THE DAILY BLADE: Is Biden Qualified To Be A Heartbeat Away From The Presidency?
In response to the financial crisis on Wall Street, Dem vice presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden told “CBS Evening News” anchor Katie Couric that FDR got it right at the start of the Great Depression: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"
Imagine the derisive and demeaning comments his GOP counterpart Gov. Sarah Palin would have been subjected to if she did not know that Herbert Hoover president when the stock market crashed in the waning days of October 1929 - FDR unseated Hoover three years later – and that FDR’s famous “Fireside Chats” were broadcast on radio as the first commercially licensed TV stations weren’t established until 1941 (in NY and PA).
If AK Gov. Sarah Palin is not qualified to have an office in the West Wing of the White House, then arguably neither is Sen. Barack Obama - given his notable lack of credentials (second item) or foreign policy experience - or Biden - given his performance on the campaign trail thus far.
In a recent op-ed, Cleta Mitchell, a member of the OK House of Representatives from 1976-1984, takes umbrage that the “first question out of the box” Charlie Gibson asks in his interview with Palin is about “the ‘Q’ word” (actually, if you read the transcript, he asks her at least three times whether she is qualified to be veep):
I learned in my second term as a state legislator in 1979 that freshmen male legislators were not deferential to me, but were deferential to my male colleagues elected the same day I was. And I realized that men grant to themselves and each other a certain “credibility” that women have to earn. …
It is offensive for Charlie Gibson to ask that question of Sarah Palin only because neither he nor his colleagues of the "mainstream media" talking heads have ever posed that question to Barack Obama.
While the liberal media demanded to know how on earth Sen. John McCain would select someone of Sarah Palin's “qualifications” for the job that is “one heartbeat away from the presidency,” they never bothered to ask the same question of the person whose heart would actually be beating in the Oval Office on Jan. 21, 2009. …
Many of the questions posed by the liberal media to and about Sarah Palin are illegal in the American workplace to be asked of prospective female job candidates and would get a person asking these questions fired on the spot.
Mitchell believes that “capable women should be compared with their actual male competitors, instead of some elusive ideal” adding: “Sarah Palin has put a face on that male competitor and turned the tables on the claims that Mr. Obama is qualified for the nation's highest office and the leader of the free world.”
Libs Worried “Too Many” Elderly Will Vote
The Chicago Tribune is worried that “the sweet old aunt, the loving grandfather or the generous widow down the street” are “given to flights of shocking prejudice when the conversation turns toward ethnic groups to which they don't belong” and that though thy are “the products of less-enlightened times [and] “unlikely to change” that “prejudice and stereotyping among elderly white Americans in particular may not be so innocuous”:
Older white voters heavily favored Sen. Hillary Clinton over Sen. Barack Obama during the Democratic primary season, and national polls indicate that group now leans toward Sen. John McCain by 10 percentage points or more. …
[F]or very basic physiological reasons related to the aging of their brains, many older citizens may be unable to suppress their prejudicial impulses, whether at the family dinner table or in the privacy of a voting booth.
In other words, Grandma's biased outbursts may not be her fault. And Obama's election strategists may want to schedule more campaign stops at nursing homes. …
Sociologists have found that racial bias pervades the subconscious of most Americans and that the elderly hold more such prejudices than those who are younger.
Weirdly, the article also cites the well-documented Bradley Effect, in which some whites who don’t want to appear racist tell pollsters that they intend to vote for a black candidate but vote for his or her white opponent in the privacy of the voting booth. The thing is, such voters make a conscious decision to be misleading, whereas the elderly are unaware that some of their views are considered prejudiced in this day and age and thus are more likely to be forthright with pollsters – meaning, the Bradley Effect is not applicable to this voting bloc.
In any case, as Jonah Goldberg notes:
[T]he Bradley effect does not reflect racism; it captures voters' fear of appearing racist. There's no reason to assume those who lie to pollsters are the racists. …
The media's obsession with race in this election is, in fact, probably fueling the Bradley effect. Repeating over and over that voting against Obama is racist only encourages non-racist people to be embarrassed to admit that they plan to vote for McCain.
BTW: This article should have been more narrowly focused on older Democrat voters, given the results of a recent Associated Press-Yahoo News poll that revealed as many as one in three white Democrats characterize blacks in negative terms, such as “lazy” or “violent”; 90 percent also believe that blacks are creating some to most of the racial tension in the U.S. The poll found that racial prejudice amongst Dems could cost Obama up to 6 percentage points in November. Goldberg also points out: “[T]he only racists who matter in this election are the ones in the Democratic Party. News flash: Republicans aren't voting for the Democratic nominee because they're Republicans.” You would think this would be obvious, but the MSM is hell-bent on finding a racist under every rock (last item).
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