Legal Commentary

Palin and the Alaska National Guard

By Beldar

Via Rob at The Spyglass, I came across this four-minute video clip about Gov. Sarah Palin's duties ? and her above-and-beyond performance of same ? as commander of the Alaska National Guard. It makes several good points, not only in illuminating the responsibilities that all governors have in directing their states' guard units, but also about how Sarah Palin in particular undertook those responsibilities.

As with Gov. Palin's occasional forays into foreign affairs ? which, as Rob points out, have included "pipeline negotiations involving Canada and fisheries matters in which Canada, Russia, Japan, and South Korea are concerned" ? I don't think her supporters should over-argue her national guard command experiences as foreign affairs/national security credentials. But they're not just nothing, either, and they deserve credit, and respect, for what they are worth.

U.S. senators, including Joe Biden, act as if their membership on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee were equivalent to being Secretary of State or even the President of the United States. That experience is not just nothing, either, but it's mostly back-seat, second- and third-hand, advisory-at-best experience. Being briefed on what the real decision-makers are doing isn't the same as making decisions. Slow Joe Biden may indeed meet with foreign leaders, but they're under no illusions that he can make a phone call and suddenly send a U.S. Navy carrier group, with its several hundred aircraft and soup-to-nuts tactical-to-nuclear capabilities, steaming along their coastlines. And Biden can make reckless suggestions, like splitting Iraq into three parts for its neighbors to devour, without any more consequence than Biden being justly ridiculed as a foreign policy idiot.

In addition to all that senator-type foreign-policy experience ? and more than most, as when he was out in front of the Clinton Administration in leading the normalization of relations with Vietnam ? John McCain has also flown attack aircraft off those carrier decks and commanded the Navy's largest air wing. The GOP ticket is not vulnerable on foreign policy/national security experience overall, and the more the Democrats want to talk about that, the more it will simply highlight how thin Obama's own credentials are.

Obama, after all, is the candidate who chose not to go visit injured troops at Landstuhl. And unlike Gov. Palin, Obama certainly has never arranged for returning national guardsmen, with families that still rely on game to keep food on the table, to get late-season hunting privileges. Indeed, in the unlikely event that it had ever occurred to him that they needed help, Obama would probably have suggested a new federal program to supply them with processed foods ? when all they really needed was for government to get out from between them and their game animals. And there endeth the lesson for today.

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on September 07, 2008 (boomark / email).