Setting Standards, Trail Blazing

There, it's done, Senator McCain has made his selection and momentarily confounded Senator Obama. This represents a cleverly manipulative teaser. Standards certainly have been set. The United States has finally, grudgingly, torn itself away from the intransigent belief that only a white American male could be considered for president. Here is a momentous occasion; the Democratic party assigning the face-off between the two parties to a black American.

Mind, the choice was between a male and a female; either of which would have tolled the bell of change and maturity in the body politic, and society at large. And just think: Senator Barak Obama had the opportunity to magnanimously select the very woman whose experience and fitness for the office challenged his own lack of experience - though his fitness is still largely an unknown - and fumbled that initiative. If that would not have represented a winning ticket, what would?

Under the circumstances, that is. One supposes that although he desperately needed the support at the Democratic convention of the Clintons to show America that the Democratic party was not divided, he hesitated to fully embrace the prospect of a Clinton running mate. One suspects Senator Obama's flinty-minded spouse had a hand in that decision. Pity that, given statistics that appear to support the realization that the voting public is steadily turning away from the Republican party.

One might also anticipate that the Obamas represent, as did the Clintons before them, a two-for-one deal. It's there, writ large. Michelle Obama's poise and presence has captivated her audience. What had the potential of upsetting that Obama two-for-one, might have been the presence of one-of-each on the ticket and in Congress. The highest glass ceiling that famously produced 18-million shards is now claimed by Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Yet another accomplished and obviously ambitious woman. One who has, in essence, achieved the American Dream. She has it all. On the personal-social side, a woman sufficiently comfortable with her own level of intellectual accomplishment, who did not seek fulfillment and validation through marital partnership with a similarly-endowed man, throwing convention to the winds by marrying a blue-collar worker, an American Inuit.

Beauty: she has it; pioneer skills of hunting and fishing: she has them; competitive sports background: she has it; offspring: she has them in abundance; political ambition: there in spades. Sarah Palin may be seen as a pale reflection of Hilary Clinton in some ways, but she is a true-blue American woman, a super-achiever, an assured and self-possessed woman who brooks no nonsense and sets about righting wrongs.

Her selection marks a stupendous coming of age in America; one party offering a black head of state, the other a female vice-president who might just ascend to head of state. The Republican candidate chose to rebuke and bedevil the choice of the Democratic candidate, who himself carefully chose an elder statesman to fill in the blanks of his own inexperience. On each side lingers raw ambition linked to lacks.

What Sarah Palin also represents is a type of social anathema to more liberal Democrats. Member of the National Rifle Association, and a determined right-to-life advocate, as well as being aghast at the very idea of same-sex marriage. On the plus side, she has no connection with oil conglomerates, she's a fresh new face in Washington, has great popular appeal in her constituents.

As a role model she does not fear facing truths. One unpalatable truth, all too common in the United States, is that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. In a country where a huge demographic of unwed teen mothers exists. One wonders: did the clever, highly intelligent and extremely busy mother forget to teach her daughters abstinence at the same time she taught them to abhor abortion?