Chamber of Commerce President: Debating Palin Will Be a Challenge for Biden
Thomas Donahue says he likes what he's seen of Palin
ST. PAUL—"Huh?"
Like so many other Americans, that was the first reaction of U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue to the choice of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential candidate.
Donohue didn't know much about the Alaska governor, but he immediately started looking into her background and record, and he liked what he learned. Understands business. Familiar with energy policy. A Washington outsider. Ran a municipal government. Rooted out corruption. Challenged the elite leaders of her state. Headed the Alaska National Guard. A good temperament for national office.
"She's charming and she's tough," Donohue told U.S. News in a roundtable discussion held in conjunction with the Republican National Convention. Regarding her willingness to take on established power, he added: "She looks to me like somebody who looked the gorilla in the eye and didn't blink."
The complications in her family—notably Palin's acknowledgement that her unmarried 17-year-old daughter Bristol is pregnant—actually proved that Palin has personal experiences common around the country. Bristol will keep the baby and marry the father, the governor said.
"It looks a lot like what happens in families all over the country," Donohue says.
The Chamber president adds that Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden will have a real challenge debating her. If he is seen to "patronize" her, many women will be offended, Donohue says.
Reader Comments
Applying for medicare
Good Day. Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.
I am from France and learning to speak English, tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "Doj indicts accused of medicare fraud."
Best regards 8-), Destiny.
sucky article
how come you dont make up a fiction story about it or at least throw in a comic article
MeCain the hero
McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.
But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children. She is McCain’s first wife, Carol, who was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model when they married in 1965.
She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnam’s infamous ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison and the woman who faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.
But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.
When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter. Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.
Today, she stands at just 5ft4in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering.
For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later.
She says. ‘My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was just awful, but it wasn’t the reason for my divorce. ‘My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does.’
Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.
McCain was then earning little more than $40,000 a year as a naval officer, while his new father-in-law, Jim Hensley, was a multi-millionaire who had impeccable political connections.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MUY9S6iCvk
Lets see what his vet buddies confirm about McCain the hero.
And Sarah Palin how is she going to defend the country if she can't defend her children against pedophiles?
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