Republican Sen. John Ensign says Sarah Palin is not experienced enough to be president and John McCain’s presidential campaign “completely mishandled” her early days on the ticket.
The Nevada senator made the comments in a television interview in which he also criticized Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s readiness for the job. Ensign then strayed far from the GOP’s standard description of its vice presidential pick’s qualifications.
“Well, I do not think that Barack Obama or her are experienced enough to be president of the United States — neither one of them. And Hillary Clinton was much more qualified to be president than Barack Obama was, but that’s who the nominee is,” Ensign said Thursday on the Las Vegas news program NewsONE.
One of his staffers should just call Fox News now and reserve him a time slot for his walkback.
Karly Rove
Love how you advertise the wingnuttery site "Pajama’s Media"
I just love Michele Malkin and Hugh Hewitt
Keep up the good work
Conservatively Liberal
I read about this over at Kos earlier. The rats are abandoning ship, they know the SS McCain is going down.
Walkback? The way Ensign stated it there is no walkback. The end of the road has been reached and even he sees the cliff at the end.
The Grand Panjandrum
Well he did make it Fair and Balanced, no? Neither one of them are experienced! Yawn …
uila
I wonder, is she "not experienced enough" on an objective basis, or is it because her rollout was "completely mishandled". If the stage management had been more competent ala W in 2000, would these clowns have a higher opinion of her experience?
I’m beginning to think all politicians are full of shit.
dbrown
Obama has been running a huge presidential campaign system with tens of thousands of volunteers and paid staff for nearly two years and thrived in a long term primary battle but he is as inexperienced as Palin? That is stupid trying to talk about something that they appear to know zero about.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
I agree with CL, I think he’s going to hold his position on this one.
Eagleburger’s walk back , I think, is going to be the exception, not the rule.
jnfr
FYI, folks, over at BarackObama.com, they’re offering a lovely, limited edition t-shirt in exchange for your last chance $30 donation.
Comrade grumpy realist
OT, but let’s say by some devious maliciousness of some god (probably Loki) McCain actually does get 50.1% of the electoral votes.
Does anyone, on either side, have any idea what McCain would actually DO as president? Yeah, sure, he’d like to go to war with Iran and send troops to Georgia, but I think every single member of the military would inform him that he was being fucking insane.
More and more, McCain reminds me of a dog that is chasing after a car, with no idea what to do if he catches it.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
He’d go running to his mother and say "Look Mommy, they made me President"… that’s all he really wants.
Comrade Darkness
Objectively, okay.
I want someone there who knows how Washington works. VP is there to take over in a crisis, a crisis that makes Katrina look like a flooded ball field on the day of the little league world series. Getting shit done in a time of crisis means knowing, instinctively, where the levers of power are, and who’s responsible for what, across all of government. An ignorant player in this position is just as susceptible to manipulation by handlers as a weak-minded one.
Two, I want someone who understands the basics of the constitution. Course, she’s only recently blown this one incontrovertibly and that has less to do with her roll out. But she gave us a preview of her sheer ignorance with that squeeky insistence that no one had yet told her what the VP does so she was not going to answer rumors about whether she was on the short list.
Three, temperament. I want someone who can stand up and unite everyone under enormous pressure. I realize her role is attack dog, but the vicious whiny snark about how half the country are fake americans has not been balanced out with even the slightest hint that she can lead more than a row of ducks while carrying a leaky basket of corn.
Biden qualifies just fine on all of these. Palin may be trainable into the first two, but the third is inherent and she doesn’t appear to have it.
kommrade jakevich
Finish destroying all the documents Cheney didn’t have time to shred or delete.
Alex
The only question is how long it will take the waterboarding to break him. I heard Eagleburger wet his pants and broke the minute they walked him into the room.
lovethebomb
OT, but I had to rant somewhere. Looks like a November surprise is the outing of Obama’s aunt, an immigrant living the US illegally. What is the political value of this outing? It emphasizes Obama’s African (read black) roots. Obama talks up his roots in Kansas and Hawiai, but this conventient spectacle paints him African and boosting a black welfare recipient living in public housing. Just the right symbolic red flags for the closet racists and those who are in denial about their racism. I don’t like this one bit. I am hopeful that American’s aren’t stupid enuf to let this affect their vote, but they did somewhat elect W twice, once even after he was exposed as a mass murdering war criminal.
On a related note, I am hitting the walls about the whole socialist thing. Doesn’t any of these Palinites have any clue about the recent socialism for Wall Street. Is socialism only OK when it benefits corporations and the wealthy? In any event, Obama is only talking about rolling taxes back to Clinton levels, before W gave the rich a handout during "wartime." What a crock. I may need a new TV before this is over.
MikeJ
VP isn’t just there to take over in a crisis. Yes, replacing the pres is the day to day is mainly knowing how the Hill works, who to lean on, who to offer pork to.
Biden will be a great veep. Palin will want to drive the subway car that goes to the Russell building.
demkat620
Who will be the first on election night to eviscerate Schmidt and Davis?
I take Pat Buchanan, 7:30 pm est, on MSNBC, with a lead pipe.
Pitchfork Pat is ready to explode on the McCain campaign for destroying Sister Sarah.
TheHatOnMyCat
Yes. He would hold weekend barbeques for the press, get everyone off the White House lawn, and fuck up the traffic in Phoenix and Sedona so bad that Arizona would come to a complete stop.
Then he’d bomb Iran, make sure that there will be "more wars, my friends," and show up on Capitol Hill once a year, which is at about the same rate that he has been showing up there for a long time.
TheHatOnMyCat
Um, no, he or she is there for when the president cannot perform his duties. Not for a crisis.
uila
@Comrade Darkness: Nicely done. I for one am hopeful she wins the final battle for the soul of the GOP (i.e. the beginning of the end). Down that path leads marginalization.
Comrade Jake
I’m continually surprised by the number of people who’ve been suggesting that Palin could be in great shape for 2012. The argument is that the polls are only showing she’s a drag now because she’s inexperienced, and that with four more years over Alaska she’ll look like a pro.
I mean, these folks are either incredibly stupid or lying through their teeth. But why lie about something like that? What can they possibly accomplish, other than to shoot themselves in the face for 2012? It’s just bizarre.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
Uh TZ, do you remember the traffic in Sedona? Are you saying it would be WORSE?
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
::whispers:: "shhhh, that’s what we want"
TheHatOnMyCat
Yes, I think he would make it worse. If I were the city fathers up there I would be giving away Obama yard signs right now.
Fuzzykisser
No! its not experience. She’s not qualified, and I doubt she ever will be.
cleter
Well, he’d yell at some admirals and boss them around, then he’d get real drunk and yell at portraits of his father and grandfather, finally throwing the empty whiskey bottle at the wall and passing out. Right before he passed out, he would get the idea to call the Vietnamese ambassador and cuss at him, but he wouldn’t be able to find the phone before puking a little on the Presidential Seal carpet and collapsing.
What would he do on the second day, and all the long, terrible days thereafter?
Hell, I don’t know.
r€nato
I haven’t been up to Sedona recently but I am fairly certain it’s mostly Obama territory. Sure you have a share of wealthy GOP retirees, but there’s a larger contingent of birkenstock-wearing tree-huggers. In other words, not a ‘pro-America’ town.
McCain doesn’t live in Sedona anyway, it’s just the nearest civilization to him. He lives on a ranch some distance from Sedona. That is, when he is not at one of his other six or seven or eight homes.
r€nato
I’m a huge fan of Bill Maher, last night’s show (which, btw, rocked) featured Amy somebody or other on the panel, a black woman who was the press secretary for Bill Frist.
She actually tried pitching (repeatedly) that Palin has ‘captured the imagination of Americans’ and that was a good enough reason to vote for her, both now and in the future. This was actually her stock reply to every single query questioning her qualifications – she kept going back to her ‘star power’ among the know-nothings who see Palin as the VPILF and dammit that’s a good enough reason to vote for her.
It really is a marvel to watch these right-wing bullshit slingers on Maher’s show, because he won’t let them get away with it. He knows they are too smart to actually believe the bullshit they are peddling, and he calls them on it.
I’m just afraid that conservatives will stop coming on his show. When they only have liberals on, it gets pretty boring with everyone agreeing with everyone else how much the Republicans suck.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
If McCain should win (not looking like a real possibility) when he was at the ranch, the press would be all over that place, including Sedona.
John Cole
@r€nato: That was Amy Holmes, and she is as dumb as you think she is.
LiberalTarian
From JedL at Daily Kos … let’s see if this works
… well, no, didn’t work, but this is a pretty clever bit re McCain’s friends …
Brachiator
@CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII:
I wouldn’t be too sure about that. The Republican faithful are making a defense of Palin part of the Official GOP Loyalty Test(tm). As a post on crooks and liars recently noted:
This resentment has been building ever since intelligent conservatives balked over Dubya’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, again, because of her lack of any intellectual distinction.
Having drawn a line in the sand over Palin, these hard core wingnuts are astounded that anyone with a lick of sense is abandoning them. But they are temperamentally unable to retreat now that they have backed themselves into a corner. Their only recourse will be to nuture their own resentment, and depend upon Rush and Hannity to whip up the most pathetically insecure Republicans into a frenzy, with Palin as the poster girl for the "real" America.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
Brachiator, a schism is forming and for Ensign to come out with that statement tells me he’s going to be on the true conservative side of the aisle. I understand they are trying to gather their forces for the final push, but, I don’t think they’re going to be that successful. Palin and the negative campaigning have made a lot of Republicans skittish this time.
Gallup has Obama +10 right now, and there is going to be hell to pay when this is over in the red tent. The schism is starting to come into fruition now with those who already see the end result.
LiberalTarian
One thing that is interesting about Sarah Palin–she really is a reflection of the base GOP voter. When you see the stuff that comes out of her mouth and marvel at how wrong-headed it is, that is the way these people think. They BELIEVE.
Moreover, I don’t think they can be reasoned with. Really, really odd.
Brachiator
@CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII:
Actually, some Republicans have all but conceded the election. They are now seriously deciding on whether to make Palin the future of the Republican Party. And negative campaigning has not made Republicans skittish. Some are feeding on it precisely because the negativity has dredged up malcontents and people who hate and fear Obama, blacks, Mulisms, Democrats or liberals.
The GOP is again falling back on the belief that they lose only when they abandon their core principals. I don’t know where someone like Ensign will fit in a party that insists that the more narrow they are, the more successful they will be.
If this is a national poll, it is totally meaningless. If it is a statewide poll, it is just plain misleading. The New York Times had a useful piece about the pitfalls of polling on its Campaign Blog page (Early Voting and Exit Polls):
The closer we get to election day, the less reliable polls become, in part because the real choices made by actual early voters is more important than the polled survey opinions of "likely voters."
In addition, poll designers are dancing around the possibility that they may not have accurately accounted for people with cell phones. Also, and specific to this election, poll designers have not found a good way to distinguish from people who are truly undecided, and those who know exactly what their choices will be, but are unwilling to say so.
The bottom line is not simply that polling is inaccurate, but that the confidence level of polls is lower than poll designers are willing to admit. The actual turnout looks kinda good for Obama, and it is understandable that people would look for every positive indicator that Obama will do well come election day.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
You state "some Republicans" – well yeah, which ones? There are factions in that demographic and they are not seeing eye to eye at the moment.
The evangelicals have all but ruined the party branding and I think the true conservatives are about to split from them. Why else would Ensign be making this sort of statement? Why else would Chris Buckley be thrown off of a right-wing blog? The coalition they built is falling apart around them.
The Christianists aren’t the party, they are only one part and if they take the true conservatives down a road they never wanted to go, they are going to lose that support. They already are.
oh really
I"ve always assumed the first thing he would do would be to get a kitchen table.
Delia
He will try to persuade Cindy to hire special food tasters and bodyguards to protect him from the Moose Queen and her minions.
AnneLaurie
Because it must be said: If Palin’s about to take over the Presidency, it has just *become* a crisis.