Because I Value Families I Will Not Vote for McCain/Palin

On the same night that Barack Obama rocked a football stadium with earnestness and hope to close out the Democratic Convention, John McCain finally announced who he had chsen as a running mate. It wasn't Kaye BaileyHutchison, or Chuck Hagel or Joe Lieberman, it wasn't even the darling of the moment, Bobby Jindal. Instead he chose the first term Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. As the five gentlemen watching Fox News with me the following evening kept commenting as footage of Palin shooting an automatic weapon, or in her younger days as a pageant contestant, swept across the screen, the consensus was that she's hot. She also seemed poised and extremely articulate in her acceptance speech standing next to the aging Senator and presidential candidate. And she must be pretty tough to have taken out an incumbent Republican Governor in a primary and a former Democratic Governor in a general election, so I do not discount her political acumen.

But, if my concerns for more than a year now about whether Barack Obama really has what it takes to follow through on his promises and his vision for a more unified America and of a kinder, gentler nation back on its economic feet, still remain unresolved, my antenna really went up when I saw the oldest presidential candidate in history standing next to someone with two years experience running a state of less than a million people and who previously had only run a very small town. The questions I had asked myself over and over again about whether basic intelligence and competence are enough to overcome lack of international experience really rained down upon me as I watched Sarah Palin, a self-avowed hockey mom from the far north. My closest friend told me that as long as McCain was healthy for a year Palin would learn on the job and acquire all the experience she needed to stand just a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Just as I looked at Joe Biden (my pick would have been William Cohen), whose policies I don't necessarily agree with, but whose experience and abilities I do not question, and decided Obama had chosen someone whose counsel he would share and who stood ready to become president should the unthinkable happen, so too did I look at Sarah Palin (my pick would have been Hutchison). I felt very strongly, her personal character and personal abilities aside, that if Palin had been a man (say, Jindal) the cry would have been that she wasn't experienced enough and really this was McCain going it alone as usual. I found that ironic, or maybe not since what so many disliked about Hillary Clinton was perhaps the force of her drive and the aggressiveness of her abilities. Yes, Palin hunts, fishes and plays the clarinet. She runs the state while her husband works for BP. But, she also is raising five children, the last of whom, a baby yet, will have lifelong special needs. To me, running Alaska in that situation is job enough, even given the reality Palin is obviously a multi-tasker.

I kept thinking there must be more to the Palin choice than I was seeing. Yes, she solidifies the Republican base with two words alone - 'pro-life', and she helps with religious conservatives even more given the size of her family, the fact her 18 year old son isn't bound for college but is deployed to the middle east, and the fact her younger son has Down's syndrome. I heard from many how marvelous it was that Palin, knowing she would give birth to a developmentally disabled child, chose to have him anyway. Honestly, I don't personally know anyone who upon finding out their child would be born with Down's Syndrome opted not to have that child, especially not people already in their 40s and who already have other children. I am a devout Catholic. I grew up in a era when almost every other large Catholic family had a child with Down's syndrome - either because we had so many children so close together or because our parents continued having children later in life. And I have friends with children who are developmentally disabled, and gave birth to my own youngest child against very long odds for our mutual survival. The reality with abortion is, most women or girls who have abortions do so because they do not want a child, period - because of mental, financial, substance abuse reasons, because of selfishness at times I imagine, because of being in abusive relationships or marriages, or because they were raped or were the victims of incest. Even the devout Catholic couple I knew many years ago who found out through genetic testing at 16 weeks that their child had severe anacephaly and would not live more than a few minutes if indeed he survived to full term, did not make a choice to terminate a pregnancy lightly. Nature had already made a determination about their child and they were told of the myriad threats still posed to the mother by progressing with a doomed pregnancy. They would have welcomed a healthy child, a disabled child, a child who would have had some quality of life, because that is the dice we all roll when we decide to have children, but a child who would not survive a pregnancy or who would expire at birth with no hope of survival was more than they could bear.

So, back to McCain-Palin and the myth of 'family values' in America. Mr. McCain is not the first divorced person to run for President. He is not the first husband to have been unfaithful to a wife, especially in politics. He has a rough history and politically, until the last six years or so, he remained an outsider with no shot at a Republican nomination as the party continued to march to the right. He is not the darling of the family values contingent that throws its weight around and say you cannot get elected without it. He is 72 years old and most of the more seasoned people he could have chosen, people who would be fully capable of taking over the office of the president, as well they should be to run for vice president, were just too old. They were younger than McCain (except Liddy Dole), but not young enough. Some of them, God forbid, were pro-choice, which does not mean they endorse abortion. But, that's a poison pill and McCain was not about to take a poison pill.

Sarah Palin is pro-life, and as she said herself, she favors teaching abstinence until marriage in schools in lieu of sex education. She does not favor gay marriage but supports gay rights, as some of her best friends are gay (yes, even in Alaska). She has five children, the last one born less than a year ago, while she was in office, and who will need a lot of her time and her husband's time. And now we know her seventeen year old daughter is pregnant, five months pregnant. Palin and her husband support and love their daughter. And John McCain knew about the teenager's pregnancy before he asked Palin to be on the ticket. Obvously, why would Palin hide something that is already pretty obvious?

So, McCain knew he had chosen someone with very little experience, but who is 'hot' and would make the Republican ticket every bit as historic as the Democratic ticket this time around. He knew he chose someone with all the right pro-life attributes, right down to having a late in life child with disabilities. He chose someone whose young son is serving in an unpopular war (maybe deflating some debate material since families are clearly off-limits to Mr. Obama). And he chose someone whose teenaged daughter is pregnant. That had to be part of the calculus. I hate to say it, but anyone who knows anything about politics knows it is true. McCain knew she had a pregnant teenaged daughter and saw some advantage in that.

Sarah Palin's daughter, Bristol, is, like roughly 1/3 of unmarried women under the age of 21 in America, pregnant. Like 80% of those women, it is most likely her pregnancy was unplanned. America has an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases among teens and an epidemic of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. Many of these STDS and pregnancies happen to young people whose parents are stridently pro-life and stridently abstinence oriented. Clearly, though we allegedly have a near pro-life majority in this country, we have the most sexually active teen population in our modern history, and a boom of unwanted babies.

What is John McCain trying to say with this choice? This is a woman who already has her hands more than full not only with running a state weaning itself from ear marks and special interest politics that it sorely needed economically and which sits upon the Holy Grail of energy self-reliance in its untapped artic refuge, but also with a large family. Was her choice also a definitive geographic push, since obviously there are perconal and public complications in her life right now. I wonder about McCain's judgment and I wonder about Sarah Palin's judgment in making this choice at this time. I am sorry, but right now Sarah Palin's family needs her more than America needs her. I mean her no disrepect. I am certain she has a lot to offer. But until November her life is going to be non-stop campaigning all over the country, part time governing in Alaska, and virtually no time for her husband and children. Her 17 year old is going to have a baby in December, and I was very disappointed to hear that the child, who is beginning her senior year of high school, intends to marry the baby's father and that the parents support this. They need some huddle time. This child has already stepped outside of childhood once and is about to become a parent. Do they also want to rush her into marriage at that age? What does that say about how they really value families?

I don't know the Palins. I don't know their 17 year old or her boyfriend. But, I have an 18 year old daughter who has a long time boyfriend. I have maintained a candid dialogue with my oldest daughter about birth control, about abstaining from sex at least until she was out of high school, until she was an adult ready to make some adult decisions - at the very least. We agreed on this, but we also discussed birth control and the very real consequences of being sexually active. Good thing, because two days after she graduated high school and more than a month before she turned 18, I found a used condom in the toilet bowl of her bathroom. She cried and told me she just couldn't wait any more, they were in love. But, she is leaving for college out of state and her boyfriend is about to start school as well. They recognize their lives may diverge, although at this point they do everything they can to ensure they won't diverge. Because, as young as they are and as much as they know about love at their very tender ages, they think this is for keeps. Maybe Bristol Palin thinks her relationship is for keeps too. It may even be possible that like a lot of young girls, especially those who live in small towns in cold places, somewhere at the back of her mind she thought this was her ticket to adulthood, to purpose, to unconditional love. Kids at that age don't always think things all the way through. At that point parents should step in and parent. It doesn't end just because our kids turn 18 and go off to the military or to college, or because they get pregnant or their girlfriends get pregnant. We stand much farther down the road of life than they do. We've been in their shoes. We knew kids who married in high school or right out of high school and we can count on one hand in most cases the ones in those situations who are still married. So do we stand on principle in cases like these, because we've always stood for waiting for marriage, and tell our kids once we find out they'r having sex or are pregnant that they have to get married?

Again, I don't know the Palins and I don't know their circumstances, but if I were in Sarah Palin's shoes and I had this little baby who needed me and this teenaged daughter going through a world of change and about to make me a grandmother, and John McCain came to me and told me I represent everything he needs to get elected and move America forward, I would have told him my family needed me more. Honestly. If we value families, we put in the time they need. We don't go out on the trail to save America when things are falling apart at home or just when things at home really need a center. I'm not sure how I feel about someone who would readily marry off her 17 year old into a world of adulthood she is most likely not one bit ready to take on. Again, I grew up amidst a group of large, deeply religious families. I had a baby nephew sharing a room with me for a while as his mother tried to move on to adulthood. My friend Connie also had a nephew like that. One of my aunts raised her oldest grandchild as her youngest child because she didn't want her daughter's whole life to be shaped by a teenaged moment of abandon. And two girls I went to high school with gave up children for adoption, while a few others raised their kids and one got married in our senior year. Of course, in her case, looking down the road she wasn't taking anything on that her own parents hadn't taken on and she didn't have a lot of opportunities. Her husband was a few years older, able to support her, and she loved the idea of her child long before she met him and fell in love with him at first sight.

So, maybe on the one hand the Palins are saying that even kids with lots of opportunity, whose parents have achieved a great deal, can start life out as teen parents, marry while in high school and make a go of life. Maybe so many families out there, voting families, are facing the same sorts of tough decisions. Maybe John McCain saw something I didn't - political opportunity. What I see is a family that could use a little privacy. I see a pregnant teen who probably wants to be anywhere except on a dais hiding her growing belly behind the baby brother she holds on her lap. What I see is people who promote family values but who may not realize they aren't projecting to us that they value their own families as much as they should. Honestly, a 72 year old man who has six of his own children maybe could have offered some fatherly advice to Sarah Palin, since he is old enough to be her father and then some, and said - wait it out, your time will come - concentrate on your family right now and America will get taken care of one way or the other.

Instead what Mr. McCain did is toss a very marginally qualified woman at us and he has painted her as the traditional mother with something extra - the lady who can run the household and the state house . Instead of seeing that personally this probably wasn't her moment and the choice he was making might adversely impact her family for the rest of their lives, hastening cosmetic decisions they might otherwise have put much more thought into and eventually chosen differently about in time, he saw an opportunity. This woman not only chose life for her baby son, but her daughter is choosing not just life for her unborn child, but also marriage and will take on traditional family values herself before she is even able to vote.

I can't vote for John McCain and I can't vote for Sarah Palin. I am being judgmental and I know it. I value my family more than anything in the world and I work very, very hard in a relatively high profile career that involves public service. When my middle child fell ill with heart disease and anorexia nearly two years ago, I put my work life on hold. My family came first. It meant my profile slipped. It meant we didn't make as much money as we otherwise would have made, but there was no way I could spend four or five days a week at out of town hospitals with my daughter, could have cared for my other children and worked as a unit with my ex-husband and his wife, if I had taken on more. I kept my job and my ability to support my family, but I was in neutral professionally because I value my family. I know I will not get one day back. My children know there are times when work has to come first, when obligations have to be met. But they also know that when they need me, I am here and they are my first priority. My oldest is off to college. She is focused on her future and secure in her past. She is not pregnant and she accepted the limits we set once we found out she'd made personal choices we wish she hadn't. I respect her privacy and she trusts my counsel, and she knows there are rules in our home that cannot be broken and that they are there for a reason. I know this could have been a different story if her dad and I hadn't worked together as parents and if we all hadn't weathered two very difficult years with her sister's illness that left all of the other children feeling a little cheated at times. I also know that no matter how much you love your kids and how good and consistent an example you set for them, they are young and they are prone to errors in judgment. They just aren't fully formed and they live in a society that focuses on the individual, on sexuality, and on the moment. It keeps them immature in ways previous generations haven't been kept immature at the same time it catapults them into a realm that is too adult for them to manage. I don't believe there are many 17 year olds out there who are ready for marriage and family, and the few who are ready will need a lot of familial support. Pregnant teens do not need their parents to run off and campaign for the vice presidency. I am sure this was a tough choice for Sarah Palin, but, mother to mother, I know she won't get any of these moments back, and I think she made the wrong choice. More than that, I feel like John McCain knowingly led her down this path for his own sake, not for the sake of the country. I don't think he thought about her family and what they need, and if he can't think about the families of people close to him with any real vision, how can I expect him to have all of our families' interests at heart?

Maybe what my friend said about a vice president learning all the important things on the job in about a year's time is true. If so there are so many other capable people out there with the drive and ambition to be vice president. The fact that John McCain chose none of them and that he did choose an already overburdened parent who also lacked national and international experience says he really thinks he can run this country on his own and Sarah Palin is window dressing.

She's not window dressing, she's a real person and I think she should stay in Alaska, run her state as best she sees fit, and spend time with a family that needs her very much. I believe she is very accomplished. I believe she is probably undervalued by Mr. McCain and he somehow conveys that undervaluing to the right wing of the Republican party as a way to remind them she is no threat. If she's window dressing, more or less, if she's been chosen to appease a vocal wing of the party that is largely out of touch with really valuing families, all the more reason to step back and choose her own family first. Women can sometimes do what some men lack the courage to do, take a step back and set personal ambition aside. And I have to say in this time and place I am much more comfortable supporting Barack Obama and Joe Biden, men who have demonstrated how much they value their own families and people who are at places in their lives where they can devote their considerable capabilities to governing this nation. I don't doubt that John McCain can devote his capabilities to governing, but I question his judgment at this point, and I don't doubt that Sarah Palin could devote her considerable capabilities to governing - but I don't think she should right now.