I'm not here to talk about Sarah Palin. Yep, yep, she's dreadful. I'll leave the fact-checking and the scandals to the experts but the real point is:
She's John McCain's second choice!
Yes, John McCain not only had the bad judgment to pick her but he picked her after he didn't get his first choice-Joe Lieberman.
And I contend that Lieberman says a lot more about his bad judgment than Sarah Palin does.
Joe Lieberman first came to the Senate by defeating progressive Republican(progressive Republican now being a contradiction in terms) with the support of a pac created by William Buckley. Lieberman cast himself as a centrist Democrat but his real party has always been himself.
While in the Senate, Lieberman supported many liberal positions but also began setting himself up as the moral conscience of America culminating in him lecturing President Clinton on the Senate floor during Monica-gate.
Once picked by Gore as a running mate, he did more to subtly sabotage that campaign for his own future viability than he ever did to help Gore. At the same time, by virtue of being selected, he became even more convinced of his moral rectitude and became even more pompous and self-serving. He was one of the first Democrats to sign on to the war in Iraq and chided his own party to support the war. When he rapidly exited the 2004 race for the Democratic nomination, he seemed incredulous than voters weren't as inspired by him as he was by himself.
Fast forward to his 2006 Senate campaign. Lieberman was truly stunned that he had an opponent from his own party and that not all of his colleagues in the Senate were rushing in to campaign for him. Barack Obama did, however, lend support and is now facing the consequences of no good deed going unpunished. Joe Conason has good write up on Lieberman's real record Lieberman-ideological turncoat.
Running against antiwar Democrat Ned Lamont almost two years ago, for instance, he promised Connecticut voters that we were on the cusp of victory in Iraq. "I am confident that the situation is improving enough on the ground that by the end of this year, we will begin to draw down significant numbers of American troops," he said in October 2006, "and by the end of the next year more than half of the troops who are there now will be home." Within weeks after winning that election, of course, Lieberman was joining with Sen. John McCain, his friend and ideological ally, in support of sending 30,000 additional American troops to Iraq -- and bringing exactly none home.
Was he lying when he offered that false but comforting assurance in the heat of a Senate campaign? Was he simply unable to distinguish between reality and his own propaganda? A similar set of questions confronted readers of a Lieberman essay on foreign policy and the Democrats that appeared Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, where we can expect the "independent Democrat" to appear often during the coming months as a turncoat surrogate for McCain -- because today he evidently hopes for appointment as a token Democrat in a Republican Cabinet, or even a second nomination as vice president, on the Republican ticket.
Even after losing, Lieberman still decided his state and country couldn't do without his vision and ran as an independent.
It's my contention that putting someone with Lieberman's delusions on a ticket would be far more risky than a one-term right wing governor of a small state. But it could have given Lieberman the distinction of running on two losing tickets for different parties.