I'VE ALWAYS been wary of gut-shot poker players and guys who fire from the hip.
I admire their courage. But when I look for people to track my investments or, say, run my country, I like to think that handling my business will keep them up nights.
I'm not talking about someone who dithers indecisively or whose favorite color is plaid. But if you are acting on my behalf, I want you to have at least a second thought before reaching for the phone.
John McCain was acting on my behalf when he settled suddenly on Sarah Palin as his running mate. I know that she answered a long questionnaire and that McCain once had a brush with her at some convention or other.
But I don't think a man who would be president demonstrates his deliberative tendencies by asking someone he had one sit-down meeting with to help him run the country. I just don't see John McCain as that quick a study.
The governor, her blue-collar husband and their five children make a compelling family photo. That tasty bit of Americana was freeze-framed into our consciousness in her pre-speech photo-op on Wednesday.
I loved that moment when their youngest daughter was caught on camera grooming her baby brother's hair. It was all Norman Rockwell and stuff.
As for her political chops, she didn't miss a note in her destruction of an effigy she built in the likeness of Barack Obama. There were enough sound bites in that slab of red meat to amuse us cursed media types for the next few news cycles.
Plays great on the tube, especially when judged on the scale of low expectations. But when she claims her tenure as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, gives her more executive experience than Sens. Obama and Joe Biden combined, it's a little too cute to be taken seriously.
Some executive experiences outweigh others. People in Detroit are having an executive experience right now watching Kwame Kilpatrick's perp-walk on TV.
Let's assume that she served Wasilla with far more honor than people in Detroit got from their mayor.
But what little we know about Mayor Palin includes an allegation that she fired a police chief because he wanted bars to close earlier than some of her bar-owning contributors did, and that there is a state investigation into allegations that she fired her public safety director after he didn't fire a state trooper who was divorcing her sister.
Maybe none of that is true. But what is?
