As far as the importance of good communication skills go, well, I'm surprised that we would even bother arguing about that. Yes, I think that the POTUS should be able to wield the native tongue effectively, clearly and with some level of interesting-ness. That doesn't make up for the lack of a clear message or guiding principle, but if you have a good guiding principle and your communication skills are poor, then your ideas don't really matter that much. Every high school English or Writing 101 teacher you ever had was trying to teach you that. When I see posts on forums that are one longruntogetherparagraph with awefull speling and no punctuation of any kind, then I just skip past them because they take too much effort on my part to read, and obviously the person writing them didn't care enough to put effort into making it readable. Maybe they're a genius at reloading, or rebuilding an outboard engine, but it doesn't do me any good if I can't understand them.
Every time Palin opened her mouth, she showed herself to be un-informed and un-interested in becoming informed. When I first heard she was the VP pick, I was interested, by the time she was done giving interviews and debating, I was done even thinking about it. And yes, she is also one of those people with very sketchy use of the language. And I'm not talking about her accent, which I found kind of charming for the first week or so.
I'm sorry, but the fact that the repubs sent her to the VP debate so totally unprepared to answer those questions intelligently let me know how little they thought they needed to get by. She reminded me of the smartass kid in school who thought they didn't need to do any homework, that their charm and charisma would get them through a test somehow. She hit a couple of base hits, but overall was pretty unprepared. If you can't do your homework for a debate, then I don't want you second in line behind an old man whose health is not so great. She may have been at the bottom of the ticket in November, but McCain's health could have put her in the Oval Office well before his term was up. To say that I shouldn't make any judgement calls on the VP pick seems pretty strange to me, especially when the presidential candidate is in his 80's. I didn't see Palin as capable of doing that job. And the fact that she couldn't even stick out her term as governor of Alaska seems to prove that she is not reliable.
Biden is an appalling, arrogant blowhard, but he was far better prepared for the debate. In the end, I went with what appeared at the time to be the lesser of two evils, which is sadly how I feel almost every time I go to vote. Every now and then at the local level there is a candidate I can really get behind. Sometimes they're repubs, sometimes dems. But at the presidential level, we just get served up a set of awful choices from both parties, pretty much every time. Maybe I just won't bother to vote in the presidential elections anymore.
I used to vote libertarian every chance I got, until I realized that they weren't really interested in winning or governing, they just like the sound of their own voices. And if Palins and Bachmans are the future of the republican party, they may never get another one of my votes again, either. I've got no use for charismatic ideologues from either side. And I count Obama in that group.
