Apparently, Sarah Palin said that she is being attacked because the press is not comfortable with the idea of a hard working average American in the White House. Conservatives apparently believe that the attacks on Palin’s qualifications means that “elitists” and liberals no longer believe in the notion that anyone can grow up to be (Vice) President. But they are getting that entirely wrong. Sarah Palin is no more qualified to be Vice President than I am qualified to be the starting center for the Blackhawks. Stating the simple fact that Palin is not qualified is not an attack on egalitarianism or the American ideal that anyone can one day achieve their dreams. The key word, the word that conservatives seem to be forgetting, is "achieve".
To achieve something is not the same thing as having it handed to you on a silver platter. People who achieve things work for them. They study hard. They train constantly. They strive to become experts in the subject matter of their chosen profession, whether that means new software design, opposing defenses, or the intricacies of foreign and domestic policy. They try to earn their positions through their hard work and diligence. When we say any child in American can grow up to be the President, we do not mean that just anyone randomly chosen off the street would be suitable for the job. We mean that any child who works hard to earn the position will not be kept from that position because of the race, their sex, their economic status. Sarah Palin has not done that work.
It is clear from her interviews that she knows nothing about policy, politics, foreign policy or the law. It is abundantly clear that she has made no effort to learn about the tings that one should know if they are to lead the country. When people criticize her for those obvious failings they are not attacking the notion of hard working Americans rising to national leadership. They couldn't be because Sarah Palin gives no indication of being a hard working anything. Someone who worked hard for the Vice Presidency would be able to explain the Bush Doctrine. Someone who worked hard for the Vice Presidency would be able to name and explain Supreme Court decisions. Someone who worked hard for the Vice Presidency would be able to talk coherently about the economic crisis and the bailout packages proposals. Sarah Palin can obviously do none of that. Just as obviously, she doesn’t think she needs to. It appears that she believes a few culture war talking appoints and some “rustic” moose-hunting charm should be enough.
I am a hard working American. I spent years working every crap job I could get my hands on to pay for college. I worked in steel mills and picked crops. I wrestled pallets off of semis in the middle of the night and went to class the next morning. I answered phones, I cleaned bathrooms, I dealt blackjack for ten hours then took classes for the next eight. I put in sixty hour weeks to push new product out the door and persevered through personal economic disaster, new jobs, marriage, and the birth of two children in order to finish my degree. And I am hardly alone in this; I know people who have had much harder routes to where they are than I am. My family always helped as much as they could and no one ever turned me away from a job because I had the wrong color skin or the wrong set of chromosomes. And it infuriates me to hear Sarah Palin, a women whose has obviously not worked nearly that hard to be Vice President, to compare herself to everyone else in this country that has struggled and sweat and bled to get where they are today. When Sarah Palin says that she is a hard working American, she is simply trying to pretend that the act of the reaching out and picking the post off the silver platter it was presented to her on is the same thing as hard work. It's not, and I and the rest of the hard working Americans out there are not stupid enough to believe otherwise.