Again I reiterate: if Barack Obama were in a presidential contest with John McCain, sans any additional connector, Obama would win.  We now have various political chattering class members who have said the same thing in explaining why the Sarah Palin choice was a necessary risk.  (And, any rate, it is not as if a Tim Pawlenty offers a whole giant grasp of policy mechinitions.)  The added bizarre item is that Barack Obama would crush candidate Sarah Palin in a presidential contest.  I do not even think this is worth arguring.  But somehow John McCain / Sarah Palin has given John McCain’s campaign a new lease on life — McCain lives to fight another day… which may or may not be when Sarah Palin debates Joseph Biden, though here — to the extent that in a presidential contest everyone ends up becoming oddly enough a part of the campaign — one has to maintain Palin to the highest of standards with which to meet.  (Frankly she should really not be allowed to be plopped back to Alaska so as to be coached on what her views on foreign affairs are, and to squelch remaining Alaskan affairs, without a political price.)

So it is that Obama gets to contest a McCain and a Palin, constantly measured against them.  So we get to argure against Sarah Palin’s assertion of “experience”.  I frankly wish our Democratic presidential candidate had a bit more seasoning, but nothing is perfect here.  Palin chimed in with this memorable line.:

“A small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”

In a previous epoch any Republican partisan would have balked at the experience of a “small time mayor” — cue Karl Rove.  But, here again I reiterate a more proper line of comparing the careers of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.

Barack Obama’s editor of the Harvard Law Review versus Sarah Palin’s Miss Wasilla Pageant victory
Barack Obama’s Civil Rights Attorney career versus Sarah Palin’s Sports Anchor stint
Barack Obama’s “Community Organizing” versus Sarah Palin’s PTA
Barack Obama’s Illinois State Senate tenure versus Sarah Palin’s Wasilla Mayorship
Barack Obama’s US Senate seat from Illinois versus Sarah Palin’s Alaska Governorship

I tend to think this is a more proper guideline.  There are a few items floating in both of their resumes that need to be plugged.  Plucked directly from wikipedia, which by necessity is going to tend toward the bland and is unable to state forthrightly various controversies which now swirl around her: 

Palin chaired the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, while also serving as Ethics Supervisor of the commission.   Obama:  taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years

Obama also wrote one memoir (I don’t think his second book — campaign directed material, sort of similar in purpose to the “Sarah” biography — really should count as “writing”) — not the “two memoirs” mocked by Ms. Palin.

This lining up is meant to, I suppose be-little Palin a tad (Sports Anchor verus Editor of Harvard Law Review), but also basically to realign Palin’s implication of “Community Organizer”.  Which is sort of like being a member of the PTA, except with different racial overtones to be exploited.  From this alignment we can appreciate what they did or did not do in each part of the career.  For instance, I have seen some “Libertarian Cases for Palin”, which strikes me as a bit of a joke — for one thing, Palin’s not the presidential candidate, for another thing [I’ll go ahead and squirt past some comments on “Libertarianism” for the moment] — for a Wasilla mayorship which plucked as much federal expenditures as it could and for an Alaska which is takes more federal expenditures from the budget than any other state.  We sort of need to get the careers aligned to get at it.

As for Obama’s “Community Organizing”, I need to re-read the Weekly Standard’s hit-piece about that tenure from a few months’ back.  It was a critical piece, but a critical piece which lead me to a higher opinion of Obama, because their ideological complaints misfired.  For instance, the article suggested a bit of Obama campaign padding in stating that he “stood up to” developers in a contentious fight to get rid of Asbestos in some low income housing.  The Weekly Standard suggested that they were more than acceptible to the complaint, and quite willingly followed Obama’s request to remove it.  Which, if true, actually fits right into Obama’s Kumbaya rhetoric — the Asbestos was removed, the quality of life for the poor residents of that housing development moderately rose — and Obama brought it to fruition.  By comparison, he worked with Lugar in his US Senate career to deal with the problem of loose nukes, which was a bill that received — as Obama’s critics point out — either unanimous or near unanimous support.  Both matters seem to bring us to a more fruitful position, ?no?   The article went on to comment that Obama really didn’t accomplish the task of getting people out of the place, which was a matter that stymied me when I read it — unless the writer and editor of the Weekly Standard had some Utopian Vision which is at odds with the very definition of “Conservative” — and, which frankly I think what is called Liberal in American politics has (largely for the good, really) abandoned somewhere in the haze of the late 1960s or 1970s.  But their vision of that “Community Organizing” hints at a sinister “pimp daddy” to some poor folk — Asbestos or no Asbestos, Obama would then grind them into a Political Machine, Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed style.

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