IT DOESN’T TAKE MUCH...
...to know what’s wrong with this ticket.


I am not a foreign policy expert, but I have traveled enough in the world to understand why a vice president of the United States in 2009 should not be someone who got her first passport in 2007.

I am not a medical statistician, but I am a seventy-three-year-old man in excellent general health who has had a melanoma cancer removed from his head, a man who is keenly aware of the odds that a seventy-three-year-old president with a history of deadly melanoma cancer and other skin cancers might not live through two or even one four-year term of office.

I am not a political scientist, but I grew up in a small town in the largest state in America, and I know that being mayor of a small town of 7000 souls or being governor of a state with just over half a million citizens doesn’t prepare an individual to be president of the United States.

I am not a social scientist; but after a career as administrator in schools serving America’s most affluent citizens and a few years as a teacher in San Diego’s poorest neighborhood, I have learned that “no child left behind” in Southeast San Diego and “no child left behind” in La Jolla are not the same problem. Nothing in the resumes or the rhetoric of some of the people standing for the highest offices in the land shows any experience or any understanding of the effects of stultifying poverty on America’s poorest citizens.

I am not a lawyer, but I understand enough about constitutional law to know that the current administration’s policies have misused and eroded freedoms that Americans should no longer take for granted if the next team in the White House is merely an extension of the present one.

I am not an economist, but I know enough about balancing an institution’s budget and about keeping spending and income in balance to be very afraid of four more years of the George Bush approach to economics.

I am not a theologian, but I know enough about the world’s religions to be afraid of a person in power who believes the Iraq War (or any war) is part of God’s plan for the world and that God is obviously on “our” side, and will always be if we just pray hard enough. It scares the @##% out of me to consider even the slightest possibility that we might get a president or a vice president who believes God will help secure a pipeline project for Alaska if Christians pray hard enough.

I am not a humorist, so I can’t get positively excited about the possibility of having a president and a vice president whose major impact on American culture is that they are foolish and silly enough to provide daily fodder for cartoon artists and late night television comedians.