A Pitbull with Lipstick

New girl in town. Stand back, she bites. Sarah Palin is not a girl I would have wanted to date -- and I can guarantee she would have had no interest in me. But, back in high school, I would have noticed her.
I loved her line on Barrack OBama's previous career as a "community organizer". She bristled at his contemptuous dismissal of her job as mayor of a small town. She allowed that there were some similarities between "community organizer" and "mayor." But, she said, a mayor "has real responsibilities".
The organizer is essentially a social worker with no authority. He can cajole and inspire; he has no power to implement. Therefor he never gains any real experience in executing a policy or making the theoretical actually happen.
OBama can cajole and inspire with the best -- what will he do when, for the first time in his life, he has to turn the engine on and make the thing go? Will he have any idea? Do we want to wait to find out until after he is elected?
OBama reminds me very much of Kennedy (I'm old enough to remember). I did not vote for Mr. Kennedy and, for the exact same reason, I am not going to vote for Mr. OBama.
Mr. Kennedy had been a senator for eight years, a congressman before that. He had an almost matchless ability to inspire, to cajole. Like OBama he and his family were gorgeous. He made marvelous speeches. Few have been better able to articulate the dreams of his hearers.
But he was very much an absentee senator (illness, often). He had almost no experience in making the Senate work -- like Teddy can.
The only thing he had ever commanded was a PT boat. The whole point of a PT boat is to maneuvre out of the way of whatever the enemy sends after you and take potshots as you skip away. He got his PT boat run over by an enemy destroyer. An understandable accident, but not a great reference for future promotion.
His absolute lack of practical experience showed up vividly in the TV debates of 1960. I came away from them appalled that we had nominated such a neophyte.
But he was glib and we elected him for his glibness.
And then came a series of events that mere glibness could not get him out of. He had to act on the Bay of Pigs. He acted horribly wrongly, inexperience trumped real life. The entire nation was humiliated as Castro demanded ransom for those we had possessed the power to keep out of captivity -- but not the experience or the will.
Khrushev summoned Kennedy to Vienna that summer. I had access to the photo morgues at Newsweek Magazine. You could see, first, the incredulity -- and then the contempt on Khrushev's face as the summit went on.
Having taken the measure of his man, Khrushev went home and built the Berlin Wall (after not have dared to against the last three years of Eisenhower). Kennedy's only response? He flew to Berlin and shouted, "I am a jelly roll." Several Berliners sent him umbrellas because he reminded them so much of the allies at Munich.
After being warned and warned and warned that the Russians were building missile sites in Cuba to counteract our sites in Europe and Turkey, finally Kennedy took notice when the missiles were already there.
At this point we would have no choice but to inflict the kind of humiliation on Russia that often starts a war. We came close. It can be said that Jack Kennedy remains the only American president to very nearly get every living American killed in a thermonuclear exchange. He got out of it alive by giving up the missiles in Turkey and because, in the end, Khruschev was an astonishingly reasonable man.
The Politburo stripped him of his job for botching the Cuban situation two years later.
I don't want that kind of deadly inexperience in the White House now. I don't want to be dependent on the reasonableness of the enemy for my life.
Islamic terrorists have no such compulsion that Khrushev had to remain alive.
Commanders-in-Chief have real responsibilities.
No matter how glib, how inspiring.