A new Wall Street Journal / NBC poll (opens as Acrobat .pdf document) out today shows that a majority of voters questioned is comfortable with the idea of having Sarah Palin in the White House as vice-president, despite a “national debate” on whether she’s experienced enough for the job.

That’s very interesting. Because polls have for months been showing that voters are somewhat concerned over Barack Obama’s lack of experience. It is the very reason why Team McCain has from the start been highlighting Obama’s perceived “lack of experience”.  Obama selected Joe Biden, a Senator with 33 years of experience in foreign affairs, to be his running mate. That’s a lot of experience, but it hardly made a difference in the polls.

So what can we conclude from this? That experience is something that only troubles Obama? Or is experience simply not that important to voters?

To paraphrase Lord Acton: “ideology blinds, and absolute ideology blinds absolutely.”

That is at the core of the question, when trying to analyze why voters deem Obama’s lack of experience a problem, but are less concerned about Palin’s lack of experience. I think the explanation for that is that people are more inclined to forgive candidates for a lack of experience, if those candidates candidly and forcefully prove that their are vehemently defending the ideas of those voters.

Months ago, I had a conversation with a hard-right American woman on some political discussion forum. When I asked her why she would never vote for Hillary Clinton, she literally said that “politics is not the place for women”. She said that women should be taking care of the family, making sure that the kids are healthy and the house is clean, etcetera.

However, shortly after John McCain selected Sarah Palin to be his veep, I saw a post of the woman on the discussion forum again – and she was thrilled by Palin, and she would go out to register, and vote for her. All the talk about how women should not be in politics was out the window, because Palin is backing the same hard-right, Christian ideology. (Minus the “women should stay at home” stuff, obviously.)

That threw me back to the 2000 election. I had many discussions with American voters then about their presumed choice for the presidency. I was aghast; quite a few of the people who said they’d be voting for Bush, didn’t really like his socio-economic agenda, but said they “had to” vote for Bush as he was the only candidate promoting a conservative Christian agenda. Some of these people had voted for Clinton in ’92 and ’96, but were finally turned off by the Lewinsky scandal.

They all acknowledged that Clinton’s economic policies had worked, and worked fabulously, and they acknowledged that Al Gore would probably continue those succesful policies. But it didn’t matter.

During the 2000 election campaign, experience was also an important factor. Al Gore had been vice-president for 8 years, and had served in the Senate for many years before that. Bush, despite having been governor of Texas, was completely inexperienced in foreign affairs. He proved it by a number of gaffes during interviews and debates. But it didn’t matter.

Bill Clinton, while on the stump for Gore, famously pressed the voters to “choose wisely”. Nonetheless, for those Americans, ideology trumped wisdom. They all voted Bush in the end.

At the end of 2003, I talked to some of the same people again. The disaster that was Bush’s economic and fiscal “policy” was clear, and these guys weren’t stupid. But I wasn’t surprised at all when they said that they would still be voting for Bush. They all believed that Kerry would be just as tough as Bush as commander in chief, so that wasn’t the problem. No, their problem with Kerry was that he wasn’t promoting a Christian-conservative agenda. And perhaps Bush could finally install a new conservative Supreme Justice in the Supreme Court during his second term. They were finally turned off when Bush botched that with his Harriet Miers nomination.

To Christian fundamentalist wingnuts like them, people like Sarah Palin can do no wrong. If today documents showed up which clearly show that Palin illegally deducted millions in tax expenes, if today someone reports that Palin once drowned a kitten, or if Palin today says that as president, she’d sell Alaska to Canada, they would still support her.

As for independent, not necessarily very religious women who are flocking to Palin: as some polls have shown, many are voting for her because she’s a woman. A fairly large number of women now view Palin as the torch bearer of the feminist struggle for equality. Some have, without blinking, switched from the quite liberal Hillary Clinton to the ultra-conservative Sarah Palin. I’m charging here, but that’s a bit like a cow preferring a butcher over a PETA volunteer to have as her new friend.

That aside, it’s quite ironic for them to vote for someone because of her gender. These women seem to be making the same mistake as the misogynists they’re fighting. Misogynists will not vote for a woman because she’s a woman. Feminists, who joined the struggle to fight for acceptance of equality between men and women, now say that they are voting for Palin because she’s a woman. Misogyny in reverse.

I wonder how these women sleep at night. Oh wait, I know – “ideology blinds, but absolute ideology blinds absolutely.” And that while darkness helps people get to sleep! Of course, how could I forget…

Time for Team Obama to turn the lights on McCain, while also asking Palin what exactly she thinks of the economic policies of George W. Bush. Does she support his policies, like McCain does? And how does she feel about the fact that McCain doesn’t agree with her view on abortion, which holds that abortion should never be allowed – even not in the case of incest or rape? Isn’t that a problem?

If the game of Team McCain is to paint Obama as “just another tax-and-spend liberal”, i.e. your average Democratic candidate and nothing special, then it is time for Team Obama to paint Palin for what she is: an ultra-conservative, right-wing Republican. And you do that not by accusing or pointing fingers, but by continuously asking questions via the media.

The answer is to question her.

John McCain got an election ‘bounce’ in the polls. As expected. The reasons why are different: the Republican base is re-energized now that veep-candidate Sarah Palin has taken away many doubts about McCain among right-wing, social extremists who formed the electoral base of George W. Bush. They’re once again rallying to the flag. Others, who were on the fence in previous polls and were leaning McCain, have now jumped off that fence — straight into McCain’s camp.

And now comes the ultimate test, as described in my previous post (and hours before these new Gallup polls came out): who of the two candidates brings change, but not too much change?

My money’s on McCain, for all the wrong reasons. Obama will have to shift into 4th gear and the debates still remain; but there’s not a whole lot in terms of issues Obama can pull from the shelf, and McCain is the better debater.

As I wrote here, McCain gaining on Obama in the polls would give Obama another reason to get worried. “Because then The Media’s big story will be ‘John McCain, The Comeback Grandpa’. And that would constitute Reason 5.” I had previously named 4 reasons why Obama would be losing; number 5 is just around the corner.

The pregnancy of Bristol Palin, McCain’s vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s daughter, will not affect the race. If anything, it will remind some independent-minded mothers of their own teen pregnancies (or their daughters’), and will only bond them to soon-to-be grandmother Palin. But it will probably also turn off a comparable number of christian wingnuts, so in the end, no win-no lose.

(The ‘QUICK’ is a new feature, to offer an opinion on a matter in a fast way. You will be seeing more of these. It’s sort of neo-Twitter – which is cool, and why? Because any word with the keyword ‘neo’ in front of it, is hot!)

The pick of Alaska governor Sarah Palin to the veep-slot of John McCain is what you might call a “gamble”. Republicans, of course, relieved that finally McCain’s campaign has gotten some positive mojo in the media for 48 hours straight, are calling Palin’s pick “fantastic”, “briliant”, “excellent”, etcetera. Team Obama has been remarkably careful in its initial response, and so has Hillary Clinton. They seem to be careful not to attack Palin too hard, as independent older women form one of the demographic groups that this year will decide the election.

Yet there’s enough to make those women growl about Palin.

At first glance, picking Sarah Palin seems a nice surprise. Her arrival on the national scene brings a certain freshness to it all.  And, still at first glance, it seems to put Team Obama in a spot. Because just when Obama was fighting hard to reconcile women who were pissed off that he became the Democratic candidate, and not Hillary Clinton, BOOM – there’s another ‘strong woman’ (why do women always need to be characterized in the press? Do we say ‘strong man’?) on the battlefield now. And he has to be careful not to come across as a misogynyst.

That’s what the McCain campaign is banking on: that Palin will be able to tie independent women to the Republican ticket, bringing a world of electoral pain to Obama, who can’t rail against her in fear of turning off more independent women.

But surprise, surprise: that’s only half the story. To those McCain strategists who came up with the Palin-independent women scenario, I say this: what you may gain in that demographic by selecting Palin, you may lose in another demographic – the misogynist, right-wing, Bush Republican column.

One of the arguments against picking Hillary Clinton was that she would turn off a not so small group of voters: the macho, alpha-male misogynysts. There are plenty of them, and they’re eligible to vote. And they’d vote against Clinton because she’s a ‘strong woman’, not a stay at home, cookie-baking mom.

There is no reason to assume that these male chauvinists have suddenly changed their minds about ‘strong women’, and will thus vote for the McCain-Palin ticket. If anything, having Palin on the ticket might turn them off.

But even then, it is by no means certain that Palin will attract that many independent women to McCain’s column. Even though part of the story about Palin is that she’s a rebellious sort of Alaskan Republican, another part of the story is that she’s also a very conservative Republican.

She reminds me of the die-hard, give-no-quarter conservatism of George W. Bush. She’s a member of the Feminists for Life organisation. Yes, a feminist, and thus in favour of women being strong and independent (red alert for misogynist America!) but also vehemently opposed to legal abortion, even if the woman in question was the victim of rape or incest, and euthenasia and assisted suicide, even if the situation for the person in question is completely hopeless. (I certainly hope Joe Biden asks Sarah Palin what she would have done with the Terry Schiavo case. On national television.)

If Palin had her way, she’d appoint more conservative judges to the Supreme Court and overturn Roe vs. Wade, thereby turning back the clock on one of the most important, modern feminist achievements. And what’s up with that anyway – right wing Republicans want the government to stay out of their lives, but  also want the government to enforce that no private person has a right to choose? You can’t have it both ways, people.

And  by the way, there’s an awkward secrecy about the Feminists for Life. They have a website, www.feministsforlife.org, but they don’t show you all their opinions. Some sections are kept from public view, such as pages on the organisation’s views on euthenasia. Why is that? Those pages may only be seen by vetted, registered members of the organisation. Is it because the pages contain information and views that could possibly be viewed as extremist by your average, independent woman?