Choosing Youth and Charisma Over Experience: What Palin and Obama Reveal

Coming this November: Candidates compete for America's top male and female spokesmodel, whose duties also happen to include being president of a very influential nation. Since it has turned into a popularity contest where issues hardly matter, rather than considering Hollywood actors and celebrities opinions irrelevant, perhaps we should take note. So, Matt Damon and Whoopi Goldberg, your views do matter after all. It is clear that better qualified candidates, like Hilary Clinton, and my personal favorite, Ron Paul, have lost in the primaries, perhaps because they were not in the running for cutest smile.

Both Obama and McCain have chosen VPs that shout "compensating." Obama chose Biden because he has the necessary experience that Obama lacks. Palin was a desperate attempt to grasp voters who are swayed by Obama because they are tired of the status quo and like to feel inspired. But we are left with the choice of electing a president who is inexperienced, or another who was scrabbling to stay in the race to the point that he resorted to running with a mirror image of Obama. Ms. Palin is a similarly inexperienced fresh younger face wth crowd-pleasing appeal. She also happens to be a woman. Whatever criticisms are leveled at Palin should be applied to Obama measure for measure. Yet what this latest campaign trail has shown us is how deep ageism, racism, and sexism run in this country.

Maybe Sarah Palin would make a good VP or eventual president. Or maybe not. Those who label and dismiss her as a vicious "hockey mom" may never know. She was not given the time to develop into the kind of leader she should and perhaps could become.

Obama was not afforded any time to prove himself either before he catapulted into the spotlight. One elected to the Senate, TIME magazine was already positioning him on the cover as "Our Next President?" Journalists are supposed to cover the news, but much like judicial activists who overstep their bounds, some journalists and editors seem to prefer creating reality rather than submitting to it. And Sarah Palin's popularity, I believe, is partly a backlash against what many perceive to be bias in the media favoring Obama.

Why do more people vote for the TV Americal Idol than in a Presidential election? Laziness, sure. But I believe it also has a lot to do with the choice of candidates people are left with in the end. Who wants to vote between two very wishy washy contenders hungry for power? If Senator Obama can vote "present", when I get my ballot in November it seem that I should be able to write in "neither."