Versus! Candidate Comparisons

By Nate Storey

As the election fast approaches and the tickets have been announced, it seems wise to understand the candidates on a deeper level than how they appear or how they strive to make their opponent appear. We must examine their positions, their views, and their actions.

One of the most important tests of a candidacy is the selection of the Vice President. In the old days, the runner-up was made the Vice President, thus giving us the Jefferson/Burr administration, in which the two men were at odds on most every issue of the day. Now we are faced with two potential Vice Presidents, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. It is hard to gauge the impact a Vice President will have on the administration. Some do nothing, some do everything, and some become President following some unforeseen emergency. Because of this, it is important to examine what sort of president the vice would make. So, this is the question, who would make the better president, Biden or Palin?

Joe Biden has been in Congress since 1973, and has served on (most notably) the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. He has also run for president twice now, once in 1988 and in 2008. In the 1988 election, he met with controversy when it was discovered that some of his speech was plagiarized from a speech by a British politician. Biden is also known to have a run on mouth and to not necessarily think before he speaks at times, which could be offensive to foreign dignitaries.

Still, having been around Washington, D.C. for so long means that were something to happen to Obama (and sadly, there have been threats against him already from the crazies out there), Biden would know how to work with Congress and lobbyists and has had foreign relations experience.

Sarah Palin has served as Governor of Alaska for nearly two years and before that, was mayor of the city of Wasilla . She has also chaired the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and served on the city council of Wasilla. Her time in Alaska seemingly separates her and distances her from the corruption expected from those within the Beltway of DC. As a mayor and governor, she, unlike Obama, Biden and McCain, actually has executive governing experience. The only issue with that point is that she was only mayor of a town with 9,000 people, and governor of a state with 683,478 people (47 th in the country). This hardly enables someone to be able to govern an entire country with many different attitudes and sections.

It is also troubling that she is on record as saying, “As for that VP talk all the time, I’ll tell you, I still can’t answer that question until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the VP does every day?” Now, she does go on to say that she is used to being busy, but it is worrisome that she doesn’t really know what she would be doing and if she had to take on the president’s job in an emergency, would she adapt quickly enough?

Also, she has told reporters that she paid little attention to the war in Iraq, which in conjunction with her lack of foreign policy experience makes her seem ill-equipped to lead a country in this globalized time. Another uninformed Commander-in-Chief is the last thing this country needs.

A final disturbing aspect of Palin’s past is the fact that she is currently under investigation in Alaska for abusing her power in order to get a state trooper fired. Now, it is still unknown whether this story is true or not, but if it is, this is not the government the country should be relying on for another four years. Governmental power has been abused for the past eight years, time and time again, so electing a new administration that will follow in those abusive footsteps hardly seems like the smart move.