously, we want a backup that’s independently elected and who could, theoretically, have an entirely different agenda than the guy who won?  And who would take office and put in his own people?  Really?

or better yet, if the office simply disappeared. For all the attention their campaign-time selections garner, few voters cast their ballots based on the vice-presidential candidate — even though that person has a nearly one in three chance of going all the way.

Recall, this “one in three” includes cases where the VP wins election in his own right.  But there have been an inordinate number of cases where the sitting president dies in office, mostly suddenly.  What alternative system does Lott propose for dealing with these emergencies?  Why, none at all!  He doesn’t even mention the possibility!

Presumably, then, we’d simply follow the Presidential Succession Act of 1947.  Hello, President Nancy Pelosi!  And, if something should happen to her, hello President Robert Byrd!

UPDATE:  See “Ending the Vice Presidency II” for Lott’s response.

Danielle Allen takes to the editorial pages of WaPo to decry the regional disparity of military service in a piece titled “Red-State Army?”

Veterans Day in Maysville, Ky. Photo Credit: By Terry Prather -- Associated Press

Whereas in 1969 13 percent of Americans were veterans, in 2007 only 8 percent of us were.

Even more important than these general demographic shifts is the change wrought by the end of the draft in 1973. Until then, military service was distributed pretty evenly across regions. But that is no longer true. The residential patterns for current veterans and the patterns of state-level contributions of new recruits to the all-volunteer military have a distinct geographic tilt. And tellingly, the map of military service since 1973 aligns closely with electoral maps distinguishing red from blue states.

In 1969, the 10 states with the highest percentage of veterans were, in order: Wyoming, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, California, Oregon, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio, Connecticut and Illinois. In 2007, the 10 states with the highest percentage of post-Vietnam-era veterans were, in order: Alaska, Virginia, Hawaii, Washington, Wyoming, Maine, South Carolina, Montana, Maryland and Georgia.

She gives the usual conjecture as to why the disparity exists and argues that mandatory national service is absolutely essential to save us from our dividedness.

Except that as Streiff, posting at RedState (ironically enough), points out, her premise is wrong. Indeed, it’s rather silly. Virginia, Hawaii, Washington, Maine, and Maryland all voted for Barack Obama! All of those but Virginia voted for John Kerry and Al Gore!

So, maybe we don’t need to fire up the draft just yet.

In the discussion on Obama’s apparent 365-173 Electoral College victory, Rodney Dill asks, “How close is this, historically? The popular vote difference seems like it was pretty big by modern standards, but usually that would result in an even more lopsided electoral vote.”

It’s an interesting question. Dave Leip’s Atlas has the results for every election.

• In 1980, the first election I seriously paid attention to, Ronald Reagan’s 50.75% of the vote gave him a 9.25% margin over Jimmy Carter, with 41.01%, with Republican sore loser John Anderson getting 6.61%. That translated into an Electoral College landslide of 489-49.

• In 1984, Reagan beat Walter Mondale 58.77% to 40.56% to get an Electoral College landslide of 525 to 13, with Mondale winning only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia.

• In 1988, George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis 53.37% to 45.65% and won the Electoral vote 426 to 111.

• In 1992, Bill Clinton beat Bush 43.01 to 37.45, with Ross Perot getting 18.91% and finished with an Electoral College margin of 370 to 168.

• In 1996, Clinton beat Bob Dole 49.24 to 40.72, with Perot pulling 8.4% — comparable to Reagan’s margin over Carter — and won 379 to 159.

• In 2000, George W. Bush beat Al Gore in the Electoral College 271 to 266 (one Gore Elector from DC abstained) despite losing the popular vote 47.87% to 48.38%.

• In 2004, Bush beat John Kerry 50.73% to 48.27% and took the Electoral vote 286 to 251.

• In 2008, Obama beat John McCain 52.34% to 46.31% — roughly Bush 41’s margin over Dukakis — to get a much smaller Electoral College margin.

I suppose I should do some sort of sophisticated social science statistical analysis of these data but one presume’s it’s been done already.  Eyeballing it, though, it seems that there’s very little correlation between popular vote margin and Electoral vote margin.

One thing to keep in mind with the foregoing analysis, too, is that it’s very much skewed by California.  In the first three of these elections, it was a reliable Republican state; since then, it’s been reliably Democratic.  (Obama won 2/3 of the vote this year; Reagan won by a 17 point margin in 1980 and 16 points in 1984.)  Presidential candidates don’t bother to campaign there, except for fundraising purposes.   Regardless, its 55 Electoral votes grossly distorts the picture.

Typos fixed.

After George W. Bush won the 2000 election, despite having received substantially fewer votes nationwide than Al Gore, many of us took great comfort in this famous map, showing the election results county-by-county:

2000 Election County-By-County Map

In 2004, Bush won re-election by a majority — but John Kerry nearly took it anyway because of a close call in Ohio — and we saw the reemergence of the map:

2004 Election County-By-County Map

Well, here it is again, for 2008:

2008 Election County-By-County Map

Because of population patterns, you’d guess that the Red team won.  The actual results, which aren’t final, have Obama winning 63.5 million to McCain’s 56.1 million, or 52.4% to 46.3%.

To make Brad Delong happy, here’s the “purple” version of the map, showing it based on the relative percentage of Republicans and Democrats in each county (as opposed to the winner-take-all version, which distorts the perception):

2008 Election County-By-County Map

Purple likely distorts it, too, simply because of the hue values, but it’s closer than Red-Blue in this case.

RELATED:

• 2004 Election County-By-County>

• 2004 Purple America

• 2000 Election County by County

2008 maps courtesy Mark Newman.  Earlier maps from USA Today.

Fox and CNN project that John McCain has won Tennessee’s and its 11 Electoral votes, as widely projected. Recall that “native son” Al Gore lost there in 2000, costing him the White House.

John McCain is getting some guff for his assertion on the Don Imus show that Sarah Palin is “the most qualified of anyone recently who has run for vice president to tell you the truth.”  And, no, not for the syntax but the point itself.

Steve Benen is incredulous:

Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman, Al Gore, Lloyd Bentsen, and George H.W. Bush? No, Sarah Palin is “the most qualified.”

Wow.

Actually, though, this is easy.  Aside from Bush, none of them had … wait for it … executive experience.  And even Bush had, in 1980, less of it than Palin.   She was a city mayor for eight years and governor for two years, making her a perfect 10.

As noted here numerous times, Americans seem to count only three offices as meaningful “experience” when voting for president:  State Governor, Vice President, and President.  No one without one of those lines on his resume has been elected president since John Kennedy did it in 1960.  Obviously, that’ll change in less than two weeks, since two U.S. Senators are the only viable candidates (some would argue, only one is).   So, while I don’t personally buy it, one could argue that Palin is indeed “the most qualified.”

The foregoing, of couse, is an odd argument to make if you’ve been in the Senate since the Reagan administration.

Sarah Palin, in a red leather jacket, waves as she steps on stage before a crowd at a baseball field in Grand Junction, Colo., on Monday.

We’ve had John Edwards’ haircuts, John McCain’s shoes, Michelle Obama’s snacks (a story that turned out to be untrue), and now, Sarah Palin’s wardrobe.

The Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.

According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.  The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.

The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August.

Jim Treacher thinks all these stories are a distraction from the real issues.  And, of course, they are.  But these are the sort of stories that seem to resonate with voters.

Matt Yglesias wonders why these expenditures are legal, noting “this seems to open the door to candidates using party committee money as a personal slush fund.”  Kevin Drum snarks that, “I’m sure that after the campaign is over the RNC plans to donate the clothing to homeless shelters in small towns around the country where they don’t have stores like Saks or Barney’s.” Really, this is no worse than Al Gore spending tens of thousands having Naomi Wolfe tell him to wear “earth tones.”

Why, precisely, it costs that kind of money to outfit Sarah Palin in a different red outfit every day, I haven’t a clue.   Presumably, it’s more expensive to dress a woman — McCain and Obama are pretty much required to wear only dark suits and solid white or blue shirts — but this is expensive.  Not to mention the fact that down-to-earth hockey moms — and pit bulls, for that matter — don’t shop at Saks and Neiman Marcus.  Then again, they’re not typically plucked out of virtual obscurity and thrust into the national spotlight right before a national political convention, either.

If I ever find Joe the Plumber,  I’m going to punch him in the nose.[*]  I’m not a big fan of Louise Ledbetter, either.

Obama McCain Third Debate Photo via YahooNews

As a general matter, I find the idiotic personalization of American public policy extremely annoying.  Phil Gramm, with his unfortunately named “Dicky Flatt Test,” at least hit on a good means of using the technique.  But spending the whole evening mentioning how each and every decision would impact some plumber we don’t know is annoying.

McCain scored some points, I think, on the matter of taxes and individual responsibility and Obama’s thinking everything is a government problem.  He lost more,  probably, with his rather grumpy demeanor.  There was a lot of similarity between his reaction shots — which was 95 percent of the debate for those of us watching on CNN — and Al Gore’s infamous harumphing during his first debate with George W. Bush.

Obama seemed cool and confident throughout, occasionally amused, while McCain seemed too eager to  get in some rather poorly crafted and rehearsed talking points.   The attack lines seemed forced rather than conversational, let alone amusing.

The questions, while supposed to be different, were mostly repeats of what we heard the first two times.  Schieffer threw a softball to Obama on why his VP pick was more qualified to be president than McCain’s but he bunted.  McCain actually did reasonably well with the question and I don’t think it hurt him.

Overall, I don’t see how McCain helped himself tonight, much less hit the home run he needed to put himself back into this thing.

UPDATE:  Switched to lo-def Fox for their roundtable after-action.   Neither Brit Hume nor Juan Williams think McCain did a lot.   Bill Kristol, the biggest McCain apologist, thought McCain went “half way” in going between the happy warrior mode and being an attack dog and missed the opportunity to draw contrasts.

Frank Luntz’ focus group overwhelmingly thought Obama won the debate.  They did think McCain’s “I’m not George Bush.  If you wanted to run against him, you should have run four years ago” was a great line, though, and the most important moment of the night.

[*] I’m actually starting to like the guy, so am much less inclined to punch him now.  Someone needs to pay, though, for subjecting me to 90 minutes of inanity.

We’ve reached the seemingly inevitable part of the campaign where the trailing candidates start hurling charges out of desperation and the leader responds in kind. In the closing days of 1992, President George H.W. Bush, ordinarily among the most decent, genteel fellows you’d ever meet, was running around calling Bill Clinton and Al Gore “bozos.” He simply couldn’t believe that he, a war hero, seasoned public servant, and recent winner of the Gulf War, was losing to a draft dodging, dope smoking hick from Arkansas.

It appears that John McCain has reached that point. During the primaries, he merely shook his head and noted that “Life’s not fair” when guys like Mitt Romney and even Mike Huckabee were outpolling him. But he kept plugging away and ultimately won the nomination easily. It looked like he was going to do the same thing in the general election, even taking a small lead after connecting on the Sarah Palin Hail Mary. But, alas, life’s not fair and the financial crisis seems to have stopped his campaign in its tracks. (It’s been noted before that this campaign has eerie similarities to the Santos-Vinick race during the last season of “West Wing.” The financial crisis is apparently the real world’s answer to the nuclear plant disaster on the show.)

Howard Wolfson is almost surely right that “Bill Ayers Won’t Save John McCain.”  Unless there’s far, far more to the association than we’ve seen, it’s a non-story that’s already been absorbed into the current polls.  And this is right, too:

This dynamic is very unlikely to change. John McCain’s goal in the first debate was to discredit Senator Obama as a credible Commander in Chief and elevate the issue of foreign policy and national security. He didn’t come close. Absent a domestic terror attack the economy will remain the number one issue in the race, and there is little Senator McCain can do to make up his gap with Senator Obama on it. Oh, Senator McCain will try to make issues of Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko and Rev. Wright, and that might hurt Senator Obama around the margins — but it will not prevent him from winning.  The economy is simply bigger than the rogues gallery that John McCain is conjuring up.

Palin kicked it up a notch yesterday with this nonsense: “Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who target their own country.”  To put it in a vernacular Palin might understand, that dog won’t hunt.  (One presumes dogs are involved in moose hunting, although my expertise is limited.)   It just comes across as a pathetic, desperate charge.

The foreign campaign contributions charge that’s been floated over the weekend is much more reasonable.  Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to work.   I seem to recall proof positive that Clinton was taking money from Red Chinese nationals in 1996 not having much, if any, impact on the race.

Ironically, Obama’s planned countercharges involving the twenty-year-old Keating Five scandal are more likely to have an impact because they go against McCain’s cultivated anti-corruption “maverick” image and most people have forgotten about that scandal.

Barring a catastrophic event like a terrorist attack, I’m not sure what happens over the next four weeks to turn this thing around for McCain.  It strikes me that his best course is to run an honorable, dignified campaign and simply sell himself.   Who knows, if he doesn’t win maybe Obama will offer to make him Secretary of State.

Bruce Ackerman thinks the vice presidency is an anachronism from the political era of the Framers and ought be abolished.

For two centuries, presidential nominees have used the office to balance the ticket by naming a running mate from a different region, or one who speaks with a different ideological accent to a specific constituency. This means that a president’s death generates a double shock: The nation not only mourns a fallen leader, it must deal with a replacement who may push politics in a new direction.

[...]

Mexico and France see no need for a vice president. We should designate the secretary of State to be in charge until a special election can be held to replace a president.

That’s rather like saying that football teams don’t need a backup quarterback because, after all, the other guy is likely to have a different style and we’d therefore be better off having the kicker fill in.

The death of a sitting president is, as Ackerman points out, a national shock.  If it comes as a result of assassination or other unnatural cause, it’s a genuine national crisis.  That’s not a great time to be fumbling around for a successor, let alone scrambling to hold a special election.

With due deference to France and Mexico, the United States simply occupies a different position in the world and there needs to be an immediate and clear line of succession to its presidency.   Further, while France lacks a vice president, it does have a second political executive, the prime minister, which is appointed by the president.   Mexico, on the other hand, simply puts together an electoral college consisting of the legislature and supreme court and votes in a new guy when they get around to it.

It’s hard to think of a modern example when the Secretary of State was both more prepared for executive leadership and hued closer to the president’s ideology than his vice president. Indeed, the only recent case that comes to mind where Ackerman’s plan would have been better was when James Baker was George H.W. Bush’s chief diplomat and Dan Quayle was his vice president.

We chose secretaries of state by an entirely different process than presidents, emphasizing different skill sets.    Surely, Dick Cheney would have represented a better continuity in 2003 than Colin Powell.  Ditto Cheney vice Condi Rice today or Al Gore vice Warren Christopher or Madeline Albright.

To the extent that people are geniunely afraid of John McCain dying and Sarah Palin being given the launch codes, they’re less likely to vote for McCain.

“Saturday Night Live” is continuing to weigh in heavily on the presidential race, hitting Sarah Palin and John McCain hard in last night’s installment.

Tina Fey reprised her role as Sarah Palin on “Saturday Night Live,” again appearing as the Republican vice presidential candidate in an opening sketch. Saturday night’s show — the third of the season for the NBC comedy program — brought back the season premiere tandem of Fey and Amy Poehler, who opened the season with a memorable sketch featuring Fey as Palin and Poehler as Hillary Clinton.

This time around, Poehler played CBS’s Katie Couric, parodying the interview with Palin earlier this week. Poehler, though, mostly played straight man to Fey, who ratcheted up her performance of Sen. John McCain’s running mate by satirizing her foreign affairs experience. When Poehler’s Couric pushed Fey’s Palin to specifically discuss how she would help facilitate democracy abroad, Fey gave in: “Katie, I’d like to use one of my lifelines. … I want to phone a friend.” When a confused Poehler informed her that that wasn’t how the interview worked, Fey’s Palin responded — alluding to one of the governor’s most quoted lines from the interview — “Well, in that case, I’m just gonna have to get back to ya.”

[...]

Fey wasn’t the only former cast member who returned Saturday night. Chris Parnell came back to play presidential debate moderator Jim Lehrer in a sketch that parodied Friday night’s contest between McCain and Democratic rival Barack Obama — which occurred less than 27 hours earlier than the live “SNL” broadcast.

The sketch mainly played up McCain’s attempts to shake up the debate process, as Darrell Hammond’s McCain urged his opponent to join him in “nude or seminude” town hall meetings. At the outset, Parnell announced: “Throughout the debate, I will urge you both to look at one another up to and beyond the point it becomes uncomfortable.”

SNL’s treatment of the 1992 debates, notably their caricatures of Ross Perot and Jim Stockdale, and their dead-on parodies of Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000 were instant classics and helped shape the public perceptions of those candidates.

They may well help transform Palin’s image from a feisty hockey mom to a clueless ditz. Then again, they’ll need to be funnier than this to do it. The first Fey-Palin segment was genuinely clever parody; this was just lame jokes delivered in Palin’s accent.

The Obama-McCain “intro” spot was mildly amusing:

The debate spoof was much better:

They’ve long had Jim Lehrer down. Hammond is a master impressionist but hasn’t gotten McCain down yet. The writing on the debate skit was pretty solid, though. The hits on McCain’s various gimmicks and Obama for playing the race card were clever. The Chicago corruption stuff with Obama, less so.

Josh Marshall headlines as “Sadly Nuts” a post responding to John McCain’s retort, to questions of Sarah Palin’s qualifications to serve as president, “If they want to go down that route, in all candor, she has far, far more experience than Senator Obama does.”

Says Josh,

Set aside the bravado. Can McCain possibly believe that? And if he does, what are we supposed to think of his own fitness to serve? Sen. Obama is certainly new on the national scene. But he’s serving his fourth year in the US senate. He’s run a successful national primary campaign. He’s deeply versed on all the relevant policy issues. Palin has been the governor of one of the smallest states in the country (by pop.) for 18 months. As recently as 2006, she said she hadn’t focused enough on Iraq to have an opinion one way or another about the surge.

Now, I agree, the burden is certainly on Team McCain to convince the country that Palin, a relative neophyte, passes the laugh test for Commander-in-Chief.  As regular readers — or even those who’ve read anything I’ve written about the subject since Friday’s announcement — know, I’m skeptical.

But McCain’s assertion that Palin has more “experience” than Obama is hardly absurd.  After all, all Josh can marshall in support of Obama is that he’s been studying up on national policy for his presidential run.  Three and a half years (if we’re not rounding Palin’s up, we’re not doing it for Obama) in the Senate, most of which he’s spent running for president, is hardly an impressive résumé by presidential standards.  (For comparison, see Biden, Joe or McCain, John.)   Palin’s been the chief executive for a state government for a year and a half, during which time she’s actually been doing her job, and was chief executive for a municipality for six years immediately before that.   Again, not exactly impressive, but it stacks up nicely.

If one goes beyond the job titles and dates part of the résumé and moves on to the “Accomplishments” section, as Bill Dyer does, one can even more easily argue that Palin is more qualified than Obama.  She’s actually gotten things done during her tenure in office, after all.

Many people would argue that eightish years of executive experience trumps none.  Indeed, as my colleague Dave Schuler pointed out yesterday in the comments of my “Sarah Palin, Small Town Mayor” post, it’s been twelve elections — 48 years — since the last time the American people elected a United States Senator to the presidency.   Since then, they’ve chosen:  A sitting president (Lyndon Johnson), a former two-term vice president (Richard Nixon), a sitting president (Nixon), a one-term small state governor (Jimmy Carter), a two-term large state governor (Ronald Reagan), a sitting president (Reagan), a sitting vice president (George H.W. Bush), a sitting multi-term small state governor (Bill Clinton),  a sitting president (Clinton), a sitting two-term large state governor (George W. Bush) — who lost the popular vote to a sitting two-term vice president (Al Gore) — and a sitting president (Bush).   That trend will be broken this year, barring tragedy, since both major parties have nominated a sitting Senator.  But, rather clearly, the American people prefer their presidents with serious executive experience.

My own predilections put Obama ahead of Palin in the preparation department because of his Harvard law degree, his years teaching law at Chicago, and his having boned up on national issues in a way that Palin hasn’t yet been forced to.   Whether the American people will see it that way is another question.

It should be noted, of course, that Palin is her party’s choice for backup quarterback.  Obama, on the other hand, would be the QB1.

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, this topic is generating a lot of discussion.

Nolan Finley, the editorial page editor of The Detroit News, doesn’t think either Palin or Obama are qualified, likening the to baseball rookies who need more time in the minor leagues.

[I]s Sarah Palin ready for the Oval Office? She’s been governor for just two years, and before that was the mayor of a small town. Had she finished this term and another, and sustained her early success, she would have earned a look for the ticket.  She’s certainly one of the GOP’s top young prospects, but she’s being called up to the big leagues too soon.

And so is Barack Obama. His resume is as thin as Palin’s. He was a community organizer in Chicago, served briefly in the Illinois Legislature and lucked into the U.S. Senate when his Republican opponent, the runaway favorite, got tangled in a weird sex scandal.  He, too, has a young family, plays pickup basketball and is very GQ. And as an added bonus, his wife is hot.

But it is embarrassing to hear Obama, 47, explain how his work on the streets of Chicago fully prepared him to be leader of the free world because he met a lot of people down on their luck. He’s been in the Senate just four years and has spent half of that time running for president.

And yet, last week in Denver, the elder statesmen of the Democratic Party walked one by one to the podium to extol the leadership skills of Obama. They had to be choking on their words. Obama doesn’t chair a Senate committee, hasn’t been one of its most influential voices, has never really led anything

[...]

This may just be old guy talk, but I still believe in the value of touching all the bases. Politicians like John McCain and Joe Biden spent decades learning their craft. They’ve dealt with crises on both personal and professional levels. There’s not much that will catch them off-guard.

And there are many others like them, men and women from both inside and outside Washington, who have been learning, doing and maturing for a long time and now stand ready to lead.  Yet for half of this year’s presidential ticket, we passed them by in favor of rookies.

This election will indeed prove the adage that anyone can grow up to be president. Only now you don’t have to bother with the growing up part.

Gerard Baker, US Editor and Assistant Editor of The Times of London, thinks it’s a slam dunk that Palin’s the better choice. He has a whole list of comparisons along these lines:

Obama: Worked his way to the top by cultivating, pandering to and stroking the most powerful interest groups in the all-pervasive Chicago political machine, ensuring his views were aligned with the power brokers there.

Palin: Worked her way to the top by challenging, attacking and actively undermining the Republican party establishment in her native Alaska. She ran against incumbent Republicans as a candidate willing and able to clean the Augean Stables of her state’s government.

That’s mostly unfair and, frankly, a little silly.  Still,  one can see that one needn’t be “nuts” or totally lacking in judgment to think it other than obvious that Obama is superbly qualified while Palin is unworthy.

I wrote a quick post before bed last night giving my off-the-cuff reaction to Barack Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, arguing that, despite all the talk of “change,” it was basically a speech that Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, or John Kerry could have given.

The NYT has a six-page transcript of the speech as delivered.  Let’s skip the biography and gotcha attack lines and go through the policy pronouncements.  These are problems for which he’s blamed George W. Bush and has promised to fix if elected president.

[M]ore Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less. More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can’t afford to drive, credit cards, bills you can’t afford to pay, and tuition that’s beyond your reach.

Exactly zero of these are within the power of the president to fix. Seriously, what does he propose to do about housing prices reaching equilibrium and people borrowing to live lifestyles they can’t afford?

We’re a better country than one where a man in Indiana has to pack up the equipment that he’s worked on for 20 years and watch as it’s shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news.

So, we’re going to ban trade with China? Ban American companies from participating in the global marketplace? Radically raise the cost that 300 million Americans pay for consumer goods to keep a relative handful of people employed in sectors where First World nations have lost their comparative advantage?

We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty…

So, we’re going to return to locking up drug addicts and people with non-dangerous mental disorders? We’re going to guarantee everyone a minimum income?

We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off and look after a sick kid without losing her job, an economy that honors the dignity of work.

Don’t people start new businesses every day in this country? And isn’t his party the one that wants to erect regulatory barriers making it harder to start new businesses? For that matter, don’t waitresses get days off already? I’m pretty sure they do.

Implicit in this sentence, though, are the inherent contradictions in Democratic domestic policy. The more mandates we put on small businesses, the harder it is for them to succeed. Sure, it would be great if even unskilled labor got terrific benefits, including paid family leave. But somebody’s got to pay for that. If it’s the customer, it makes the product or service less attractive. If it’s coming out of the owner’s pocket, it makes hiring employees less attractive. If it’s the government, it takes money out of everyone’s pocket — including those with dreams of starting their own business. Including the very waitress who we’re trying to help. Whose salary, incidentally, will naturally go down as a result of the policy — if she’s hired to begin with.

Ours — ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools, and new roads, and science, and technology.

Now this is terrific line. It starts off appealing to conservatives and moderates and then promises a chicken in every pot. Who can be opposed to these things, after all? Why, mean old out-of-touch people like John McCain, that’s who!

But how does this translate into policy?

Protect us from harm. Keeping foreign enemies from attacking us and domestic criminals from terrorizing the innocent is the fundamental purpose of government, one could argue. But we’ve been trying to do these things since Day 1. One suspects, though, he’s defining “harm” much more broadly.

Decent education for all. I’m for it. But isn’t that a local responsibility? The federal government doesn’t run too many schools, after all, aside from those on military bases and diplomatic outposts. And what does “decent” mean, exactly?

Are we going to have government only do “that which we cannot do for ourselves”? Or is it going to invest in science and technology?

Change means a tax code that doesn’t reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it.

Don’t workers and small businesses have lobbyists? And why is government in the business of deciding who “deserves” to keep the money they earned?

I will stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.

They’re the same companies!

I will — listen now — I will cut taxes — cut taxes — for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.

This is another great line. It sounds very New Democrat. But, really, it’s the same old class warfare: We’re going to cut taxes for most people — even though we’ve just listed trillions in new spending programs — while raising them on those already paying the largest burden. But, hey, 19 out of 20 people will like it! Democracy! As Dave Schuler likes to say, “When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on the support of Paul.”

And for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as president: In 10 years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

We will do this. Washington — Washington has been talking about our oil addiction for the last 30 years. And, by the way, John McCain has been there for 26 of them.

And Joe Biden 35 of them, by the way.

This is sheer fantasy. Of late, it’s become a bipartisan one, since even President Bush has spouted similar platitudes. It’s simply not going to happen.

And I’ll invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy — wind power, and solar power, and the next generation of biofuels — an investment that will lead to new industries and 5 million new jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.

Man, if $150 billion would do this Exxon would already be doing it.

I’ll recruit an army of new teachers, and pay them higher salaries, and give them more support. And in exchange, I’ll ask for higher standards and more accountability.

I suppose they’ll work side-by-side with the 100,000 new policemen Bill Clinton put on the beat.

Teachers are hired, trained, and supervised at the state and local level. Even if we federalize them, how is it that we’re going to attract better caliber people to do a job that’s often thankless and repetitive? Simply by paying them more? And what are these “higher standards”? Test scores? Democrats don’t like that measure. No Child Left Behind, Part Deux.

Granted, Clinton and others have made this promise and it’s almost certainly rhetoric that won’t translate into policy. If it did, though, we’re likely to see the repeat of federalizing airport security screeners: The same people doing the job as before but making more money and even harder to fire for poor performance.

And we will keep our promise to every young American: If you commit to serving your community or our country, we will make sure you can afford a college education.

What does this mean, exactly? If, say, you work in a soup kitchen a couple hours a week, we’ll send you to Harvard?

If you have health care — if you have health care, my plan will lower your premiums. If you don’t, you’ll be able to get the same kind of coverage that members of Congress give themselves.

So, if I don’t have a job, I get the same coverage we provide for 535 elites making executive salaries? Groovy. No scaling problems there.

I will make certain those companies stop discriminating against those who are sick and need care the most.

I think we have different definitions of “insurance.”

Now is the time to help families with paid sick days and better family leave, because nobody in America should have to choose between keeping their job and caring for a sick child or an ailing parent.

See our earlier discussion on this. Look, I’m for this. That’s a situation I’ve never been in and would dearly hate to be in. But who’s going to pay for it? A small business owner with, say, five employees almost certainly can’t afford to pay one of them for an extended period while not reaping the benefits of their work. Nor, realistically, can he afford to pay a temp to come in and do that work while paying the person he’s replacing. Large companies can probably absorb this sort of thing more easily — and many in fact do so — but, then again, large companies have more employees and therefore a greater likelihood of having to pay this out.

Or is this going to be some sort of government insurance program? If so, are we going to pay everyone on a capped basis, as with unemployment insurance? Or are we going to pay, say, an executive with a sick kid $20,000 a month while she’s out? What if her company sends good American jobs to China?

And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day’s work, because I want my daughters to have the exact same opportunities as your sons.

Dude, the 1970s are over.

Obama’s a bright guy. He anticipated these objections and dealt with them squarely:

Now, many of these plans will cost money, which is why I’ve laid out how I’ll pay for every dime: by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens that don’t help America grow.

But I will also go through the federal budget line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work and making the ones we do need work better and cost less, because we cannot meet 21st-century challenges with a 20th-century bureaucracy.

Clearly, the man has seen “Dave.”

I mean, seriously, we’re going to pay for all this by closing loopholes?! We quite literally couldn’t pay for it if we closed the entire federal government excepting the Defense Department and the Social Security Administration.

Yes, government must lead on energy independence, but each of us must do our part to make our homes and businesses more efficient.

The cameras didn’t show Jimmy Carter but I’m sure he was smiling. And wearing a sweater. While turning his thermostat down to 72.

[W]e must also admit that programs alone can’t replace parents, that government can’t turn off the television and make a child do her homework, that fathers must take more responsibility to provide love and guidance to their children.

Agreed. One small problem: They ain’t gonna.

Turning to foreign policy, the speech was actually much stronger there. I actually agreed with much of it, including some of the contrasts he drew with Bush and McCain. Two exceptions:

You know, John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the gates of Hell, but he won’t even follow him to the cave where he lives.

We have no clue as to which cave bin Laden lives. Or if he lives in a cave. Or he’s still alive.

Do we seriously believe that, if he could, Bush wouldn’t be killing or capturing bin Laden? His approval ratings would jump 25 points.

We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country. Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t keep us safe.

I agree with the underlying premise here: Of course Democrats want to keep the country safe and, goodness knows, Democrats aren’t any more reluctant to send troops into harm’s way than Republicans. One probably doesn’t want to invoke JFK here, though. Bay of Pigs. Taking us much closer to the brink of nuclear holocaust than we’ve ever been. Vietnam.

Look, I realize that I’m not the target audience here and that convention speeches are often full of platitudes and sops to the base.  My guess is that John McCain’s will be, too — and we’ll criticize that, too.   But don’t base your entire campaign on “CHANGE” and give me warmed over ideas from the Carter administration.

Obama Photo: Linda Davidson/The Washington Post. Magic pony  via Adam Stein.

Adam Serwer laments the fact that Barack and, particularly, Michelle Obama have to humanize themselves to the electorate and fight back against an elitist caricature.

[T]he Obamas are still fighting Jackie Robinson Syndrome, the reflexive double standards and often small, sometimes large, but always public humiliations that come from being the first black person to do something.

Ezra Klein thinks this “beautifully put” but thinks there’s more to this than race.

Rather, the campaign against Obama has metastasized into a variant of class warfare. It’s the resentment of the meritocracy. What the GOP realized was that Obama did come across different than the average American, but not so much because he was black as because he was effortless. The very set of supercharged talents and qualities that allowed Obama to levitate past the boundaries of race and class make him different than those who haven’t rocketed upward on the strength of their intelligence and charisma and charm. After all, if you’re a fumbling, struggling individual out in suburban Ohio, how can you believe that this guy who doesn’t look to have struggled a day in his life cares about your pathetic problems? Obama, in other words, is elite. As in “A group or class of persons enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic status.” Obama isn’t an economic elite, but he is a social and intellectual elite. And it’s that creeping sense that he’s different, that he’s better and knows it, that McCain is trying to exploit.

But that’s a time-honored tactic.  Witness the campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988, George H.W. Bush in 1992, Al Gore in 2000, and John Kerry in 2004.  Or any seriously contested presidential primary, of either party, in my memory.  Being “out of touch” with “regular Americans” is a political liability.   Caring about “people like me” is good.  Being elite is fine.  Being elitist, not so much.

Getting back to Serwer’s quote, it marks the second time in recent days I’ve seen the Jackie Robinson comparison trotted out.  A National Journal poll over the weekend, the results of which were released today, asked, “Who is Obama most like — John F. Kennedy, Jackie Robinson, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter or Colin Powell?”

My response:

It’s an insult to great achievers like Robinson, Powell, and Kennedy to mention Obama in the same breath.  Obama’s got the youthful charisma and inexperience JFK brought to the White House, minus the war hero credit.  That leaves, by default, Jimmy Carter, who was a decent, smart guy in way over his head.

Jackie Robinson was a demonstrably talented baseball player, denied access to the Major Leagues by dint of the skin color he was born with, who instantly became a top player once given a chance.  Barack Obama has faced no such barriers, getting admitted to the finest schools in the country by virtue of his qualifications and then put on the fast track in academe, politics, publishing, and other pursuits through combination of extraordinary gifts, hard word, and, ironically, the color of his skin.  While there’s no doubt that being “the first black” poses challenges, it comes with perks.

Regardless, he’s very young to be on the verge of a major party presidential nomination and has none of the usual resume entries one expects to see in one who got there so quickly.  Bill Clinton was about the same age but had been governor of Arkansas for a dozen years.  Kennedy was a war hero and Pulitzer Prize winner.  Obama gives good speeches.

That said, comparisons only go so far.  As I’ve written on numerous posts in recent months, we’ve had great presidents who seemed barely qualified for the job and lousy ones who had extraordinary preparation.   It’s quite reasonable to look at Obama’s and McCain’s pasts as clues to their futures — they’re really the only clues we have, after all, aside from gut feelings about their personalities — but the presidency is sui generis and people surprise you.