BlogWonks

Steve Chapman tells us that while Joe Biden pretends to have had a blue collar upbringing it’s just not true.

The facts are there for anyone who wants to look at them. When Joe Biden Sr. died in 2002, his obituary in the News-Journal of Wilmington reported that when he married in 1941, “he was working as a sales representative for Amoco Oil Co. in Harrisburg.”

It went on, “Biden also was an executive in a Boston-based company that supplied waterproof sealant for U.S. merchant marine ships built during World War II. After the war, he co-owned an airport and crop-dusting service on Long Island.” Upon moving his family to Delaware, the News-Journal said, Biden “worked in the state first as a sales manager for auto dealerships and later in real-estate condominium sales.”

Executive, co-owner and manager? Those titles identify the jobholder as solidly middle class, if not better. They fall in the category of white-collar occupations, not blue-collar.

And Biden Sr. clearly knew the difference. In his book, “Promises to Keep,” Biden writes that his father was “the most elegantly dressed, perfectly manicured, perfectly tailored car sales manager Wilmington had ever seen.”

Biden notes that he himself could have gone to the best public high school in Delaware. Instead, he enrolled at Archmere Academy, a Catholic prep school that made him think he had “died and gone to Yale.” He took a summer job to help pay the steep tuition, which today amounts to $18,450 a year.

The Obama/Biden ticket keeps getting phonier by the second.

According to the latest Rasmussen poll, the Obamassiah’s bounce is gone, and Obama is now polling the same as prior to the start of the convention.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday—the day before the Republican National Convention is scheduled to begin—shows Barack Obama ahead of John McCain by three percentage points both with and without leaners. That’s exactly the same edge Obama enjoyed a week ago on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.

But wait. It gets much, much  worse from there.

There have been significant changes in perception of John McCain in the two days of polling since he named Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Since then, 49% of Republicans voice a Very Favorable opinion of McCain. That’s up six percentage points from 43% just before the announcement. Also, 64% of unaffiliated voters now give positive reviews to McCain, up ten points since naming his running mate.

There has been little change in perceptions of Obama since his Thursday night speech and the Palin announcement (see trends and other recent demographic observations).

Palin herself made a good first impression and is now viewed favorably by 53% of voters nationwide. Her counterpart, Joe Biden, is viewed favorably by 48%. While Palin has made a good first impression, the more significant numbers will come a week from now after the nation has a chance to learn more about her.

No wonder the Democrats are getting scared. They  keep attacking Sarah Palin, but she keeps   polling  better than their own candidate. But, the real problem here for the Dems is how much better independent voters feel about McCain since he made his VP selection.  Obviously, picking Palin is playing extremely well with the very people that are going to decide this election.

Here’s an installment of Chapin’s INFERNO wherein I outline Joe Biden and his links to pernicious feminism…he is The Scourge of Man. His iron clad connection with totalitarian harridans is yet another, in a multitude, of reasons why voters should reject the Democratic Party this November.

While the Obama supporters are fairly delusional in their thinking that Sarah Palin was a last minute desperation pick in response to their sensational convention, the reality isn’t even close. Sarah Palin has been under consideration for months to be John McCains’s running mate, and was even the front runner for most of that time.

Far from being a last-minute tactical move or a second choice when better known alternatives were eliminated, Palin was very much in McCain’s thinking from the beginning of the selection process, according to McCain’s advisers. The 44-year-old governor made every cut as the first list of candidates assembled last spring was slowly winnowed. The more McCain learned about her, the more attracted he was to her as someone who shared his maverick, anti-establishment instincts.

“He looked at her like a kindred spirit,” said one close adviser, who declined to be identified in order to speak more freely. “Someone who wasn’t afraid to take tough positions.”

Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager and the person at the point of the vice presidential process, said there was no abrupt change of course in the final hours. Nor, he said, was Palin selected without having gone through the full vetting process that was done for other finalists. That process included reviews of financial and other personal data, an FBI background check and considerable discussion among the handful of McCain advisers involved in the deliberations.

“Nobody was vetted less or more than anyone in the final stages, and John had access to all that information and made the decision,” Davis said. “It’s really not much more complicated than that.”

In part to blunt criticism that McCain had pulled a last-minute switch and turned to Palin without all the information he may have needed to make a decision, some of those advisers shared details yesterday about the steps that led to McCain’s choice, mostly on a not-for-attribution basis.

Six people were involved in the secretive deliberations that led to Palin’s selection: McCain; his wife, Cindy; campaign manager Davis; longtime confidant Mark Salter; senior adviser Steve Schmidt; and key strategist Charlie Black. In addition, Washington lawyer A.B. Culvahouse oversaw the vetting.

Starting last spring, the inner circle met regularly with McCain to review and discuss an initial list of about three dozen possible choices. “He and several of us had multiple meetings,” one adviser said. “Discussions, strengths and weaknesses of all the candidates. He asked a lot of questions and listened — didn’t tip his hand to too many of us. He was very insistent that this process often wounds people, and we were to stay very quiet.”

The desperation pick was Obama choosing Joe Biden to add foreign policy experience, even though Biden has been wrong about many major foreign policy issues during his Senate tenure, such as opposing the troop surge in Iraq and favoring splitting Iraq into three different regions rather than having it remain a unified country. Picking Biden demolished Obama’s claim that his campaign was about “change” since Biden’s been in the Senate for 35 years. On the other hand, Palin fosters McCain’s maverick image very well. They are very much complementary, and rather than a desperation choice, Palin was an aggressive choice by a  candidate wanting to play offense rather than defense.

The online site Politico asks four Democratic historians whether Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President, and shockingly, they respond by saying no.

So unconventional was McCain’s choice that it left students of the presidency literally “stunned,” in the words of Joel Goldstein, a St. Louis University law professor and scholar of the vice presidency. “Being governor of a small state for less than two years is not consistent with the normal criteria for determining who’s of presidential caliber,” said Goldstein.

“I think she is the most inexperienced person on a major party ticket in modern history,” said presidential historian Matthew Dallek.

[...]

Palin, on the other hand, is a total “wild card,” said Stanford historian David Kennedy.

If she had been around for two terms as governor — or been a senator — it would have been an incredible choice,” said historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “Who else could he have found who appealed to the conservative base … and as someone who was a reformer?”

As it turns out, Joel Goldstein is an Obama donor, Matthew Dallek is a former speechwriter for former Democratic congressman Richard Gephardt, David Kennedy is an Obama donor, and Doris Kearns Goodwin is  a Democratic Party donor.  This is who Politico asks to comment on Palin’s credentials. I thought Politico was better than that but I guess I was wrong.

But let me reiterate an important  point. Politico is full of crap. Palin has 13 years of executive experience while Obama has none. Sarah Palin is infinitely more experienced than Barack Obama is. The more they harp on the experience question, the deeper the hole the Obama supporters are going to dig for themselves.

Sarah Palin went to Landstuhl  back in 2007, before she was on the national stage. She did it because she cared, not because it would make her look good. Meanwhile, Barack Obama refused to visit our wounded troops, and went to the gym instead.  Barack Obama has no business criticizing Palin for her lack of foreign policy experience when Sarah Palin  obviously has  better judgement on these matters than Obama does.

That as governor of Alaska Sarah Palin has actually been to Iraq as many times as Senator Barack Obama has? I’d say that makes Barack Obama look pretty pathetic as far as foreign policy experience goes, and he might want to keep his arrogant yap closed if he knows what’s good for him.

Kirsten Powers says that by attacking Sarah Palin as viciously as the Democrats are doing, the Democrats  are proving that they are male chauvinists.

SHE’S just a beauty queen.

She’s another Dan Quayle.

And ironically, the biggest criticism of Sarah Palin, John McCain’s veep choice, is she has no experience. Funny, coming from the Barack Obama camp.

Following McCain’s announcement of Palin - the first female to be put on a GOP ticket for the White House, and only the second in US history - the Obama campaign skipped the niceties and blasted her as the “former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience.”

She’s also a governor of Alaska (my home state), the first woman in that office and the youngest elected in state history. She has an 80-plus percent approval rating. She has turned the state upside down with her reformist zeal and has made enemies of the Republican establishment.

And she can talk energy policy, one of the biggest issues facing this country.

Is she a gamble? Definitely. But so is Barack Obama, who has himself dismissed experience as a prerequisite for leadership, despite his spot atop the Democratic ticket.

Sarah Palin is a middle class self made woman who started at the PTA, was elected to the city council, ran for mayor of her town and won, and then was elected governor. She’s obviously an intelligent, driven woman and she’s going to bring in a lot of women voters on Election Day. And that is why the Democrats are falling all over themselves to try to make her out to be a female Dan Quayle.

Between her time as mayor and governor Sarah Palin has 13 years of executive experience while Barack Obama has zero. The Democrats say nominating Palin takes the experience issue off the the table. No, it certainly does not. What it does is point out even more clearly how little experience Barack Obama has. And the foreign policy issue is a nonstarter also, because Obama has virtually no foreign policy experience. And, whatever foreign policy decisions he’s had to make so far (like opposing the troop surge in Iraq) have been dead wrong.

Somebody might need to explain to the idiots at the Associated Press that Alaska is not “a tiny, out of the way state”, but the  largest state in the United States.

In this Dec. 4, 2006 file photo, Todd Palin, right, holds the Bible for his wife, Sarah Palin, as she is sworn in as Alaska’s governor during an inauguration ceremony in Fairbanks, Alaska. As the political community turned desperate for any clues about the potential running mate of Republican Presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., speculation moved toward several dark horse candidates including Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the so-called ‘hockey mom’ credited with reforms of her tiny, out-of-the-way state.

Obviously, the AP is nervous that adding Palin to the ticket will hurt Obama/Biden, so they’re going after Palin themselves. It’s pretty sad really, and it won’t work.