McCain - Not Really Living in the Real World...

The following is a very interesting article about how McCain touting Palin as more experienced than Obama. Except he's either grossly misinformed or a liar. Or both.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain says his vice presidential pick, Sarah Palin, was already an experienced government official while his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, was working as a community organizer.

She wasn't. Palin was finishing college, getting married and working as a TV sportscaster when Obama was directing a church-based community group on Chicago's South Side in 1985-88.

McCain sought to make the comparison in an appearance on Fox News Sunday, criticizing Obama as too inexperienced to be in the White House despite his choice of a running mate who's also being called too unseasoned for that role.

Palin: Finishing college. A sportscaster. GREAT political experience there. Meanwhile, Obama was ALREADY changing lives and making living on Chicago's South Side better.

Challenged about his vice presidential choice, McCain said as governor of Alaska for the last two years, Palin "has had enormous responsibilities, none of which Senator Obama had." Later, McCain elaborated that "as a governor, she has had executive experience. She didn't sit in the state legislature."

The same contrast could be made with McCain himself, whose entire 26-year political career has been spent in Congress.

It's true that in recent years, more presidents have come from governorships than from legislative bodies. But it's a stretch to argue that running the statehouse in a small state is ideal preparation for the issues that will confront the next president, from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to coping with a half-trillion-dollar budget deficit and serious energy and health-care problems.

So, if McCain has no executive experience, how is HE any more qualified than Obama?

Further, they were saying the same thing about Clinton in 1992, except he HAD been governor of Arkansas, a much more populated state than Alaska, for years at that point. So, I guess that means that someone who'd been governor for a whole twenty months is more qualified than Clinton was. Oh, and Clinton, despite his personal shortcomings, did a great job as president. His only real POLITICAL faux pas was NAFTA, and I don't think he realized how bad that would turn out.

Also, McCain's been in politics for 26 years. That's only about five years less than Obama, considering he was a community organizer (meaning he was involved in local Chicago politics) in 1985.

In the same interview, McCain continued the theme, noting that "when she was in government, he was a community organizer."

That's incorrect. When Palin was first elected to the town council in Wasilla, Alaska, in the fall of 1992, Obama was wrapping up work in Chicago on a voter-registration drive. When that job ended, he joined a Chicago law firm and became a lecturer at the University of Chicago law school, and the Chicago Tribune picked him as one of "25 Chicagoans on the road to making a difference."

Obama's community organizing career had come years earlier, in 1985-88.

Somebody's REALLY got to get his facts straight. The man looks like an idiot! Further, even if Obama HAD been a community organizer in 1992, which he wasn't, all Palin was was a city councilwoman for a town of 9,000. BFD.

And, finally:

McCain also highlighted what he termed Palin's independent streak, praising her for often bucking her own party leaders.

"When she was taking tough positions against her own party, Senator Obama was voting 'present' 130 times in the state legislature, on every tough issue, whatever it was," McCain said.

That charge was reminiscent of attacks waged on Obama by his fellow Democrats during this year's primary campaign, including Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.

It's true that Obama voted "present" dozens of times, part of the thousands of votes he cast in an eight-year span in Springfield. Illinois lawmakers commonly vote that way on a variety of issues, and he has countered that many of those votes were cast because of technical or legal considerations about the underlying legislation.

Often, Obama voted "present" with large groups of other Democrats to protest what they saw as Republican trickery or abuse of power. Other times, voting that way sends a message that a lawmaker supports a bill's intent, but has concerns about how the legislation is drafted. Voting this way also can be a way to duck a difficult issue, as McCain charged, although that's difficult to prove.

There are also cases where legislators vote "present" as part of a strategy. Obama did this on some abortion measures, voting "present" to encourage some wavering legislators to do the same instead of voting "yes". Their "present" votes had the same effect as "no" votes, so getting them to vote present helped defeat the bills.

Get that last part? Obama knows how to play the system. He knows how to get the vote to go the correct way, sometimes without even putting people on the spot.

On the other hand, McHypocrite voted against the ban on torture earlier this year, even though he firmly believes waterboarding is torture...

So, where does Mc-I-Don't-Know-Anything go from here? The problem is McCain doesn't realize we live in the information age, when pretty much anything can be found out online, and when information retrieval is instantaneous. He just doesn't get it. You can't go on national TV anymore and lie and figure people will just believe it with so much information available at our fingertips. You just can't.

He's going to have to learn better tactics, and let's hope he doesn't. The elections are nine weeks from today. Let's hope Obama/Biden pack a one-two punch all the way to the White House.

(Article above was posted by the Associated Press.)