Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has been musing over politics recently. As you can tell from the last post, your Maximum Leader missed Sarah Palin’s speech last Wednesday. He also missed most of John McCain’s speech on Thursday.

NB to all minions: You know… Last Thursday was one hell of a day from a TV viewing perspective. There was the opening night of Football season. Your Maximum Leader watched the New York Giants bash in the hapless Washington Redskins. He also flipped over and was watching the Nationals on TV. He also wanted to watch the Barack Obama/Bill O’Reilly interview. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t often watch O’Reilly. But he wanted to see O’Reilly and Obama go at it. The interview didn’t disappoint. Then there was McCain’s speech. That is a lot of viewing all running simultaneously…

Anyhoo…

So, your Maximum Leader downloaded Joe Biden’s speech, Barack Obama’s speech, Sarah Palin’s speech and John McCain’s speech. He watched them all in order on Friday night.

Your Maximum Leader knows… That is a tall order to do right in a row. Indeed, watching that much speechifying at once is not something to be recommended to political novices. It was only your Maximum Leader’s black heart, strong constitution, and cynicism that allowed him to make it through the ordeal.

Whoda thunk before the convention season started that the most memorable speech given at either the Democratic or Rebpublican National Conventions would be from the Republican Vice-Presidential pick. Your Maximum Leader wishes he’d made wagers on it…

Anyhoo…

Your Maximum Leader’s basic opinion of the race hasn’t changed. This is a tight race and will remain so (barring some unforeseen gaffe or happening) through the election. If the election were held today, your Maximum Leader believes that John McCain would win. But in all honesty, those of you who know your Maximum Leader well know that this is the first time that he’s thought John McCain would win. It is likely that your Maximum Leader will go back to saying that it will be Obama in a squeaker by the middle of next week.

So… Your Maximum Leader is concerned that the one question he keeps getting asked by people he knows is “Why do you think the polls are so close? Don’t you think McCain should be ahead?” What makes this question so concerning is the subtext. The subtext is always this “McCain should be further ahead, but white people don’t like telling pollsters that they aren’t going to vote for the black man.” Now being a Virginian, your Maximum Leader remembers well the Douglas Wilder/Marshall Coleman governors race back in 1989. According to polling, Wilder was going to crush Marshall Coleman. But in the end, Wilder only prevailed by a half a percentage point. Your Maximum Leader isn’t sure that this racial subtext isn’t just a Virginia thing. He hasn’t heard much of it in the national press or on major blogs he frequents. Is your Maximum Leader concerned about people being racist and not voting for Barack Obama because he is black? Sure he is. Judging people solely by the color of their skin is stupid. But there are stupid people out there. He doesn’t think they are a sizable section of the population, but in a super close election they could be a factor.

From another angle… Women who are going to vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin just because Sarah Palin is a woman are likely just as small a group as unrepentant racists. But in a close election they might be a factor in some states. Frankly your Maximum Leader doesn’t think that many women will vote for John McCain just becuase of Sarah Palin being a woman. Some women might vote for the McCain/Palin ticket to make a statement about Sarah Palin’s treatment by the press recently. That is a different thing than just voting by sex. Perhaps your Maximum Leader is parsing. One voter is just voting on the non-sensical topic of sex. The other voter is voting out of sympathy. There actually is a difference.

Speaking of Sarah Palin… Your Maximum Leader is intrigued by her. Her politics (broadly speaking) seem to be in line with his own. She certainly seems to be an ambitious woman who is competent at everything she has attempted. It is hard to judge her record for a number of reasons. The first reason is that no one seems to vet a damned thing when it comes to Sarah Palin. The amount of rumour and innuendo widely circulated out there about Sarah Palin is staggering. If nothing else is only helps to strengthen that sympathy vote your Maximum Leader was just writing about. It seems from the past 10 days or so that anyone can say anything about Sarah Palin (or her family) and have it reported by a major news outlet - and be retracted/modified/revised within 24 hours. The way the press and left-wing bloggers have written pretty much anything they want about Sarah Palin makes your Maximum Leader wonder if it is possible for her to get a fair hearing at any point from most news outlets…

Now as for Governor Palin herself… Is she who your Maximum Leader would have picked had he been the Republican Nominee? Probably not. She wasn’t on your Maximum Leader’s radar for a host of reasons. The chief among them is that she has only been governor for two years. Now he is not saying that her executive experience is meaningless. It is not. But he is saying that by choosing Governor Palin, Senator McCain did seem to blunt his own critique of Senator Obama’s own lack of experience. There is the whole “she’s-the-Veep-and-he-is-the-Pres” arguement; but being able to really hammer Obama’s inexperience had been making people think. Now there is a certain hollowness in that arguement.

Frankly, Bill Clinton might have gotten it right when he said that (and your Maximum Leader paraphrases) nothing prepares someone for being president. That is a sentiment that your Maximum Leader has held for many years. Indeed, about the only thing that prepares someone for being president is having a long resume with lots of different positions on it. The only man in the past 50 year who was really qualified to be president was George H.W. Bush. (And frankly, he was a pretty good president. Better than both men who succeeded him. And - making a prediction here - George H.W. Bush will have been a better president than whoever wins in 2008.) About the only positions that might prepare a person to be president are Governor of California, Governor of New York and Governor of Florida. They are big states. The Governors are involved in foreign affairs because of the role their states play in the world economy. They have varied populations. And their powers are roughly analogous to that of the President of the United States. That said… On the whole, your Maximum Leader would rather elect a sitting or former Governor to the office of President of the US than a US Senator. There is a major difference to being a single member of a larger deliberative body and being an executive. Someone who’s done both would be good (Pete Wilson of California for example - before he went and pissed off all the hispanics in California and destroyed the Republican Party on the west coast.)

Anyhoo… Your Maximum Leader was writing about Sarah Palin. So far he is generally pleased with Sarah Palin. He has one big and one little concern though.

The big concern is the whole “Trooper” story. Your Maximum Leader will not recount the facts (such as we might know them). But he will say that any ethics investigation is serious and worries him. Your Maximum Leader hopes that the people who vetted Palin are very certain of the outcome. But at some level any investigating group (particularly special prosecutors appointed by the Department of Justice… Oops… We digress…) will want to find something. An investigation that finds nothing is one that can’t think of a reason for its own existance. Investigations go on until they find something. Unless Alaska’s investigators have a particularly narrow focus… Anything is possible. And that big radical “anything” is very disconcerting.

The small concern is the vetting process itself. Your Maximum Leader wonders just how good a vetting job the McCain people did. The Washington Post last week had a piece that seemed to indicate that the process was very abbreviated for Palin. That is concerning too. It gets to the “experience and judgement” that McCain touts. Of course, he is also a maverick and wants to shake things up. So you’ve got that too.

All in all it is going to be very exciting through November…

Carry on.