JeffJudge.com

Great commentary from the San Francisco Chronicle about John McCain’s message since announcing Sarah Palin has his running mate.

I’ll admit, I’m not that well versed in the foundations of each party, their respective political history, nor am I very familiar with the background of each candidate. I do think I’m pretty good at picking up on the obvious though…by that I mean when how things work and when something is not right. Frankly, we are being fed a load of shit right now.

Primary example…the whole experience thing. Neither candidate has experience running a company, or any key leadership roles where they’ve had to really manage something critical. Yet both candidates (really their team) have thrown the non-experience flag on the field. And what I hate is that all of this gets chopped up into soundbites, which are delivered to people who take what they want to hear, eat it up and spit it back out. “Obama has zero experience, zip, zilch, nada” or whatever that 9/11 guy said. Quite honestly, I don’t think experience here really matters. No one has ever been prepared to become the president. How could they be? Leadership and integrity are what matters here. The ability to bring people together, understand the issues, and drive to fair and logical resolutions. No one person will have the experience to do that to the scale that is the United States. That’s why presidents hire a team of braniacs to help them. This is exactly what companies like Google do - they find the best and brightest people and put their minds to work. Neither candidate trumps the other with experience, so let’s quit talking about that artificial differentiator.

Then we have a press conference put on by some notable women in the GOP at the RNC claiming that the media is being too rough on Sarah Palin, when she’s previously called Hillary Clinton a whiner for the same thing. The spin is just absurd.

Let’s see, what else is annoying. Oh yea, John McCain’s small town bit - making Barack Obama out to be a big city guy. Why? Barack’s from Chicago. I’m from Chicago. I grew up in Iowa. We don’t have a “big city attitude”. Chicago is the melting pot of midwesterners. We trend along same values as the “small towner”, yet we skew towards diversity given the size of the city. If McCain and team really believed in small town values, and that he works for the people “I work for you”, then his team wouldn’t have talked trash about community organizers. I think this video sums it up well:

Poking fun of community organizers was done in poor taste and judgment. I hope the Republican’s get their ass kicked for this alone. Are we going to start making fun of volunteers next?

Here’s the bottom line. Regardless of political affiliation, we all love our country, and we are all proud of what it is and what it has the potential to be. But we need to talk about our issues and options/plan for dealing with them vs. pandering and positioning.