Republican candidate for Vice President Sarah Palin's history and public policy comprehension deficiency is yet another example of conservatives demonstrating their ignorance regarding the salient issues of our time.
For years, conservatives have scoffed at and attempted to belittle accomplished scholars of higher education institutions. They like to use loaded words like 'elitist' to insult anyone who dares to demonstrate a firm grasp of the knowledge necessary to speak intelligently on issues that have a very real impact on the lives of countless millions of Americans and billions of others around the world. They have dared to insinuate that an educated, intelligent person cannot possibly relate to the working-class, rust-belt citizens who cannot afford to send their children to college (where, presumably, they would become educated) or provide health care in case of illness or emergency.
Led by their overstuffed cronies in talk radio i.e. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, conservatives in America have continued t beat the 'elitist' drum in an attempt to disparage educated policymakers at every turn. However, with their own party's future on the line, conservatives have championed someone who represents their own views on the value of higher education - and in the process, they have demonstrated precisely why a lack of education and comprehension of the public policy issues facing this country makes a party and its ticket patently unqualified to run this country for the next four years.
New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch wrote a piece on May 12, 2008 regarding the 'elitist' tag that was being placed on Democratic Party Presidential Nominee Barack Obama at the time. He wrote:
Columbia- and Harvard-educated, bad-bowling Obama is an elite, the conservatives - and the Clintons - claim. He is out of touch with the working class, they say. It has become commonplace for the predictable millionaire puppets of Fox News and their conservative talk radio counterparts to present themselves as the voices of the working class in combat with an educated elite from places like Harvard. But beneath those cliches fester ideas that are deeply anti-democratic. They are anti-democratic because they scoff at this basic truth: Education is the key to social mobility in our country. The stereotyped working class has no innate limits. It has produced the majority of doctors, engineers, architects, educators and others who realized the dreams of their families by studying hard and moving into careers quite different from those of their parents and their neighbors.
Stanley Crouch hit the nail on the head with his identification of the doors that higher education can open - but the usefulness of an educated mind steps further into personal congruence with the ideals that define who you are, what you stand for, and how you will approach crises like the financial mess our country finds itself in right now. Making policy judgments sans a deep and thorough understanding of both the history of and present state of political, social, judicial, and foreign issues is both counterproductive and destructive to the possibility of solutions to what ails our republic.
This is why the American public should not look at Palin's diatribe about Putin rearing his head, her inability to cite a single Supreme Court decision save Roe v. Wade, or her predilection toward avoiding periodicals/magazines/newspapers should not be the source of amusement, but rather deep concern that leads to her rejection as a candidate along with the ticket that she represents. This is a time for calm, educated, and reasoned leaders with specific public policy solutions based on intelligence and prudence rather than folksy, rambling, uneducated, and ignorant approaches that rely on 'gut feelings' or 'looking into someone's soul'.
This election isn't just about competing ideologies or differences of opinion. It is also about who is most qualified to lead this nation by virtue of having the requisite knowledge and comprehension of the issues that face the next administration to successfully lead the people moving forward. Candidates who are uneducated and lack intelligence regarding specifics of the economy, foreign policy, and the history and importance of the Supreme Court in our democracy are unequivocally unqualified to lead a nation that depends on their judgment. Both tickets have distinctly different levels of these qualities. The Obama-Biden ticket displays education, intelligence, and reason as a means to govern. Ultimately, the voting public must decide whether they want intelligence or ignorance as the overriding characteristic of the next administration.
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