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 Guiliani’s experience running New York City’s five boroughs and Palin’s experience running the village of Wasilla, Alaska (pop. 9,780). 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. That’s about the same distance as between Buenos Aires, Argentina and Washingon DC. How well do you think the Mayor of DC understands Argentinian politics and military intentions?
Now things might be different if Gov. Palin displayed a thoroughgoing familiarity of foreign policy issues. But she doesn’t. She has no idea what U.S. foreign policy has been, nor any independent idea of what it should be in the future. She doesn’t even know who attacked us on 9/11 or why we are sending her son over there to fight. Here’s how James Fallows put it this morning.
What Sarah Palin revealed is that she has not been interested enough in world affairs to become minimally conversant with the issues. Many people in our great land might have difficulty defining the “Bush Doctrine” exactly. But not to recognize the name, as obviously was the case for Palin, indicates not a failure of last-minute cramming but a lack of attention to any foreign-policy discussion whatsoever in the last seven years.
