Getting to know Palin - is 66 days long enough?

Like so many Americans, I was more surprised than critical when Arizona Sen. John McCainJohn McCain selected Alaska Gov. Sarah PalinSarah Palin to be his running mate on the GOP presidential ticket. At the time, I didn’t know enough about her to know what I would or wouldn’t be criticizing. What struck me then about the choice was how few Americans knew who she was. Surely, I thought, citizens will demand not just one but several closer looks before Election Day.

After all, another recent face on the American political scene, Democratic nominee Sen. Barack ObamaBarack Obama, was a relative unknown quantity until his nationally televised keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention speech in Boston. Then a Senate candidate from Illinois, Obama spoke eloquently about the United States as a beacon of freedom and opportunity, not unlike the “shining city on a hill” Ronald ReaganRonald Reagan spoke of in his farewell address to the nation in 1989.

But despite the inspirational message he delivered at the’04 convention, people were understandably skeptical of Obama’s presidential ambitions when he announced them in the spring of 2007. After serving little more than two years in the U.S. Senate, what made Obama think he was capable of being the leader of the free world? Knowing he would face questions and face them relentlessly, Obama followed a time-honored path in answering them: He met the people whose trust he sought.

Obama met Democrats, Republicans and independents. He listened to concerns of working families in Iowa living rooms, dined with voters at small restaurants in New Hampshire, toured factories in the Rust Belt and spoke with workers displaced by the misguided economic policies of the Bush Administration. Through Super Tuesday in early February and the neck-and-neck primary dogfight with Sen. Hillary ClintonHillary Clinton, Obama gave voters every chance to find out who he is and what he stands for.

By Election Day, voters will have had 18 long months in which to assess Obama, on personality as well as policy. Voters will have had 66 full days (Aug. 30 through Nov. 3) in which to assess Palin’s qualifications for the ultimate No. 2 job in the free world. To put that in perspective, it’s about four to five weeks shorter than the average college semester. It’s about seven months shorter than a pregnancy and 10 months shy of a year. By any reasonable standard, it qualifies as nothing more than a glimpse.

Regardless of your political affiliation, gender or how you ultimately cast your ballot in November, every voter should consider two questions:

1. Is 66 days long enough for American voters to fairly evaluate the woman who would become president if McCain wins and then dies in office?

2. What does it say about McCain that he thinks it is?

In the days that followed Palin’s convention speech, it became increasingly clear that McCain didn’t want voters to learn more about her through dialogue, interaction and accessibility. The Republican campaign wants the country to get to know her solely on the terms it dictates, terms that resemble not so much the give-and-take of the democratic process but those of a bait-and-switch salesman banking on reactionary emotions to close the deal.

In a shameless display of partisan cynicism that does anything but put “Country First,” the noble but now dishonored theme at the GOP convention, McCain the Maverick has transformed into McCain the Huckster. Sad to say, he seems all too comfortable in this abrupt new political incarnation. For her part, Palin seems entirely too at ease in the role of willing accomplice.