John McCain once explained why he is better qualified to be president than Rudy Guiliani, Mike Huckabee, or Mitt Romney. His words look ironic in retrospect.
“I am prepared. I am prepared. I need no on-the-job training. I wasn’t a mayor for a short period of time. I wasn’t a governor for a short period of time.”
–John McCain, Republican Presidential debate in Orlando, Fla., October 21, 2007.
The obvious logical inference to take away from McCain’s remark is that he doesn’t see his running mate as prepared and that he thinks she is going to need on-the-job training. Gov. Palin has much less gubernatorial experience than either Huckabee or Romney, and I don’t think we want to make any comparison between running New York City’s five boroughs and running the village of Wasilla, Alaska. We all have positions on the issues and policies we’d like to see changed or continued, but nothing trumps national security. You can’t have a commander-in-chief that has never met a foreign leader in her life, who has no idea what the Bush Doctrine is or why it matters, and who thinks staring across the Bering Sea at Russia is good experience in understanding the conflict in the Caucuses. It is 4877 miles from Nome, Alaska to T’bilisi, Georgia.
