Davos Newbies

I’m watching an absurd discussion on Newhour with Jim Lehrer. A supposedly serious question is posed to an Alaskan writer: “What can you tell us about her achievements on the city council and then as mayor?” There was no real answer to that, as might be expected. Sarah Palin was mayor of a small town, and more recently governor of a physically vast state, with very few people and an extremely simple economy based on oil extraction.

When I was involved with Davos some of the invited public figures were presidents or prime ministers of small countries. It rapidly became apparent that rising to the top of the political establishment in, say, Bermuda, is not equivalent to rising to the top of the political establishment in a country of more than 66,000 people (Bermuda’s population). There were highly targeted issues where the Bermudan prime minister might have heft — the re-insurance industry, for example — but outside that it was like meeting the mayor of a smallish town.

Scale counts.

Mark Kleiman:

Could McCain have possibly made a more un-serious choice? Esepcially given his age and health problems? Think about the former Mayor of Wassilia confronting Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. Think about it hard. Now none of this is any reproach to Palin. She is no more responsible for McCain’s choice of her than Incitatus was responsible for the plan of his rider, Caligula, to make him Consul of Rome. This isn’t “shattering the glass ceiling;” this is an insult to all the Republican women who had some actual qualifications for the job, and for that matter to all women: McCain is making a joke of women’s aspiration to high office. McCain’s willingness to put Palin one not-very-reliable heartbeat from the Presidency tells you all you need to know about his fitness for office.

As Kleiman also points out, if Alaska were a county, it would only rank 84th in the country in population.