During her tenure as a governor she has learned how to avoid being corrupted by executive power. Anyone who has held a position of executive status knows how easily it can be abused. One learns very quickly how easy it would be to get people fired, particularly those who have custody disputes with people in your family. Good people, people with small town values would never abuse power they hold over others as elected officials, and would never support those who do.

She has a son in Iraq. No one with their own child being sent to an area full of Sunni insurgents and littered with IEDs could possibly deny that we need a responsible plan to end the war Iraq. Having a son in harm’s way must mean that she sees the Iraq “war” as the occupation and the war crime that it is.

She has a pregnant daughter. Good parents are deeply in touch with their children. They would never be ignorant of their child’s accidental pregnancy. Since they know about the pregnancy, they would never thrust their child onto a national stage to be eaten alive by tabloids. They would know the horrors that abstinence only education causes, and be strongly in support of comprehensive sex education. Palin let her daughter choose whether or not to keep the child, so she must support that choice for others. She must understand the difficulties young mothers face, and would always help them get the care they need.

She has a special needs baby. She must understand how important it is for the birth of a special needs baby to be overseen by doctors. She would immediately go to a hospital if she started leaking amniotic fluid, because that baby’s life hangs in the balance. She would never give a speech, drive to the airport, fly to Seattle, fly to Alaska, and then drive an hour into rural Alaska before seeking help from a doctor. That would be irresponsible and possibly deadly. She understands how much attention and care babies need from their mothers. She would support extended maternity leave, because no one would be so cruel as to go back to work three days after giving birth.

Mothers are compassionate and wise. Many have said that if all world leaders had experience as mothers, war and poverty would not exist. Mothers support peace. Mothers support choice. Mothers care for the people of their country instead of abusing them for profit. Mothers support a social safety net, so that no mother’s child goes hungry.

We need a mother in the White House for many reasons, but Sarah Palin is a warped and corrupted shell of what a mother should be. I’ve never been a Hillary supporter, but I can tell you that she learned her life lessons. Hillary took her experience as a mother, and factored it in to making her decision to be pro-choice, anti-war, and support health care for every American. I can tell you that Sarah Palin is a god damn insult to everything Hillary stood for, everything women have worked so long and so hard to achieve. Sarah Palin has experienced many things in her life. Most women base their political stances on their personal experiences. If that was the case with Sarah Palin, she would be exceptionally qualified, and I may in the future support someone with exactly her qualifications. But the fact is that despite mountains of personal experience that would cause any person without a blackened withered stone where their heart should be to become compassionate, wise, and peaceful, Sarah Palin is a bitter, sarcastic, self-serving puppet of corporations and religious zealots.

I have no problem with her qualifications, I have a problem with her.

I thought it was odd that she brought up “universal” healthcare for “every American” twice. That’s one of the few policies where she and Obama differed last time I checked. Obama’s healthcare plan is voluntary, so healthy Americans don’t have to join. Clinton’s would have forced those healthy Americans to join the plan to subsidize those with large healthcare bills. I actually prefered Clinton’s plan to Obama’s, because I’m a dirty socialist because those healthy Americans are merely subsidizing their future selves after an accident or the toll of old age, that’s hardly too big a burden, particularly when spread so wide. But it’s strange that she called on Obama to continue that fight, when he’s not fighting it in the first place.

One of the reasons I like Barack Obama is that he has class and grace. He does not engage in ad hominem attacks or accuse his adversaries of opposing him merely because they are biased. Clinton’s vision of the glass ceiling with eighteen million cracks in it was telling me, and all of my Obama-voting ilk that we are too shallow to have voted her down because of her policies and her style of campaign. I have heard Barack Obama say many times that he does not consider the nomination to be a fight for the presidency, but an opportunity for the American people to hear the policies debated and choose the policies they agree with. That’s change I can believe in.