Sarah Palin likes to talk about scaling back government, about the wasteful spending of unnecessary bureaucracies.
Republican voters argue that those wasteful bureaucracies are often the result of incompetent people getting jobs because of their ethnicity or their sex (or whether they were in the military or not), rather than their competence and intelligence... ie people getting jobs they can't handle. While this isn't the main cause of waste in my opinion, it's an extremely problematic one if and when it were to happen. Brownie and Katrina are the perfect example. It's a tragedy when it happens in an important position.
Ten years ago, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin was criticized by those in her community after she was elected for hiring a deputy administrator (deputy mayor) to help her do her job.
They said she wasn't up to the task at hand... ie the task of running a small town of only 6,500 people.
She added $46,000 to the city payroll in doing so, turning what was suppose to be a one person job paying $68k/year into a job that cost the town $114K per year.
Sarah, like many people who sell us things, ain't hard on the eyes, but if she's not competent to do her job, why should Americans pay twice as much when there are competent people out there willing to do the job they're paid for?
A Frontiersman editorial wrote, “We still don’t understand how someone can be claiming to keep her campaign promises when she pooh-poohed the complexities of city government, then hired a deputy city administrator to help her.” [Frontiersman editorial, 3/7/97]
For anybody out there taking Palin seriously when she claims her small town experience is going to cut it in DC as the Vice President, they need merely look at that small town experience to see that she wasn't even up to that task. Unbelievable.
Some of Palin's hiring as mayor proved almost as controversial as her firings.
She quickly hired a deputy administrator, reworking the city budget to find money for the $50,000-a-year position, which had been empty for several years. Critics said it showed she wasn't up to the job, but Palin defended it as necessary for the fast-growing city.
The deputy's name was John Cramer.
Ms. Palin, who had campaigned promising to cut her own full-time salary, reduced it from about $68,000 to about $64,000, but she also hired a city administrator, John Cramer, adding a salary to the payroll.
Critics said Republican leaders installed Mr. Cramer...
So, Republicans had to install a deputy administrator (deputy mayor) for a town of 6,500 people in order to help Sarah do her job.
How many deputy Vice Presidents does McCain expect to have to add to the payroll in order to help her do the one he's brought her on board for?
And in the end, on McCain's 911, when McCain is reading a book to schoolchildren while America burns... are Palin's deputies going to be available to do the job she isn't qualified to do? Cheney may have been evil, but at least he didn't need a babysitter.
If she couldn't run a town of 6,500 without hiring someone to do her job for her, how are we suppose to take her seriously now?
Answer: We aren't.
So, for any aspiring ABC interns out there trying to research questions to ask Palin, here's one I came up with:
Back in Wasilla, you hired a deputy as mayor to help you with the job. Some of the 6,500 citizens criticized you at the time for spending another $50k on his salary and said you should have been able to do the job on your own. They called it an unnecessary bureaucracy that your inexperience added to the position. If the mayorship of a town of 6,500 was too much just 10 years ago... how can we elect you VP now?
Oh, and by the way... Palin was almost recalled over this issue by her own hometown.