I just finished watching a 30 minute video of the campaign stop of John McCain and Sarah Palin in Colorado Springs. Or should I say, I watched half of the video, for the first 15 minutes featured Sarah Palin praising her running mate for his “sheer guts”, “putting our country first”, “22 years of military service”, “belief in the surge in Iraq”, and his “belief in promoting change”. I was so reminded of the song, Stand By Your Man, by Tammy Wynette. In Sarah Palin’s eyes, John McCain could do no wrong. She then went on to tout her record as a reformer in Alaska and told the adoring throng that she put the State of Alaska’s “over-the-top” luxury jet on e-Bay, that she drives herself to work and that she laid off the Governor’s chef. All to thunderous applause. She touted her record of vetoing budget items “in defense of the public interest”.

Besides being so loyal to her man, what else do people see in her? She is a flag-waving nationalist (America is the greatest country in the world). She is a fighter against “the good-old-boys”, the oil companies, and the way business is done as usual. She is a real, down-to-earth woman, just like everyone’s neighbor. She has an out-of-wedlock pregnant daughter, like so many families do. She has a special needs baby, like more than a few families do. She put herself through college, taking years to do so. She isn’t wealthy. Her husband is a blue-collar worker who has taken some college courses, just like so many men in this country. She and her husband were commercial fishermen and he still works at commercial fishing for some weeks of the year. Just a hard-working, ordinary American who seeks to re-claim America from the lobbyists, special interests and out-of-touch liberals who run this country. In short, she is just another American, struggling to make ends meet. No elitist here. She didn’t graduate from Harvard, by God!

There is nothing wrong with any of this – I must make that crystal clear. Not a thing. Nothing.

But what will happen if Gov. Palin gets to Washington? The reform that she fought so hard for in Wasilla and Juneau will, I suspect, become many orders of magnitude more difficult. There are a whole lot of very powerful people in Washington and I suspect that we won’t hear very much “reformist” rhetoric from Gov. Palin after she arrives. First, she is going to have to learn what it is that a Vice President does. She has already admitted that she doesn’t have a clear idea of what the Vice President does. And, she will be working with a man who has been in the Senate since 1986 and prior to that, the House of Representatives for 4 years. A graduate of the Naval Academy, John McCain has never held a job outside of government. And he claims to be an agent of change? Despite the fact that Richard Cheney has been an activist Vice President (mostly due to the incompetence of George Bush), don’t count on that continuing in a McCain presidency. So how much influence will Gov. Palin have on a McCain presidency? I suspect not much.

So, all cheerleading aside, I don’t think much will change under a McCain presidency. Don’t count on getting out of Iraq, don’t count on an improving economy, don’t count on the restoration of our civil rights. Don’t count on our right to privacy to be restored. Don’t count on a smaller government with a balanced budget. McCain is an insider and will do exactly as his puppet masters ask him to do, just as every other president has done since the death of FDR. And lest people accuse me of being a worshipper of FDR, I am not. FDR saved capitalism from itself. If FDR had not enacted the reforms that he did, over the intense opposition that he encountered, there would have been blood in the streets. FDR proved that pure capitalism does not work – a lesson that the current generation of “leaders” needs to re-learn.
Ever since Ronald Reagan, this country has lurched radically towards pure capitalism and Social Darwinism and some day soon, the pendulum will swing back, whether or not the Republican party wants it to. If Obama doesn’t win this election, either McCain will rein in the neo-conservatives and restore this country to the republic it once was or he will be faced with increasing social unrest that will severely challenge his ability to govern.

Is there a possibility that Gov. Palin will use her experience as Vice President under John McCain to enact FDR style reforms as President Palin in 2012? Perhaps.

We live in interesting times ….