Commentary
By: Thea Agnew Bemben
According to one Alaskan native, Sarah Palin doesn’t know anything about the problems of most of America. Writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Thea Agnew Bemben says she lived in Alaska her entire life up to last year when she moved to Pittsburgh so her husband could attend medical school. She says when she heard the news that Sarah Paling was running for vice president, "I was so shocked I almost got hit by a bus."
Ms. Bemben knows Wasilla, describing it as tiny, "It basically is a collection of big box stores strung along one of our two major highways (that’s right, we have two major highways in the entire state) surrounded by rural-suburban homesteads."
In Alaska, our politics swirl around oil and gas, hunting and fishing regulations, and where to mine next. The issues that people face here in Pittsburgh — the loss of manufacturing jobs, urban decay, race relations — bear scant resemblance to Alaska’s preoccupations. Not only does Ms. Palin have no international experience (she applied for a passport for the first time a year ago), she has no understanding of the issues that most Americans face.
Today in Alaska, the economy is doing well. State coffers are overflowing with oil royalties and in October every Alaskan man, woman and child will receive a check for more than $3,000 as our share of that wealth. We pay no state income tax, no state sales tax and receive many times more per capita in federal funds than any other state in the union. Sound like life in Pittsburgh? I don’t think so.
While she was mayor, Ms. Palin had a full-time city administrator who ran the city, so I would say her level of "executive experience" is much more limited than she claims.
In the 20 months Ms. Palin has served as governor, her style and record raise further questions about her suitability for national office.
And Ms. Bemben says this choice speaks to John McCain’s character:
By choosing Ms. Palin, John McCain demonstrated that he is cynical about the American public. He is banking on our love of celebrity to distract us from the truth. He believes that by telling us he represents change that we will forget that he has voted with President Bush 90 percent of the time and that his party has controlled both the White House and Congress for most of the last eight years without changing anything for the better.
Read the entire article here at Post-Gazette.com.
