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I’ve tried. Repeatedly.  I even went out to dinner with a Republican to attempt to make sense of the conclusion so many McCain-Palin voters have reached — Sarah Palin is a great choice for VP.

I’ll be the first to say that I wish I had her schmoozing skills.  Palin has a way of gift wrapping words that drives the Republican base wild.  She’s that colleague at work that you love going for drinks with because she tells the funny stories and relates to everyone at the office.  She’s the big sister you want to confide in.  I could look past her political orientation and be frenemies with Sarah Palin.  Yes, frenemies. Because I have no doubt she’d stab me in the back, and the front, if I stood in the way of an opportunity she wanted to pursue.

But being personable is not a qualification for being Vice-President; it’s a qualification for getting invited to a hot-ticket dinner party.  And it’s incredibly short sighted of voters to want the “girl next door” to reside a seventy-two year-old’s heart beat away from the Presidency.

Sure. She’s just like you and me.  A mid-September poll by the NYTimes and CBS found that “77% of Republicans said they had a favorable view of Palin.” The adjectives brought to mind by Palin:

But when asked what specifically they liked about her, their top five reasons were that she was honest, tough, caring, outspoken and fresh-faced. . . (By the way, her intelligence was in a three-way tie for eighth place, right behind “I just like her.”)

So you need to ask yourself, are YOU qualified to be Vice-President?  Would you be comfortable being thrown on a national stage handling the Wall Street melt down with the leader of your political party? Or the next terrorist attack by foreigners (since we like to avoid labeling the home grown variety as such)? How would you make health care affordable for uninsured, high risk Americans?

If you possess or are working towards a degree in political science, economics, public diplomacy, international relations or history, you are over qualified and exempt from this line of questioning. You know way more than the average American about internal and external forces and policies that shape the current political and financial climate of America to answer.

I suspect most Americans would not want to shoulder the burden of a national economic crisis, let alone be determine the best course of action from the myriad he or she is offered. Surely, you don’t want the girl next door, who cruised through 5 schools in 6 years (more evidence of her short attenton span?) before graduating with a degree in  journalism influencing those executive decisions.  The clean up of 8 years of a Bush administration in charge is not the job of light weights or those who agreed with Bush 90% of the time

Jay of Ill Doctrine shares his take on what voter need to do in light of the current economic crisis sucking up Wall Street, with Main Street already stunted.

That feeling that you’re feeling right now, hoping and praying that you leaders are actually smarter than you.  Please remember that feeling when you go in the voting booth. Because just this once, I think we really need to vote for the annoying smart guy.

I know how you feel. He’s always got this smug look on his face, and it brings up all our esteem issues from high school, but we need him right now. As soon as this crisis is over, we can give him a wedgie and lock him inside his locker.  But this is his moment.

I know this is not an easy choice. But this moment in history is a time for courage.  It is a time for change.  It is time for a nerd we can believe in.

Out of all the people I know, I can think of one person, I’d trust to make hard decisions with global ripples.  And he’s not the guy next door. He’s an arrogant know-it-all that has spent years reading up on economics and politics, both domestic and foreign.  He makes me feel really dumb a lot, but I keep going back for more because he inspires me to be better.  He’s a cut above the rest, and it’s that quality I want in the leadership that represents my country. It’s a quality that’s sorely missing from both halves of the Republican ticket.