Integrity — an attribute that carries no party line

J. Todd Foster
Published: September 17, 2008

By J. Todd Foster

Media General News Service

Is it racist to question Sen. Barack Obama’s thin résumé?

Of course not.

And it’s not sexist to question Gov. Sarah Palin’s meager experience either.

But it’s hypocritical to claim one but not the other. Then again, hypocrisy is now defining this campaign.

Palin was for the Bridge to Nowhere before it became a national embarrassment, and as of a few days ago believes man contributes to global warming – a new position for her but one that coincides with
John McCain’s world view. While Palin decries federal pork-barrel earmarks, she sought millions of dollars worth of them just this year.

Obama was against offshore drilling until his position became politically untenable.

McCain loathed Christian conservatives for helping to slime him into a 2000 Republican primary loss, but now he embraces them and has hired the same GOP operatives to slime his opponent.
Remember South Carolina eight years ago? The GOP called voters and asked them if they would feel differently about McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child. The Arizona senator
was campaigning at the time with his adopted, dark-skinned daughter from Bangladesh.

Obama has done a gracious job of emphasizing that the candidates’ children are off limits, but his left-wing loony supporters have made blogosphere fodder out of pregnant teen Bristol Palin and the
governor’s record of motherhood.

Absolutely unfair and

outrageous.

But Republican charges of

sexism might carry more weight if some of those same GOP stalwarts hadn’t targeted Hillary and Chelsea Clinton for scurrilous attacks and tasteless jokes for the past 15 years.

Where were these Republicans in 1998 when McCain told this joke: “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.”

Chelsea, by all accounts, has led an exemplary life and did not get pregnant as an unmarried teen. She’s also quite fetching.

Where was the outrage when broadcast blowhard Rush Limbaugh showed a photograph of Socks the cat and then a young Chelsea and introduced her as the White House dog? Or when Limbaugh and
other members of the so-called GOP base were accusing Hillary Clinton of murdering Vince Foster?

Speaking of broadcast bloviators, there’s Bill O’Reilly, who says the Palin daughter is off limits and that it’s a private family matter. But last year, when Britney Spears’ sister, Jamie Lynn, got pregnant,
O’Reilly said: “Here the blame falls primarily on the parents of the girl, who obviously had little control over her.”

Fox News’ commentator Sean Hannity says the treatment of Palin is the worst kind of sexism he’s ever seen, but last year said Hillary Clinton’s complaints of sexism sent the

message “you’re not strong enough” to be president.

Dick Morris, a former Bill Clinton adviser and now hater of all things Clinton, told Hannity a few days ago that the pushback against Palin was something “a man would never have to go through.”

Maybe that was the new Dick Morris, not the one who used to purchase the services of prostitutes. Or the one 10 months ago who addressed Hillary’s performance on the campaign trail with this:

“When a woman wants to be president, she shouldn’t complain based on gender. ‘I’m going to take my toys and go home because the big boys are picking on me,’ ” Morris said, affecting a high-pitched
voice during an appearance on Fox as Hannity’s guest.

“What happens when the boys in the Middle East or the boys who run Russia or the boys who run China start picking on you?” Morris said. “Are we going to have the president of the United States
saying the boys are picking on me? This is what Hillary always does. Whenever she gets under fire, she retreats behind the apron strings.”

Then there’s Karl Rove, a man who has never been elected to anything but is nicknamed “Bush’s brain” and helped choreograph the past eight years. As a result, 84 percent of Americans now say the
country is heading in the wrong direction.

Last week, Rove defended Palin’s credentials. “She’s a populist and economic and social conservative,” he said. “She’s a reformer, she’s a former mayor, the mayor I think of the second-largest city in
Alaska.”

(Wasilla, with fewer than 7,000 residents then, was the eighth-largest Alaskan city when Palin was mayor.)

Rove sang a different tune on an Aug. 10 appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation” while discussing Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine’s potential selection as Obama’s running mate.

“With all due respect again to Gov. Kaine, he’s been a governor for three years, he’s been able but undistinguished. I don’t think people could name a big important thing that he’s done. He was mayor of
the 105th largest city in America. Again with all due respect to Richmond, Va., it’s smaller than Chula Vista, Calif.; Aurora, Colo.; Mesa or Gilbert, Ariz.; North Las Vegas or Henderson, Nev. It’s not a big
town. So if you were to pick Gov. Kaine, it would be an intensely political choice where it said you know what, I’m really not first and foremost concerned with is this person capable of being president of
the United States. What I’m concerned about is can he bring me the electoral votes for the state of Virginia, the 13 electoral votes in Virginia.”

If Richmond is a small town then what would that make Wasilla? Rove also omitted Kaine’s four years as a lieutenant governor or the fact that Richmond is a state capital.

But my point here is not to say that Kaine would have been a good or bad running mate or that Palin was a wise or foolish choice. The fact is that Obama, Kaine and Palin all have more political
experience than Abraham Lincoln did before he was elected president, and many historians regard him as the nation’s finest commander in chief ever.

The point is that integrity doesn’t have a D or an R after it.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of Media General’s Bristol Herald Courier.