There are lots of reasons why Sarah Palin would make a lousy President of the United States, but contrary to Iceman’s assertions, “because she’s not qualified” isn’t really one of them.

Why? Because the qualifications for becoming President are actually officially listed, in Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution, and Governor Palin meets each one.

We can hammer it out in the form of a checklist, if you like:

• Minimum age of 35? Governor Palin was born in 1964, making her 46 next year. So, check one.
• Natural born citizen (i.e. born in the U.S.)? The Governor’s birthplace was Sandpoint, Idaho, and Idaho became a state in 1890. So, check two.
• Resident in the U.S. for a minimum of 14 years? Unlike our Leader of the Opposition, there’s nothing to indicate that she’s been out of the country for extended periods. Check three.

And that’s it. Really. The reason why Obama’s place of birth became such a big issue is because people were actively trying to disqualify him from becoming President, solely on constitutional grounds.

Yes, the Constitution tends to use the masculine pronouns when referring to the position, but lexicographers will point out that the masculine pronoun is traditionally used to refer to positions when the gender is not identified; so women aren’t specifically barred from the position of the Presidency.

The thing is, you don’t actually need intellect, or courage, or a higher education, to run for (and win) the White House, even though most of us would agree that they’d be nice things to have.

And there’s a reason for that. We tend to forget that a lot of the delegates who helped write the original U.S. Constitution were what we’d call today “self-made”: they didn’t have higher education degrees. Some were lawyers; a lot more were tradesmen, farmers, men of business. They weren’t interested in establishing an exclusive club of intellectual elites to run the government, as Plato had envisioned; they knew that, for their democracy to work, the legal barriers had to be as few as possible, and then only concerned with loyalty to the state in particular and the country in general. Which mean they didn’t want a rule that said: “Sorry, you’re not educated / rich / in the Army / enough to qualify for this position; the Law says so.”

You can call Sarah Palin shallow, hokey, a bad mother, a fool, etc. Lots of reasons for Americans not to want to vote for her as a President. But “not qualified”? Uh-uh. She’s a natural-born, middle-aged, long-time resident American, and as far as Americans are concerned, that’s all she needs.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 07:24 and is filed under Yankees. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.