This Is Not News

I have been trying to wrap my head around John McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee today, and I’ll be honest, I’m having no luck. I don’t know if it will help or hurt McCain, or what exactly it says about the state of our politics. I know that as a partisan Democrat I don’t want her to be Vice President, but I’d’ve thought that about anyone that McCain picked.

But what I’m really starting to wonder about is whether this will bring more coverage to Alaska and its unique economy and politics. As I understand it, the state distributes a dividend from oil revenue to everyone in the state – a shared participation in the state’s resources that provides some foundation for every citizen. That’s a fascinating idea to me, and I wonder if we’ll have the chance to discuss why Alaska does it this way – and why the rest of the country doesn’t.

The major thoughts rattling through my head after the John Edwards news last week seem to be as follows:

1. Good thing the Democrats didn’t nominate this guy.
2. Man, I feel awful for the Edwards supporters who feel let down or worse.
3. If Obama ever does something this dumb, you’re gonna need to keep me away from windows and sharp objects for at least a month.

There is one other thread, though. I’ve noticed a number of people on the blogosphere saying that this isn’t such a huge deal, and that their support of Edwards was because of the positions Edwards took, not who Edwards was himself. And while I see where they’re coming from, I have to say that I think it’s a terribly incorrect way of viewing the role we voters play in the American government at this point in time. Outside of the occasional initiative ore referendum, we pull the lever for a name, not a policy position. And that’s not an accident.

For starters, even if a candidate completely agrees with you on all of your policy issues, getting those policies enacted is a personal skill. You have to decide if the candidate can do that. Part of that skill in enacting policies depends on the popularity of the official doing the enacting. And part of a public official’s popularity depends on how the public reacts to that official – on how we feel about him or her as a person.

Beyond that, there are any number of ways that a particular policy can be implemented or approached. Those decisions are going to be in the hands of the public official, and they can determine whether or not your goals are achieved in the way that you want them to be. So you have to decide whether this particular candidate’s approach to implementation and problems solving is one that you can get on board with.

And all of that says nothing about the fact that any leader is going to have make hundreds of unglamorous decisions about issues that you might not have given any prior thought to, so you better hope you feel good about a candidate’s judgment, level-headedness, and ability to deal with challenges.

All of this is why, on some level, most voters have to feel like they can trust something about the person they’re voting for. And we have to make these judgments about these candidates based on fairly distant signals – which is exactly why personal scandals can wind up with the legs that they do.

This NY Times article on rising shipping costs is worth a read, if only for the examples of head-scratching activity that somehow makes sense given our current energy and economic policy. When I think of the effort that is required to ship something from China to the US, it boggles my mind that it is somehow cheaper to send raw materials to Asia, manufacture a product, and then ship[ that product back to the US. What that suggests to me is that as high as energy and fuel costs have gotten lately, they may still not be high enough to accurately reflect the scarcity of fuel, the global demand for products, the environmental damage currently done by transportation, and the further diminishing of available resources that results from damage.

I have a feeling a lot of people are going to have to make a lot of lifestyle changes in the coming decades. And I have a hunch part of my job as a teacher is going to be to try to help my students understand why that’s necessary – or at least to clearly understand the problems so that they can find the solution that is far, far beyond my grasp.

In the hub-bub over Iraqi government leaders backing Barack Obama’s general proposal for a 16-month timeline to withdraw American combat troops, John McCain has been making the argument that even if, after all “translation”-related confusion has been cleared up, the Iraqis do agree with Obama, Obama deserves no credit for this because he opposed the surge plan a year ago. Whether you agree with this or not, it does raise the point that the justifications for the timeline seem to be shifting a little bit in the media coverage. When Obama began proposing a 16-month withdrawal, he argued that it was necessary to give the various Iraqi factions time to get their act together – that Iraq would never completely stand on its own until it had to. Now the argument seems to be coming across more as “things have calmed down, they don’t need us, let’s go.” I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t take just about any justification for getting out of Iraq right now, but I have a gut feeling that the original justification is going to turn out to be a lot more valid than the new one. There are still a lot of competing power centers in Iraq, and I am certainly not an expert on how well the government is currently getting along with the Sadrist militias or what kind of autonomy the Kurds will demand or so on. But I can’t help feeling that we’re in a calm-before-the-storm period, that the calm has something to do with a belief that American forces will leave relatively soon, and that it won’t stick around indefinitely if that belief is lost.