Like most Americans, I was surprised by John McCain’s choice yesterday of Alaska’s governor, Sarah Palin, to be his running mate. I was not “surprised and delighted” the way people on the far right of the Republican Party seem to be. Just surprised.
I guess McCain is trying to shore up the support of his party’s conservative base, especially the evangelical Christians, and that may well work. Some think he is also trying to attract disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters. That doesn’t seem as likely to happen. I don’t know a lot about Sarah Palin, but at first impression, she seems to be more than a tad to the right of Hillary Clinton. If both women were facing north and Sarah Palin were standing on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, Hillary Clinton would be treading water somewhere between LA and Honolulu.
Palin at least gives us a candidate in the race with some executive experience. True, all of her experience has come in Alaska, a state with 640,000 people crammed into a mere 570,000 square miles. That’s over one human being per square mile, so during the course of a day you could expect to catch a glimpse of another person off in the distance, stalking a moose or chopping wood for the cook fire. In contrast, on our recent vacation to New York City, my family and I stood in a cab line outside of Penn Station that was 640,000 people long. We’d still be in line, but finally decided to walk.
Delaware, the state that Joe Biden represents in the U.S. Senate, is as small as Alaska is big; at 2,500 square miles, Delaware has 0.44% of Alaska’s area. However, Delaware has a couple hundred thousand more residents than Alaska, and a population density of over 400 per square mile. According to U.S. Census data from the year 2000, Delaware is 6th among states in population density. Alaska is 50th.
The District of Columbia — the ultimate goal for all the candidates — is more densely packed than any of the states, and by a huge margin. Yes, the Capitol and White House police do their best to keep us ordinary citizens away from our elected leadership, and that’s a good thing for both sides. And, yes, many D.C. residents are poor people whom politicians can and do safely ignore after the election. But, at least psychologically, sharing a square mile with nearly 10,000 other residents has to feel much different than having the whole thing to yourself. All of a sudden, you’ve got neighbors, and lots of them. Some of them smell funny. Some of them are nuts.
Oddly, having all those neighbors can make you feel lonelier, and at the same time, more put upon. In Alaska, if you happen to encounter a neighbor while you are out inspecting your line of beaver traps, you will probably stop and chew the caribou fat for a while. If you try to do that in a busy place like New York City or D.C., your bustling neighbors (and a couple thousand tourists) are apt to stamp you into the sidewalk like a wad of gum. Of course, on the positive side, it is much less likely that you’d be inspecting a line of beaver traps in New York or D.C..
Anyway, I just think someone ought to point all this out to Sarah Palin. She may not know how good she has it.
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