Are you satisfied that the candidates, Mr. McCain and Mrs. Palin, were fully qualified by experience and character to take on the roles of POTUS and VPOTUS, respectively?
John McCain? I gave him money 8 years ago, and worked full time for his campaign from the convention until Election Day. I can think of no American politician I would rather have in the Oval Office. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
Sarah Palin? Well, the 'role' of VPOTUS consists in being a citizen over 35 with a pulse (or, in Cheney's case, an electronic simulacrum thereof). And I'm sure she would look good in black at various foreign funerals.
More to the point, she's at least as qualified, dare I say more so, for either job than Barack Obama, whose resume is singulary devoid of bullet-point accomplishments beneath those impressive tittles.
do you believe you were well served by your party - assuming that the GOP was "your party" - in the past election?
I don't believe I've been well served by the GOP for the last ten years. Sad to say, the Republicans needed a good kick in the seat, so that they can start remembering what they once stood for.
Unfortunately for the nation, a discredited and disarrayed opposition is unlikely to be able to serve as such, and I fear a rapid descent into the hard-left abyss. Those who voted for Obama believing him to be a centrist, a moderate, a bi- or post-partisan figure, a uniter or a healer are quite possibly going to be extremely disillusioned.
is Mrs. Palin the sort of person you yourself chum around with? Like, is she the same "class" as you are, solictr?
No. But she is representative of the people I have known all my life and my ancestors before me in the Faulknerian South. I have great reaspect for the 'salt of the earth'- especiallty threirplainspoken sound judgment on most things. The same is largely true of the urban working cvlass like my wife's family. OTOH, as an intellectual and borderline blueblood myself I do *not* trust my own class, being as it is prone to subscribing to ideas, as Orwell put it, "so stupid only an intellectual could believe them." Bill Buckley, no mean mind himself, once ventured that he would rather the country were run by the first 400 names out of the Boston phone book than the Harvard faculty, and I'm inclined to agree.
I saw no "classist venom" on this forum
No, but neither were there any threats against Obama here. In the wider world, however, you can't deny that a great deal of the oppobrium directed at her was naked bigotry. There isn't any problem with opposing her views or those of any politician, including the President-elect. But to sneer at them for belonging to an "inferior" group is unacceptable, in either direction.
Ellie: Obama came from about as privileged an upbringing any American not named Bush or Kennedy can have.