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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

Palin On Obama

By The Daily Dish
Sep 4 2008, 10:54 AM ET

It was a great line:

Listening to [Obama] speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or even a reform, not even in the state senate.

I guess we should thank Matt Scully for inserting the word "major." You can go look at Obama's State Senate legislative record here. And his US Senate record here. At last count, sponsorship of 820 laws in Illinois, and authorship of 152 bills and co-sponsorship of 427 in Washington. The 2007 Ethics Reform bill alone cannot be dismissed as simply non-existent. And since part of Palin's own claim to substance is an ethics reform bill, it seems extremely weird that she should believe that Obama's record is a total zero.



At her first press conference, why not ask her why she said that Obama has never passed a single reform, when he passed the 2007 Ethics Reform, described by many as the most sweeping package of its kind since Watergate. Of course, she doesn't know. She was given this speech. But she should be asked to respond to the question of why she said something patently untrue to the entire country.

But you can see the idea here: to keep equating Palin's experience with Obama's. At one point, Rudy Giuliani claimed that after her first day as governor of Alaska, Palin had more executive experience than Joe Biden and Barack Obama combined. So there's your standard. It's fatuous and stupid. But if you repeat it often enough, it might just work.

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