Basic Incompetence From McCain

Marc files a dispatch on McCain's minimal vetting of Palin. All you can say from this - regardless of what happens with this Desperate Housewives subplot beginning to play out - is that McCain is more incompetent as an executive than Bush:

As the Palin pick turns 72 hours old, McCain's campaign is learning as much about her from the media and from Democrats as they are from what minimal political preparation they had...

They've bragged that Palin opposed the famous "Bridge to Nowhere,"  only to learn that Palin supported the project and even told residents of Ketchikan that they weren't "nowhere" to her. After the national outcry, she decided to spend the funds allocated to the bridge for something else. Actually, maybe it's more fair to say that coincident with the national outcry, she changed her mind. The story shows her political judgment, but it is not a reformer's credential.

Likewise, though she cut taxes as mayor of Wassila, she raised the sales tax, making her hardly a tax cutter.

She denied pressuring the state's chief of public safety to fire her sister-in-law's husband even though there's mounting evidence that the impetus did indeed come from her.

Ostensibly to clear her name, Palin asked her attorney general to open an independent investigationthe legislature had already been investigating. (I am told that the campaign was aware of the ethics complaint filed against her but accepts Palin's account.)

McCain's campaign seemed unaware that she supported a windfalls profits tax on oil companies and that she is more skeptical about human contributions to global warming than McCain is.

They did not know that she took trips as the mayor of Wasilla to beg for earmarks.

They did not know that she told a television interviewer this summer that she did not fully understand what it is that a vice president does.

     

You know what this pick remind me of? Invading a country with no plans for what to do once you got there.