Surprise! I'm a single parent

I find myself fascinated by Sarah Palin.  Beauty queen, mother of five, soon to be granny, governor of the other country of alaska, republican vice presidetial candidate. As close as any woman has been to the white house. Who wouldn’t slow down and look?

I have a  sinking Shipley feeling and I can’t look away.

Ive been thinking lately that politicians are the wrapping paper of elections. They are a product as much as the policies of their party. What sparked this was the revelation that a Canadian politician had given a speech which bore a great similarity to an Australian politicians speech. Google inadvertantly highlighted some lazy speech writing and a speech writer in Canada has subsequently resigned from their job. But…. how come we accept that politicians don’t write thier own words?

So ‘presidential debates’ are the spontaneous displays of what they might really be like. Maybe. How much can you know of a person beyond the packaging and the random finds of them on teh internet. I wonder if Sarah blogs?

If I accept that politicians are primarily (in their campaigns at any rate) orators of party rhetoric that is styled as their own words then we shouldn’t be too critical of their private lives – lives that we can never understand anyway. Ive seen a you tube clip of Sarah being blessed away from witch craft – probably something she shares with Elizabeth the first.

I can’t help contrasting Palin with Helen Clark. Not a beauty queen or a mum, a life time politician. Pilloried for not wearing the right clothesand not being pretty for the first few years. Heres a beauty queen and she’s sneered at for that. different sides of the political fence and different countries. I guess almost nobody un teh US knows there is an election on down in New Zealand. I only just clued there is one in Canada.

At the begining of the election cycle I was feeling really sick of politics. I think it was partly the obama/clinton thing. And partly the steady demoition of politicians by nationaland act over the apst few years. I said I was going to switch off the tv till after the election. But since we’ve been plunged into a global fiscal crisis its got a lot more interesting.  The Chinese say it is a curse to live in interesting times. Surely for politicians at election time it is a blessing – or for their speech writers at least.