And the Moon Is Made of Green Cheese

McCain is launching an ad campaign with the theme that Alaska governor Sarah Palin is “more qualified than Obama” to be president of the United States:

The campaign announced: “The McCain campaign will launch a television ad directly comparing Gov. Palin’s executive experience as a governor who oversees 24,000 state employees, 14 statewide cabinet agencies and a $ 10 billion budget to Barack Obama’s experience as a one-term junior senator from Illinois.”

Obviously, the claim is absurd on its face; that said, look at how McCain’s use of language aids the absurdity. He leaves out the fact that Palin is also in her first term. He uses the adjective “junior” instead of “U.S.” to describe Obama, thus downplaying the fact that Obama has national experience while Palin has none. And he omits both Palin’s experience before being elected governor (mayor of Wasilla, a tiny town in Alaska where she was born and raised), and Obama’s experience before being elected U.S. senator (he served two full terms as Illinois state senator, and part of a third, resigning from his third term after he was elected to the U.S. Senate).

The above is not the full extent of Obama’s relevant experience:

…Once elected, Obama gained bipartisan support for legislation reforming ethics and health care laws.^[28] He sponsored a law increasing tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for childcare.^[29] In 2001, as co-chairman of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, Obama supported Republican Governor Ryan’s payday loan regulations and predatory mortgage lending regulations aimed at averting home foreclosures,^[30] and in 2003, Obama sponsored and led unanimous, bipartisan passage of legislation to monitor racial profiling by requiring police to record the race of drivers they detained and legislation making Illinois the first state to mandate videotaping of homicide interrogations.^[29][31]

Obama was reelected to the Illinois Senate in 1998, and again in 2002.^[32] In 2000, he lost a Democratic primary run for the U.S. House of Representatives to four-term incumbent Bobby Rush by a margin of two to one.^[33][34]

In January 2003, Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee when Democrats, after a decade in the minority, regained a majority.^[35] During his 2004 general election campaign for U.S. Senate, police representatives credited Obama for his active engagement with police organizations in enacting death penalty reforms.^[36] Obama resigned from the Illinois Senate in November 2004 following his election to the US Senate.^[37]

The answer to who is more qualified to be president isn’t even open to question. It isn’t arguable. Obviously, McCain will argue the point anyway, but that doesn’t make it a matter of opinion, any more than the roundness of the earth is a matter of opinion, regardless of how much “evidence” some folks present to prove that it’s flat.

One Response to “And the Moon Is Made of Green Cheese”

1. gcotharn says:

   September 3, 2008 at 2:54 pm

   Barack’s claimed Illinois Senate legislative achievements were aided by a wizard behind the curtain. Todd Spivak:

   Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama’s. He became Obama’s ­kingmaker.

   Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio ­program.

   I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

   “He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.'”

   “Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

   “Barack Obama.”

   Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

   “I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen,” State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. “Barack didn’t have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.

   “I don’t consider it bill jacking,” Hendon told me. “But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book.”

   During his seventh and final year in the state Senate, Obama’s stats soared. He sponsored a whopping 26 bills passed into law — including many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as inexperienced.

   A specific example of legislation given to Barack on the very day of it’s passage, from David Freddoso:

   Five months after the ethics bill was introduced, and more than one month after it reached the senate, Obama was invited by Emil Jones to become its chief Democratic cosponsor. As David Mendell writes in Obama: From Promise to Power, former Rep. Abner Mikva convinced Jones to let Obama handle the legislation. Sen. Dick Klemm (D.) was removed as chief cosponsor and replaced by Obama on May 22, 1998 — the very day the bill passed.

   CBSNews.com:

   When Democrats took control of the state Senate, Jones, though he risked offending colleagues who had toiled futilely on key issues under Republican rule, tapped Obama to take the lead on high-profile legislative initiatives that he now boasts about in his presidential campaign.
   […]
   State Sen. Donne Trotter, D-Chicago, laughingly accuses Jones of a little “bill-jacking” – taking issues that other senators had been working on and giving them to Obama.

   Reply