Sarah Palin has a new job as a news analyst on Fox News, but she's saying the same things she said during her unsuccessful run for the vice-presidency -- that "common sense" can solve America's national and international problems. Her critics, she reiterated in her debut appearance, "don't like the common-sense conservative solutions I articulate."
Unfortunately, she has yet to articulate an example of such a solution, and that's because there is no such thing. In fact, the idea of "common sense" solutions to America's problems contradicts every principle of the nation's Founding Fathers. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe -- and the majority of American voters then -- believed that those in high office needed a broad range of knowledge and experience to solve the nation's problems. Common sense simply wasn't enough.
Washington and others believed that the presidency requires training, skills and experience in leadership, international affairs, political science, military strategy, economics, history, geography, science and a wide range of other knowledge. It requires skills in political negotiation and compromise with domestic and foreign leaders. Above all it requires a broad education, a brilliant, thoughtful mind, and skills in solving complex problems. Even George Washington, Harry Truman and other presidents who never attended university obtained the equivalent knowledge through extensive self-study.
Orphaned at 12 and unable to attend secondary school or college, George Washington obsessed over improving his skills and education, and he accumulated more than 3,000 books over his lifetime. Education was central to his thinking about the future of his nation. "Knowledge," he said, "is in every country the surest base of public happiness."
Washington trained himself to command the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, studying the three-volume "Art of War," along with tomes on military discipline, fortifications, projectiles and gunnery, and mass maneuvers--in short, everything a commanding general needed to know. And obviously he learned his lessons well: He won the war.
About 40% of Washington's library were books on agriculture and the law -- with good reason. As owner of one of Virginia's largest plantations, his principle nonpolitical activity was agriculture. As a political leader, he served in the Virginia legislature and Continental Congress as Constitutional Convention president, and as the nation's first President. Complementing his law studies, he pored over more than fifty books on history, and more than sixty books on political science and economics, including Adam Smith's three-volume Wealth of Nations, John Locke's On Human Understanding, Gibbon's six volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and many more. His margin notes prove that he read and studied them all.
Those presidents with college educations were equally passionate in acquiring knowledge for leadership. Our fifth president James Monroe, the most beloved president after Washington during our nation's early years, learned reading, writing, arithmetic, higher mathematics, Latin, French, and the Scriptures in a one-room schoolhouse in the eastern Virginia woods. He then went to College of William and Mary before studying law under Thomas Jefferson.
The only president other than Washington to win election without opposition, Monroe accumulated a library of more than 3,000 books including works on history ranging from ancient Greece through the Age of Enlightenment. His enormous library of French and classical literature included more than 100 volumes of works by Voltaire, Rousseau, Plutarch, and Horace, along with collections of essays by Montaigne, Montesquieu and others. Before announcing for president, Monroe had served as a state legislator, U.S. Senator, governor of Virginia, ambassador to France, Britain, and Spain, U.S. Secretary of State, and U.S. Secretary of War.
Sarah Palin -- and many Americans like her -- would, it seems, dismiss James Monroe and other brilliantly educated Founding Fathers as "elitist," believing that an aborted two-year stint as Alaska's governor, a term as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, and "common sense" are enough training to lead America and the Free World. Like too many children in school, they demean achievement in the classroom while celebrating achievement on the playing field.
I initially applauded the choice of Senator John McCain for President. Superbly educated and experienced like his forbears, he had served our nation gallantly. But his choice of Sarah Palin was political gimmickry that bordered on sedition. The finger of a hockey-mom -- blessed as she may be with common sense -- does not belong on the button that could destroy our children and the rest of humanity. Common sense is not enough.
I'm sorry, but no matter how much the Right, Faux News and Sarah herself tries to "sell" Ms. Palin as being competent for the highest office in our land, she destroys the myth by merely opening her mouth and speaking.
"Washington and others believed that the presidency requires training, skills and experience in leadership, international affairs, political science, military strategy, economics, history, geography, science and a wide range of other knowledge. It requires skills in political negotiation and compromise with domestic and foreign leaders."
The Republican party and many of its candidates and supporters deny evolution, bash science, call diplomacy "weakness," and call educated people "elitist."
During the Dubya years, I was really concerned that we were inches away from becoming the theocracy at the center of Margaret Atwood's novel "The Handmaid's Tale."
The novel "is set in the Republic of Gilead, a country formed within the borders of what was formerly the United States of America by a racist, male chauvinist, nativist, theocratic-organized military coup motivated by an ideologically-driven response to the pervasive ecological degradation of the land, widespread infertility, and attendant social dislocations. Beginning with a staged terrorist attack killing the President and ousting Congress, the coup leaders launched a revolution which overthrew the United States government and abolished the US Constitution. The new theocratic military dictatorship, styled "The Republic of Gilead", moved quickly to consolidate its power and reorganize society along a new militarized, hierarchical, compulsorily-Christian regime of Old Testament-inspired social and religious orthodoxy among its newly-created social classes.
[Wikipedia]
I have the hardest time 'respecting' alleged leaders who assume that their followers are nimrods. President Ronald Reagan,... though I despise just about every long-term political decision that came out of his White Hose,... at least seemed Presidential most of the time, and didn't seem to assume that this electorate was composed of nimrods.
George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, despite their personal faults and shortcomings (very different sets of them) also never seemed to assume the electorate was composed of morons & sheep.
I need a President that I at least THINK is at least as smart as myself and those I love. President Obama, while I am not completely happy with him,... at least appears smart and doesn't talk down to 'us' all the time.
Sarah Palin,... I don't think she is very informed (by choice) on the world because she choses not to be. Without being informed - common sense does not follow.
Yep...the country could use a little common sense at the top.
But I would not even credit Mrs. Todd Palin with having common sense -- she has been an epic failure at parenting, mayoring, governing, VP-candidating and now political punditry-ing.
Common sense would tell you that when you let the lake die outside your house and you turn your picturesque Alaskan village into an ugly strip of big-box stores... when your children run amok and even get in repeated trouble with the law... when you have to leave your governorship due to ethical problems... when you divide the nation as a national political figure... and when you incite your "fan base" to make death threats against judges and bloggers... you may be on the wrong path.
What you say about them wanting theocracy to take over is absolutely true. During the '08 election when Palin first came out I showed them the videos of her praying for her church to take over government administration. I asked them point-blank if they wanted this kind of theocracy to take over. My jaw nearly dropped to the floor when they actually answered me that, yes, they would like for that to happen! They would be perfectly fine with it!
Then just a couple weeks ago they were talking about who was the worst president in the past century. Bush's name didn't even come up, it wasn't even mentioned! I nearly fell off my chair. They do not consider the Bush administration a disaster by far, despite nearly bringing the entire country to the brink of complete collapse. It's utter denial and positively astounding. (While, of course, Obama was mentioned in their conversation, I think they settled on Carter.)
I kept hearing this "common sense" mantra and yet she never built on it, never went further than the soundbite. In fact if we are honest, every question she was asked was basically Beck leading her with Sarah only having to repeat back to him what he said as best as she could.
She and her ilk keep having a go at PBO about his "change" motto but actions speak louder than words and his actions are pretty strong.
Soundbites and hollow sentiments are only going to sustain the country for so long - about five minutes - and if this is what people are backing as their "hope" for 2012, I hope they are ready for the quick sharp jolt down to earth.
In the last couple of decades, the term "common sense" has come to mean that it is a view which says, I can ignore everything that has happened outside of my little world for the rest of my life. I can be President of the United States and still carry on like Mr. Bean (without even realizing that Rowan Atkinson who plays him is a brilliant, extremely competent and well educated man)
Cut taxes, more guns, remove all regulations so the free market can prosper, no aid for the needy, destroy Obama, use your children as props. Real common sense solutions Granny Grifter, they've really worked so well.
The only point I would beg differ on is that John McCain was "superbly educated." He actually wasted his chance at a superb education at Annapolis and finished 894th out of 899. Maybe if he had taken advantage of that education, he would have been astute enough to realize decades later that picking a "political gimmick" for his VP running mate would not ultimately be in his or the country's best interests. I agree that his VP choice bordered on sedition .... he must have missed the discussion at Annapolis on sedition.
Between McCain and Palin, the country was supposed to believe that the requirements for leadership pivot finely on being a POW or a Hockey Mom. Thankfully, most of the country saw through that ludicrous shallowness.
When the neo-cons I work with ask me "how's it going with that 'change' thing of yours" I tell them it's certainly going better than it would have been had Queen Iquitarod and her court jester been elected (*shudder*).
-- The article asserts that she is NOT capable of these things.
First, her nonsense word-salads at every turn clearly show that she cannot articulate clearly, even with pre-written speeches. Half of what she says are just rambling sentences that don't make any point. I think that's exactly why she does babble so much: she's trying to camouflage that she's not actually saying anything of worth.
Secondly, once again, as the article clearly asks: what exactly are her "common sense" ideas? She's always saying this, but never specifies a single one. Oh, details, details...