My Mom is as Qualified as Sarah Palin to be Vice President
She’s Even as Qualified as Barack Obama and John McCain to be President
Allow me to indulge in a child’s old adage: My mom is as qualified as
your mom to be vice president. Upon such a claim many will naturally
ask what my mother’s qualifications are. Certainly they should be
extensive given the media scrutiny to Sarah Palin’s underwhelming
qualifications. But my mom’s are not much. She’s simply over the age of
35, a naturally-born citizen, and has resided in the United States for
the past 14 years. Like many of her peers, she’s as qualified as the
next person, according to the U.S. Constitution.
It’s true, if you look, that the only “qualifications” to being vice
president, even president, are the ones I listed for my mother. That’s
not the impression one would get from those who criticize Sarah Palin
and even Barack Obama as lacking in “experience.” Those people never
define what the qualifications and experience are. Allow me to bolster
my mother’s defense.
My mom is a mother of three (lovely, if I say so myself) children.
She’s a college graduate, one who even went to school while tending to
her children. She graduated with a degree to teach. Simply put, my
mother can read, write, and listen.
These three traits encompass the delineated powers of the vice
presidency and presidency in the U.S. Constitution. Namely, to be the
head of the Senate, for the former, and to make treaties, appoint
judges, and tell the Army and Navy what to do. When you consider that a
vice president and president get most of their policy information from
their cabinet and peers, my mother could surely do all of these
functions with ease.
The cynic of course will say this is all too simple. The office of the
vice president, and the president for that matter, is much more complex
than the simple trifles of domestic life. This is where Palin receives
her criticism. Not even her “town of 9,000” was big enough to provide
her with experience to stand behind the president. This criticism is
apt and correct.
Yet only in a time when the U.S. Constitution no longer applies is the
vice presidency and presidency complex. A look at what is asked of both
offices clearly explains this present-day complexity over the past-day
simplicity. The president and vice president today are held to explain
how they will create jobs. They’re asked about their energy, fiscal,
foreign, environment, and tax policies, and so on and so forth through
an extensive list nowhere mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.
My mom, of course, has never dealt with these ugly political manners.
She’s never “created” any jobs. She’s always gone out and achieved her
own. Her energy policy consists of the “simple” idea of not consuming
more than she can pay for. She doesn’t counterfeit money as the Federal
Reserve does, always paying her bills. She doesn’t go around to her
neighbors destroying their land to show them how to live freely. She
properly disposes of her trash, doesn’t steal other people’s money, and
so on and so forth.
My mom, of course, is a woman of pride and would never act as such a
brute. We wouldn’t expect any decent human being to act as such. Yet
many people see these actions as O.K. and all too well to do because
the U.S. Constitution no longer applies. It’s now expected that the
vice president and president make these actions a part of their
so-called policy.
Frederic Bastiat long ago clarified the proper role of the Law and, by
extension, the government. The law is “the collective organization of
the individual right to self defense”—to defend person, liberty, and
property. That is, anything we’d expect an individual not to do, a
government should also not do, such as oppress and plunder.
Only when the law is confined to its proper place will the cries over
“experience” and “readiness” for any form of presidency cease. As
Bastiat said, “if law were nothing more than the organized combination
of the individual's right to self defense; if law were the obstacle,
the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder — is it likely
that we citizens would then argue much about the extent of the
franchise?”
Truly, if the U.S. Constitution were cared for, in all of its check on
executive power, my mom, among many others, would certainly be
qualified as the next vice president or president as any of the
existing candidates.