“My Name is Morgan Freeberg and I’m a Sarah Palin Fan”
12th June 2011
Freeberg likes Palin. But we knew that.
Many’s the time I’ve heard a Palin hater say “I don’t have a better candidate in mind, but I’m hoping one will emerge.”
Well, I’m not a ‘Palin hater’, but I do have a better candidate in mind — several, in fact — although none that I can endorse as wholeheartedly as I could Reagan (and, before him, Goldwater). So I could vote for Palin, if she got the nomination; not least because it would cause the sphincter muscles of over a million people to release simultaneously — but that’s more a reflection on me than on her.
I like having former Governors run for President, because the approaches that Governors develop are more directly applicable to the approach needed as President than the approaches that legislators develop, which are in many respects precisely the wrong ones.
Every time we have a former legislator (typically a Senator) get elected President, we wind up with a crappy President. Kennedy, Nixon, the elder Bush, and Obama are the wounds I’ve had to live with, but think it holds true back at least a century. (Yeah, yeah, Lincoln — but I think he would have been a better President if he had been a Governor first; he made a lot of mistakes that people tend to forget because he got some big things right.) This is not to say that having a former Governor as President is any guarantee; the two Roosevelts, Wilson, and (ack, phtooey) Carter testify to that. But at least they know how the standard controls work; Obama could seriously profit from some form of training wheels.
I’m willing to make allowances for somebody with executive experience outside of government, such as Cain — but that isn’t a very large allowance, because an executive outside of government can put programs in place easily, modify them easily, and get rid of them easily if they don’t work out; don’t try that in government (hello, Romneycare).
Most especially, having a track record as a Governor gives a pretty direct indication as to how somebody will do when faced with a decision that needs to be made, and can often save people from making a big mistake, if they’re in the mood to be saved, which isn’t always the case. Unfortunately, it won’t help in situations where the only choices are Dumb and Dumber, which is what we usually get in elections — but it sometimes concentrates the mind during the nomination process.
Sadly, in Rumsfeldian terms, we go to elections with the candidates we have, not the candidates we’d like to have … which is why I don’t put a lot of effort into poking around in the background of potential nominees: Typically sufficient useful knowledge thereof comes out during the campaign to make a reasonable choice. And I’ll spend more time thinking about Palin this time a year from now, because I don’t feel any compelling need to do so before then.
And it’s nice to have True Believers like Freeberg (whose general approach to things is very sound) around to provide drive-by voters such as myself with the materials needed to make a choice.
Oh, my ideal candidate? The movie character typically played by Angelina Jolie (which doesn’t have any connection to the actual Angelina Jolie, of course). Watch SALT or WANTED — or even, God help us, TOMB RAIDER — if you don’t know what I mean.