Sarah Palin’s credentials have been widely called into question since the 44-year old governor of Alaska was named by John McCain as his vice presidential running mate. The McCain camp’s spirited defense of Palin has been alternately defensive, offensive, contradictory and amusing.
At a recent town hall meeting in Michigan, Palin was questioned about her foreign policy credentials. In typical Palin style, she dodged the question by answering, “I’ll be ready. I have that confidence.”
On reflection, the Sarah Palin Lies Debunked blog reports, the McCain camp must have realized how ridiculous that sounded and decided to supplement her response because the next day, campaign spokesperson Tracey Schmitt offered the following experiences that Palin would bring to the table on foreign policy:
“As the Governor of one of our largest energy producing states, Governor Sarah Palin is uniquely qualified to speak to one of the most pressing foreign policy issues of our time; achieving independence from foreign oil. She is Governor of the only state with two international borders – a land border with Canada and a maritime border with Russia. She has executive experience, has promoted trade of Alaskan products to over 100 foreign destinations and met with dozens of international trade delegations. Last year she traveled to the Middle East to visit members of the deployed Alaska National Guard troops and she has also visited wounded US troops in Germany.“
As the SPL blog writes, “So let’s get this straight. Her creditentials are: she resides in an oil-producing state that ships oil overseas and borders Canada by land and Russia by sea. She has traveled to Kuwait to visit the Alaska National Guard and made a stopover in Germany.”
Now though it turns out that even McCain has questioned his veep’s qualifications. Thanks to my colleague Adam Howard for finding this video of the Republican nominee declaring, in a debate with Mitt Romney on October 7, 2007, that “mayors and governors don’t have national security experience.” As the Republican candidate declared, “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.”
Clearly, Palin had not been on McCain’s shortlist for all too long.
