House District 3
John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his nominee for Vice President comes 24 years after Walter Mondale selected Geraldine Ferraro – it took the Republican Party a long time to catch up to the Democrats on that front. But Sarah Palin, only one heartbeat away from being President, would set the country back a hundred years.
It’s not Palin’s lack of national or foreign policy experience that should worry you most. The Republican choice for Vice Presidential nominee supports the most conservative agenda including creationism teaching in public schools; taking away a woman’s right to control her own reproductive health; opposing all GLBT relationships, including marriage and civil unions. She shoots AK47s in Iraq and thinks that theses guns should be allowed in the streets of America. She fired the state official who wouldn’t violate state civil service rules by firing Palin’s former brother-in-law at her request. Her political “management” experience comes from being mayor of a small (population 9000) town in Alaska and then being governor for 18 months of a state with only 640,000 residents (about the size of Baltimore, Maryland), all of whom receive an annual oil and gas dividend payment.
Remember that John McCain turned 72 this week. No matter whether you supported another Democrat in the primaries or any Republican, Sarah Palin as President is frightening for our country.
The Republicans’ ploy to portray Governor Palin as a millennium June Cleaver who has broken the “glass ceiling” is only a cheap revival of the Phyllis Schafly shtick of the 1970s. While Governor Palin portrays herself as a “hockey mom,” she has held local political office for at least 16 years of her five children’s lives (the oldest of whom is 19 years). It is frankly an affront to the millions of women who actually and actively choose to stay home and be primarily responsible for raising and caring for their families. And it is insulting and degrading to the many millions of women who must work one or even two jobs outside the home in order to provide the essentials for their children, lacking the work flexibility to participate in after school activities.
Please exercise your rights (while you have them) and not only vote for Obama-Biden, but work hard to elect the change we need – Barack Obama and Joe Biden.