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“The Old Viking” forwarded me a viral email today.  I did a quick Google search and found that it’s up on quite a few sites.  I get a lot of these from both sides and I don’t usually post them, but I really like this one, so here it is:

What if the resumes of Obama/Biden and McCAin/Palin were switched around?  Think about it.  Would the country’s collective point of view be different?  Could racism be the culprit?

Ponder the following:

What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?

What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?

What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?

What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his standards?

What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?

What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?

What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

What if Obama couldn’t read from a Teleprompter?

What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?

What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem?

What if Michelle Obama’s family had made their money from beer distribution?

What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?

You could easily add to this list. If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

This is what racism does.  It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND:

Barack Obama:
Columbia University – B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in
International Relations.
Harvard – Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude

Joseph Biden:
University of Delaware – B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
Syracuse University College of Law – Juris Doctor (J.D.)

John McCain:
United States Naval Academy – Class rank: 894 of 899

Sarah Palin:
Hawaii Pacific University – 1 semester
North Idaho College – 2 semesters – general study
University of Idaho – 2 semesters – journalism
Matanuska-Susitna College – 1 semester

The most anticipated vice presidential debate in history is over.  Many of us watched it like we would watch a car race, just waiting for someone to crash and burn.  Well neither Biden or Palin crashed, but she did swerve onto the infield grass a few times and managed to get back on track without crashing.  She did, however, end up losing the race.  Some say by only a few car lengths, but I say she got lapped.  I say that because Biden blew her away in three key areas:  foreign policy, health care, and the role of the vice president.

If you weren’t able to watch the debate live, you can watch it at your leisure on several news sites.  I recommend the New York Times site because they run a transcript right along side the video.

Palin supporters probably thought this was one of her best moments:

PALIN: Oh, yeah, it’s so obvious I’m a Washington outsider. And someone just not used to the way you guys operate. Because here you voted for the war and now you oppose the war. You’re one who says, as so many politicians do, I was for it before I was against it or vice- versa. Americans are craving that straight talk and just want to know, hey, if you voted for it, tell us why you voted for it and it was a war resolution.

That statement standing alone is what they like about her – that she really is an outsider and she presents herself as an agent of reform.  But her charge against Biden was ridiculous.  Did she even hear what Biden said about his Iraq war vote just minutes earlier?

BIDEN:  With regard to Iraq, I indicated it would be a mistake to — I gave the president the power.  I voted for the power because he said he needed it not to go to war but to keep the United States, the UN in line, to keep sanctions on Iraq and not let them be lifted.

I, along with Dick Lugar, before we went to war, said if we were to go to war without our allies, without the kind of support we need, we’d be there for a decade and it’d cost us tens of billions of dollars.  John McCain said, no, it was going to be OK.

Is that not an explanation?

Both candidates stretched and shaded the truth, and you can read all about that here. 

There’s one falsehood that both Palin and McCain continue to bring up that I think is extremely important for the Democrats to rebut:

Palin: Castigated Obama’s health-care plan as one that would mandate a “universal government-run” system in which health care is “taken over” by the federal government.

The facts: This is inaccurate on several levels. Obama’s proposal includes an option for people to choose a new public plan with benefits similar to those that members of Congress and other federal employees have. It also includes an expansion of Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, but it is not at all exclusively government-run. His plan also mandates only that children, not adults, have coverage.

Note to Obama and Biden:  You have been good at pointing out the many bad aspects of McCain’s health-care plan, but you have not been good at all about explaining your own. 

What Palin said in the debate was a gross distortion of Obama’s plan.  She and McCain describe it as a government takeover because they want to scare people who fear socialized medicine into voting for them and McCain’s ill-conceived plan to fix health-care through a combination of tax breaks and free market competition.  (Read the transcript for Biden’s excellent critique of this plan.)

Obama’s plan is not anything close to socialized medicine.  It’s not even socialized insurance.  It’s a hybrid of private and federal insurance with incentives for everyone to buy in.  People need to know this.  They need to know how it works and what makes it superior to McCain’s plan, so please PLEASE offer up a clear an concise summary of your plan in the next debate.

Joe Biden is, for better and for worse, going to be himself.  He’s going to have some smart answers and he’s going to be wordy at times, and he’ll be humorous at times.  He’s been around too long to change any of that.  What I’ve read in the papers and online is that, surprisingly, he must constrain his wide smile, and that he needs to temper his responses.  They say these character adjustments are necessary so that he does not appear to be condescending towards Sarah Palin.

To that I say, how can anyone appear not to be condescending when they are up against this?

I mean really… If a question comes up about Supreme Court cases and Palin doesn’t know what Gwen Ifill is talking about and Biden does, what’s he supposed to do?  Say he can’t recall the case and let it go?  Biden teaches Constitutional Law at Widener Law School.  He could talk in great depth about any case brought up in a debate question.  Palin obviously could not unless it was a lengthy question that provided a lot of background information and context to help her out.

Biden had been in the Senate for 35 years, so he obviously knows way more about the workings of the Federal Government than Palin.  He should have no problem sounding like he knows what he’s talking about.  He just has to not sound like he’s better than her because he’s a lawyer and a long-time senator. (even though he is way, way better.)

So what will Palin be like?  Well she can’t be like the Palin we’ve seen in the Katie Couric interviews for the past week.  She will have to be much more like the Palin we saw at the Republican Convention. 

How can she be like that in a debate?  Well it’s pretty simple really.  She’s getting coached on delivering a script of talking points.  I’d bet that she’s going through final rehearsals right now.  She’ll be armed with her memorized script crafted in a way that can be used to answer a variety of questions asked in a variety of ways.  She will not stray from the script.  She will also have some “zingers” aimed at Biden and Obama that her campaign advisors are hoping will be delivered sharply and with a big wide-eyed smile so that the mainstream media news channels will replay them over and over and over again.

Whether or not this works for he is going to depend on Gwen Ifill’s questions.  If she asks a few that aren’t quite what Palin and her handlers expected, and Palin answers with a talking point that doesn’t really fit the question, and Ifill (or Biden in his response) asks her to get back to the question, then we might see a bit of the Palin we’ve seen in the Couric interview.  And if we do, McCain is toast.