What looked enticingly beautiful in the dark of the night……

Sarah Palin clearly ended up hindering John McCain’s White House dreams. The New York Daily News quoted Steven Cohen, professor of public administration at Columbia University as saying. “She was a drag on the ticket, particularly with undecideds,” He added, “The idea of her as President scared people.”

In the final days of the campaign, 59 percent of American voters nationwide said Palin was unprepared to be commander in chief. Nearly a third of the voters said that when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, it was a major factor in their decision not to vote for him.

Why did America turned on Sarah Palin? Obviously, her wobbly television interviews hadn’t helped. The scandals from Alaska, which tarnished her reformist image was like the death of a thousand cuts.

On the eve of the historic U.S. presidential election, two Montreal radio DJs pulled a telephone prank on Palin. When one of them told her that he was the president of France, she fell for it. She didn’t check to see if the call was legitimate. The caller, (a radio host) actually conned her into believing that Stef Carse (a singer) was the prime minister of Canada and that Richard Z. Sirois (a comedian) was the premier of Quebec. This woman is the governor of Alaska and yet she didn’t know who the prime minister of Canada is, not withstanding that Canada is Alaska’s closest neighbour. This tells you something of her inability to fully function in international politics.

As the race for the presidency was coming to a close, I noticed that Sarah Palin was obviously kept away from plain view. It reminds me of Joseph Stalin, the late dictator of the Soviet Union. One of his arms was shorter than the other so he made a point of making sure that the photographers didn’t photograph him in a way in which his shorter arm was seen in the photographs. I think McCain realized that Palin was not only a disappointment, she was also an embarrassment. It was not unlike a man marrying a really ugly woman and is too embarrassed to show her to his friends.

The Republican National Committee didn’t help her image when they paid $150,000 for a shopping spree that started in early September "to clothe and accessorize" the governor and her family.

An Alaska investigation had cleared her of any hint of any kind of unethical activity in the Alaska ‘Troopergate’ controversy. She said on October 11th; “I'm very, very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing, any hint of any kind of unethical activity there.” The independent report however found that she actually breached the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.

Agnew Spiro was the vice president of the US in the 1970s and we all know how much of a crook he was before he was removed from his role as the vice president of the US. I somehow think that if McCain and Palin won the election, her vice presidency would end up being something one would find deep in a garbage can where the smell is at its worst.

How is it that McCain didn’t check Palin out before choosing her as his running mate? Did he think that merely choosing a women as his running mate would garner the votes of all the women in the United States? Did he think that the American women are too stupid to see the glaring error he made in choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate? He gambled and lost it all.

Choosing a running mate for the vice presidency is fraught with the same dangers that a drunk will encounter when he chooses a woman of the night to go to bed with; a woman that is unfamiliar to him. What looks enticingly beautiful in the dark of the night; looks unbelievably ugly in the light of day.

There have been some great American vice presidents in the past. George Washington chose John Adams and then John Adams chose Thomas Jefferson. Grover Cleveland chose Adlai E. Stevenson. Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose Harry S. Truman. These are just a few of the good choices made by great men choosing good running mates.

It's interesting to note that John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin was not only a poor choice in regards to her lack of knowledge and experience, it was also a poor choice given the vice president’s role in the executive branch. The vice president serves as President of the Senate so it follows that having previously been a senator is a great advantage for someone who is vying for the role of vice president of the United States.

Vice presidents should be able to help the presidents deal with Congress, which means they should have experience in Congress. In other words, governors don't make good vice presidents if they haven’t served in the US Senate or at least served in the House of Representatives for several terms. Presidential candidates typically select as their running mates, those who have a history in Congress, especially in the Senate which makes sense if you want your vice president to be capable of helping your administration pass laws.

President elect Obama wisely chose Senator Joe Biden to be his running mate. He chaired a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on ‘Defining the Military's Role Towards Foreign Policy.’ This means that he is experienced in foreign affairs which is more than can be said about Sarah Palin who didn’t even know who the prime minister of Canada is.

I am not going to comment of whether or not John McCain would have made a good president. Certainly his age (72) shouldn’t be a factor. I am 75 and I still have my mental faculties intact. However, I am concerned that had he been elected as the president of the United States, would his choice as to who was to become his Secretary of State or his Secretary of Defence, just to name two positions, be of the same caliber as his running mate? If they were, then the United States would lose whatever prestige it is currently hanging onto.

Barreling ahead without first looking where you are going causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved. John McCain barreled ahead, and like the man who speeds going around a curve on a highway, he didn’t see the chasm just around the bend. He went over the railing and crashed into flames. Memorial services will be held later in the week. There will be none for his running mate, Sarah Palin.

NEW INFORMATION

Less than 24 hours after McCain lost the presidential election to Democrat Barack Obama, those close to McCain apparently wasted no time dishing the dirt on her.

They said that she wasn't aware that Africa was a continent. Further, she didn't know that the three North American Free Trade Agreement countries were Canada, U.S. and Mexico.

She spent tens of thousands of dollars more than the $150,000 reported on clothing, accessories and luggage for herself and her family. One senior aide told Newsweek that she was told to buy three suits for the Republican convention and hire a stylist, but instead, she began amassing costly goods from top stores. At one point during the campaign, Palin's youngest daughter, Piper, 7, was photographed carrying a $790 Louis Vuitton bag.

Palin also allegedly instructed low-level staffers to buy her new clothes with their credit cards, something the McCain campaign only discovered last week when the aides tried to get reimbursed. A Republican party lawyer is reportedly heading to Alaska to inventory and retrieve the clothes still in Palin's possession.

The tensions between the two camps reportedly continued even into election night, when Palin met up with McCain at the Biltmore hotel in Phoenix with a concession speech in hand. Much to her chagrin, she was told by senior McCain aides she wouldn't be speaking.

I was right all along in my previous articles. That woman was an anchor around McCain’s neck. With that anchor holding him back, he didn’t have a decent chance of winning the election.