“The top two officials coming from different — what Marcos called not political parties but that non-word — political aggrupations? Of course that leads to political chaos!”
by Ducky Paredes
It is too bad that in our country, the vice president and president are chosen separately. This has helped make our politics even more selfish and personality-centered than it, ideally, should be.
Here, a vice president is chosen by the presidential candidate for the votes that he might bring into the team that would help the presidential candidate win. Of course, since the decision is done with only this purpose in mind, the vice presidential candidate will often go off on his own and try to win his own election even at the expense of the party and its presidential candidate.
We have had the spectacle of a president and a vice president being elected from different slates. Diosdado Macapagal won while his president lost; so did Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. The top two officials coming from different — what Marcos called not political parties but that non-word — political aggrupations? Of course that leads to political chaos!
The better system is as they have it in the United States where one votes for the pair; there is no way that one can vote for a president without also voting for his vice president. Thus, the choice of a vice president by the presidential candidate says a lot about what the presidential candidate is thinking and how he thinks he might win the election.
In many ways, the choice of a vice president may be the decision that defines the Presidential candidate.
At this point, it is clear that despite the acrimonious path to the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama, to begin with, had the deeper bench. Any number of Democrats would have been great VPs: Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, among them. If he was pushed and was a bit desperate, he might have gone for Clinton, That he did not do so but, instead, chose as his VP, Senator Joeph Biden, which a television comic compared to “going into a Baskin Robins store and choosing Vanilla,” shows that the Democratic candidate feels that he is leading.
Someone who is leading does not take chances. Picking Hillary or anyone else might have produced a more exciting but potentially rockier, more turbulent campaign. By picking Joe Biden, Obama addressed the effective Republican campaign line on Obama’s lack of experience.
Contrast this to John McCain’s choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. The Wall Street Journal notes: “It’s a daring pick because Mrs. Palin has never faced national scrutiny and hasn’t had to deal with foreign policy. Most VP choices are designed to do no harm, and we tend to agree with the maxim.”
What this tells us about the McCain candidacy is that it sees the race not as a close one – so tight that no one can tell who is winning – but one in which McCain is in a dead heat or behind in most swing states and is in danger of losing some of the states on the Republican side of the ledger. A landslide for Obama is not too far-fetched as a possible occurrence.
(The US election is different from ours in that we count the popular vote – one vote per voter – and they count electoral votes. Electoral votes are given to the states – the larger the population, the more popular votes. Winning a state – even just by a single vote – gives all of its electoral votes to the winner.)
Republican is a bad word to today’s electorate. Palin is not your usual Republican and has fought her party on many issues. Says one Republican: “She’s a fresh new face in a party that’s dying for one — the antidote to boring white men.”
Still, by his choice, McCain may have destroyed his own effective campaign line against Obama as being ‘dangerously inexperienced.”
Because he sees himself as running second, McCain has gambled on “a woman he hardly knows, who hardly knows foreign policy and who can hardly be seen as instantly ready for the presidency,” as one observer puts it.
His choice of Palin may also mean that he is politically conscious of his advanced age. Just as Obama chose an older, more experience white man for his VP, McCain has, in contrast, chosen a woman 28 years younger than he is, who cannot possible have any exposure to issues that have to do with anything outside Alaska. This may also mean that McCain sees himself, at 72, as physically fit, Thus, he is not too worried about his VP having to do the only job of a vice president – that of taking over if the President quits or dies.
Why did he then choose Palin? She is definitely not ready to be President having been elected governor only in 2006, after being mayor of a town of less than 9,000 residents; nor is she someone that McCain really knows. Says a news report: “They met for the first time last February at a National Governors Association meeting in Washington. Then, they spoke again — by phone — on Sunday while she was at the Alaska state fair and he was at home in Arizona.”
The Palin choice shows that McCain is not comfortable with the conservative base of the Republican Party. He needed someone who is an avowed opponent of abortion which Palin is. She was previously scheduled to speak to the Republican National Convention on this very issue.
McCain’s appeal has always been that he is a “maverick.” His choice of a VP was right down this alley but it also shows that McCain is genuinely worried that Obama may well be on track to become the first non-white President of his country,
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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin says that Russia’s troubles with Georgia are all American-inspired and for the weirdest of reasons:
“The American side in fact armed and trained the Georgian army. Why hold years of difficult talks and seek complex compromise solutions in interethnic conflicts? It’s easier to arm one side and push it into the murder of the other side, and it’s over.
“If my guesses are confirmed, then the suspicion is raised that somebody in the United States purposefully created this conflict with the aim of aggravating the situation and creating an advantage for one of the candidates in the battle for the post of U.S. president.”
That sounds to me like the current conspiracy theory that blames the Americans for the MOA on the MILF Homeland! Could the US be doing this also to push for a McCain win?
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hvp 08.31.08)
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