Thursday, September 4, 2008

Keeping track of hypocrisy

There's a lot out there to keep straight:
  • "And [Sarah Palin] already has more executive experience than the entire Democratic ticket." -Rudy Giuliani, RNC speech. The hypocrisy: By this reasoning, she also has more executive experience than John McCain. So however negatively this charge is meant to reflect on the Democrats, it cross-applies to McCain with equal measure.
  • "Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency." -The Obama campaign. The hypocrisy: Obama himself has "zero foreign policy experience" as well. In fact, during the primary he labored to make the distinction between having experience and having good judgment, arguing that having the one does not guarantee the other and vice versa. If the Obama campaign wants to attack Palin, it cannot be for her lack of experience per se; the campaign will have to show that Palin has demonstrated poor judgment in specific instances.
  • Any accusation by McCain that Obama is too inexperienced to sit in the Oval Office. The hypocrisy: If McCain thinks that having lots of experience is a necessary condition for occupying the White House, then he undermines this by choosing as his vice-president someone who is very inexperienced (Palin was mayor of a small town and then governor of a non-populous state for two years). If McCain tries to wriggle out of this by claiming that Palin is indeed qualified because she--unlike Obama--has executive experience, then he implies that he himself might not be qualified, because he has no executive experience. The only way for McCain to navigate out of the thicket would be to maintain that either having lots of legislative experience or a small amount of executive experience is necessary for being president, but that having a small amount of legislative experience doesn't cut it.
  • Any acknowledgment by the Bush administration that John McCain was tortured in Vietnam. The hypocrisy: the terrible things done to McCain as a POW are precisely the same things that the Bush administration ordered done to detainees in Guantanamo Bay--and are the same things, it is worth mentioning, that McCain himself believes the CIA ought to be able to carry out. Andrew Sullivan makes the argument.

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