Storytime with Miss Sarah

She started with the standard "I am so proud to be an American," paid respect with "happy birthday Ronald Reagan," and almost blew it with a lame "ice tea" joke. The lady who taught her Alaskan constituents that deals - like governing a state for the full term one is elected to - need to be honored only for as long as one pleases, gave the nation a lesson on "common sense values" at the convention of the Tea Party, whose members she characterized as "kind and selfless."

In a style that is usually employed by story tellers to entertain and awe toddler audiences, she attempted to ridicule the Obama administration for not being able to fix within a single year the mess George Bush had eight years to create. Betting on the audience's short memory, she skipped the fact that Bush inherited the largest budget surplus in the nation's history - $230 billion - and squandered it immediately. The budget was in the hole again by $200 billion after his first year in office, and by $1.8 trillion by the end of his second term. The Obama administration has since reduced that amount by $500 billion.

Not worth to be mentioned by Miss Sarah, though. Instead she fired a "we don't need to increase taxes" at an undisclosed target. I don't know anyone who's taxes have increased. But I know a lot of people who's interest on credit card purchases has more than doubled. Banks used the extra revenue created that way to repay the bailout money and then felt free to resume the practice of paying ridiculous bonuses to their managers, effectively giving the American people the finger.

Meanwhile Miss Sarah mused "small businesses grow our economy one job at a time." Really? It's been so long since I saw a "Now Hiring" sign in the window of a small store, I forgot what it looks like. With credit card interest rates at a record high - despite record low prime lending rates - and most good paying manufacturing jobs relocated to communist China, who can afford to shop at small stores or buy goods manufactured in the US? The banks themselves are aware of this dilemma and reacted unpatriotically by reducing their lending to small businesses by more than $12 billion, worried they may never get that money back. Attempts by the administration to nudge large financial institutions in the direction of reason and decency earned Miss Sarah's remark, "Washington replaced private irresponsibility with public irresponsibility."

She went on to lament about "sticking our kids with the bill" and demanded to "get serious about getting our financial house in order," but offered no ideas on how to do that; obviously there is a difference between a story teller and a consultant. She was not shy, though, to quote one of the founders of the world's oldest democratic party with a convenient principle.

"The government that governs least governs best," she chirped. With all due respect to Thomas Jefferson, by that standard nations like Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan must be among the world's best countries, since their governments govern very little, if at all. Maybe Miss Sarah should seriously consider moving to one of them, have herself elected, and then quit the job before the end of the first term; the ultimate form of "governing least."

Nevertheless, there are issues where she would like to see some more governing. "We're not supporting the movement in Iran," she observed and pointed out that there hasn't been much freeing of struggling people going on, lately. She did that well before and safely distanced from the "sticking our kids with the bill" and "get serious about getting our financial house in order" parts, so the audience won't detect the contradiction.

She does have a vision for a world in peace, and shared it: "Democracies don't go to war with each other." Not sure if that includes the following nations with democratically elected governments: Israel and Palestine who seem to exist only for the purpose of beating up each other, India and Pakistan who appear eager to be the first countries to settle border disputes with nuclear weapons, Georgia and Russia who keep swinging at each other like two alcoholics that don't remember what it was all about or who started it. To Miss Sarah's credit I should mention that, unlike Siberia, none of these countries is clearly visible from her home in Wasilla, so she has no way of knowing what's going on there.

She asked her audience to "please understand that candidates are humans." Fair. As long as those candidates, after being elected, still understand that their constituents are humans as well. Humans who get sick and need healthcare; humans who deserve to live in dignity, humans who have dreams and the right to pursue them, humans whose needs deserve priority over the ones of corporations and foreign investors.

The lesson ended with the revelation "the government is supposed to work for the people". Most of us already knew that, but for Miss Sarah that's a big step. Then again, it doesn't really complement her earlier statement that the best government is the one that governs least. Unless she combines the two, resulting in "the government is supposed to work very little for the people."

And that wouldn't be out of character for Miss Sarah as we know her.