September 04, 2008

Sarah who at the RNC



THIS woman pulled no stops. Just as Republican presidential candidate is using her to appeal to the female voters, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, used her son in the U.S. military who would be leaving for Iraq next week, her daughter who has special needs, her 17-year-old pregnant daughter, and her husband a "champion snow machine racer", to appeal to a disparate range of American voters. The Republicans are trying to sell her by highlighting her "orindariness"; that her life story is the same story of every American.

But Palin isn't exactly your average hockey mom. She is a governor so she has a job and doesn't stay at home 24/7. She doesn't have to run all over town picking up her kids from school or from soccer practice. She has help to do that for her.

On her young pregnant daughter Bristol alone, Palin is so far off from the ordinary American family who have to make tough decisions about a similar domestic situation. Of course she can afford for her daughter to go through with the pregnancy; the family is privileged enough to allow her daughter to go on to university after her pregnancy, unlike the thousands of other pregnant teenagers, who face no other choice but to drop out from school and work immediately after giving birth. (Do I hear Murphy Brown cackling in the background?) There are so many ways she and her family are different from the average American family that I think the will be able to discern these come November.

As an attack dog, she did her job well in tearing down Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. She was witty enough in pointing out that her job as a small town mayor is "like a community organizer only with real responsibilities." She had enough sarcasm to put David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart and the entire SNL cast out of their jobs. But let's just make it clear that Palin is actually going head to head with Sen. Joe Biden, a distinguished and well respected member and leader in the U.S. Congress, the Democratic VP candidate who has a string of major legislative accomplishments, and not Obama.

And as a woman, I don't appreciate her trying to pander to the disenfranchised female American voters with her supposed real life soccer mom story. It's just insulting. She never once even mentioned how she was going to address the Middle East conflict (and we all know part of the VP's job is to travel abroad and deal in diplomacies across the globe), nor did she have any real plan about the environment except to echo McCain's desire for alternative fuel sources but she is an advocate of drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge btw.

She mentioned about how Obama was so worried about reading the rights of the Al Qaeda terrorists, but she fails to mention of course the Republican administration's failure to actually go after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. So sure, Palin's a pretty mom with a small town experience as an administrator, but can she sit across the table from the Israelis and its Middle East neighbors to talk peace?
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Many wonder why am I so engrossed in the U.S. elections? Whoever wins in November will impact on our country. Any policy that the U.S. government implements will likely be the direction our own government will mimic. The entire globe is watching the U.S. presidential elections because all our economies are intricately linked with the U.S. economy. We need a strong U.S. economy to boost our own economy...the Americans are still our major buyers, and we need their money. It's a simple as that.

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