Judgment Call

Michael Kinsley, writing at Slate.com makes a couple of wonderful points, plus really gets an elbow in, while placing attention on McCain's vice-presidential pick where it belongs: on John McCain and the party he now (nominally) leads. (Emphasis mine.)

In a famous example of ideological flexibility, the American Communist Party changed its mind completely about Adolf Hitler in 1939, when he signed a deal with Stalin. Previously, they hadn't cared for him much. Suddenly, he looked pretty good. Then two years later, when Hitler ratted on the deal and invaded the Soviet Union, the Communists changed their minds again. Both times, it took only days.

But now, thanks to the Internet, the same kind of conversion can take place in hours or even minutes. And although it's hard to find many Communists around these days, we happen to have just the party for the job.

It seems like just yesterday that the Republican Party was complaining about Barack Obama's lack of foreign-policy "experience." As a matter of fact, as I write (on Friday, Aug. 29) it actually was just yesterday.

...

...the important point about Palin's lack of experience isn't about Palin. It's about McCain. And the question is not how his choice of Palin might complicate his ability to use the "experience" issue, or whether he will have to drop experience as an issue. It's not even about the proper role of experience as an issue. In fact, it's not about experience at all. It's about honesty. The question should be whether McCain—and all the other Republicans who have been going on for months about Obama's dangerous lack of foreign policy experience—ever meant a word of it. And the answer is apparently not. Many conservative pundits woke up this very morning fully prepared to harp on Obama's alleged lack of experience for months more. Now they face the choice of either executing a Communist-style U-turn ("Experience? Feh! Who needs it?") or trying to keep a straight face while touting the importance of having been mayor of a town of 9,000 if you later find yourself president of a nation of 300 million.

He said it here.

That's the way you do it. That's where you want to go. In this race as in virtually every other since roughly 1805 it's not about the choice, it's about *who made* the choice. That and what that choice says about the chooser's personal integrity, control over their party or even place in it, judgment, seriousness, or committment to the nation. Going anywhere else, no matter how virtuous or vice-ridden the person *chosen,* distracts from the real question: do you trust someone who makes such choices to run the show?