WonderfulPessimist.com

While talking at voters yesterday, Michelle Obama - wife of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack “Barry” Obama - warned voters not to vote for someone because “I like that guy” or, “she’s cute.”

When asked whether she was targeting Alaska governor and GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin with that comment, Michelle replied that she had meant to reference herself with that comment.

One problem there: Michelle’s not on any ticket herself, so her rationalization doesn’t hold water. It was a Palin swipe, like it or not, and you don’t need cell phone amplifiers to hear that signal clearly.

It’s like finding a high-quality antique at a fraction of its true value at a discount furniture store: conservatives, who couldn’t find anyone they were really behind in the entire primary season, are now so over the moon for Sarah Palin that you’d think she was at the top of the ticket.

Palin resonates with blue-collar voters - “hockey moms” and the like - far more effectively and any Republican leader since Ronald Reagan. As a person who matured and came of voting age during Reagan’s run, Palin has done well modeling herself after the Reagan ethos.

So far, it appears Reagan would find a lot to be proud of in Palin become the successor to his mantle.

Let it never be said that WonderfulPessimist.com can’t admit that it was wrong. A few months ago, someone posted a comment to one of my articles insisting that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin would make the perfect running mate to John McCain.

I did some brief research into her background and basically pooh-poohed the idea. Why? Well, first I got some bad info on her; I was under the impression that, despite some otherwise nice conservative credentials, she was a global warming sell-out.

Turns out, that’s not the case. While she acknowledges the importance of climate change, she stated in her convention address that she doesn’t believe it’s man-made. At least that’s a middle-ground stance I can live with.

While my instincts are usually more reliable than life insurance quotes, I have to admit that as I learned more about Palin, I’ve become more and more impressed.

With only two years as governor under her belt, I certainly think 2012 would have been a better year for her, as well as for Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindall. But there’s no position better in this nation to train for the presidency than to be someone else’s running mate and vice-president.

WonderfulPessimist.com still has a sea of reservations about John McCain himself; yet with Palin on the ticket, we can at least trust there will be a solid conservative as his presumptive successor once his term is over - assuming McCain-Palin win. Can’t count those votes before they’re cast, after all.

And it does pose an interesting scenario for 2012. If McCain decides not to go for a second term, there is a very good chance that the GOP ticket next time around could be Palin-Jindall. For a Reagan conservative like me, that would be a dream come true.

And with a ticket like that in 2012, the charge could never again be made that the GOP is a home only to “angry white men.” Take that and stick it in your ear, Dems! Who’s the party of diversity now?

Who would have thought the governor of Alaska and a careless comment about lipstick could have such a huge impact on the political messiah, Barack “Barry” Obama?

John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin struck all the right chords to energize the GOP base, while at the same time intriguing middle-of-the-road and undecided voters, as well as not a few disenfranchised Hillary voters. It’s a dream come true for the GOP, which until the GOP Convention was buying into the Beltway spin that this was fated to be a big Democratic year.

Now, the promotional items are being ordered in bulk at McCain-Palin HQ, and there’s a new enthusiasm for the GOP ticket that comes from a pair of candidates who seem to not only be about “change,” but change with a full agenda of specific proposals - something Barry the Messiah is quite thin on.

Major Dem fundraisers and bigwigs are saying, behind the scenes, “Here we go again.”

Hey, considering it’s the Dem-led house and Senate that are riding the lowest approval ratings in US history, what did they expect, a cakewalk to the White House?

Oh wait… I guess they did.

Republican presumptive presidential nominee John McCain is floating the idea that he may pick a pro-choice Republican or even a Democrat as his running mate in his bid for the White House. Either choice would be the final slap in the face to the party’s conservative wing, and might well trigger a conservative revolt within the GOP, including a possible challenge on the convention floor. Such a move would be like weight loss pills in a voter and support sense of the word.

In spite of conventional wisdom, this is a very winnable year for the GOP, if they focus on energy policy and its linchpin role in affecting the economy. Not only could the party retain the White House, but if energy policy and the economy are the top focal issues, with foreign policy a strong third issue, the GOP could not only stave off predicted seat losses in the House and Senate, but potentially even post gains in both houses.

The key, however, is whether the party has learned that its losses of two years ago were caused by abandoning the GOP’s conservative core values, not by being too conservative.

Time will tell the tale on this one.

GOP presidential hopeful John McCain will promise today that he will balance the federal budget within four years - by the end of his presumptive first term in office. He plans to do this by eliminating wasteful spending and overhauling entitlement programs - including Social Security. So much for those retirement Hilton Head rentals we were all hoping for!

“In the long-term, the only way to keep the budget balanced is successful reform of the large spending pressures in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” the McCain campaign says in a policy paper to be released Monday. “The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.”

It’s a step in the right direction, but WonderfulPessimsit.com speculates he’ll make more headway with voters by keeping the “drill here, drill now, pay less” bandwagon issue front and center throughout the election season and into election day in November.

Today, Senator John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee for president, announced he’d appointed a new head of his campaign, Steve Schmidt. Schmidt, who replaces Rick Davis (who’ll stay on in a diminished role), joins a campaign that has been dormant while waiting for the Democrats to settle on who they would run against McCain.

The McCain campaign has been lax on fundraising, headline-making, organization and direction under Davis, and it’s hoped that Schmidt, who served in George W. Bush’s re-election campaign, will be able to bring new energy and vision to the McCain camp, making the letheragy of recent months a mere memory.

One thing’s certain: McCain’s VP choice is the easiest way to get him back in the headlines; let’s hope Schmidt is up to the task of helping McCain settle on a running mate who’ll engage the party’s conservative wing, which would go a long way toward re-energizing the McCain campaign.

While Hillary may have dashed the hopes of liberal women for a female in the White House, the GOP still has a legitimate - if somewhat longshot - contender to be John McCain’s running mate, a heartbeat away from the presidency if he wins in November.

Sarah Palin, the current GOP governor of Alaska, is hardly of the shrill, Hillary-like, progesterone-ingesting style of female politicians. For one, she is ardently pro-life and recently gave birth to a fifth child she knew would be born with Downs Syndrome. She has maverick credentials, going up against incumbant GOP governor Frank Murkowski, who she accused of impropriety, a charge that ultimately proved true.

Furthermore, she is a fiscal conservative. The problem for conservatives with Palin is that she buys into the Al Gore line on global warming, an important battle line in US energy reform; her views on domestic drilling, especially in her state’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, have been kept under wraps since emerging as a potential running mate for McCain.

Palin has potential, but comes from a state too small in electrol votes to be considered a lock; also, while she adds youth to the ticket, Palin has only been governor of Alaska for two years, lacks foreign policy experience and could be seen as underqualified for the second-in-command role.

We’ll see what McCain thinks soon, I’m sure.

A breath of fresh air has arrived on the scene in Bloomington, MN, politics. Bob Green, the GOP-endorsed candidate, has decided to take on Ann Lenczewski, the DFL incumbant for the Minnesota House District 40B seat this November, and unlike many Republicans in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, he’s an actual conservative.

Green is hoping to point out Lenczewski tax-increasing shortcomings in the upcoming contest, and certainly her record, which includes voting with her party to raise the state fuel tax in the middle of one of the largest oil price spikes in the last three decades, speaks for itself.

While WonderfulPessimist.com has been hesitent to embrace McCain for president, Pawlenty for governor or Coleman for US Senate, due to their liberal Republican tendancies, we have no such hesitation with Bob Green: if you’re tired of a career politician like Ann Lenczewski sitting in their home theater chairs and voting constantly to keep Minnesota one of the highest-taxed states in the nation, Bob Green is the guy to support this November in House District 40B!

Hoping to put a shine on his environmental suit of armor while not completely abandoning free-market solutions, GOP Presidential nominee John McCain on Monday proposed a $300 million award for the first person to, “an automobile battery that far surpasses existing technology.” To claim the prize, the car model would have to “deliver power at 30 percent of current costs and have “the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.”

It’s a unique idea that depends both on the capitalistic drive toward innovation and American ingenuity. The prize would equate to $1 from every American, and would result in a new generation of automobiles that would divorce America from its dependance on fossil fuels, not for reasons of so-called “global warming,” but as a way to save people money, an everyday pocketbook concern.

The foundations of such a solution have already been laid; the Science Channel recently aired a Mythbusters Young Scientists Challenge that featured electric cars that are equal or superior in speed and power to gas models. If such designs can be refined and made economically viable for commercial use without the long recharge times or the severely limited travel radiuses, it would certainly be an economic boon to the US economy, currently weighed down by gasoline costs.

Who would have thought that some of the most innovative ideas on energy reform would come from one of the oldest men to ever run for president?

California auto insurance may soon be cheaper than a gallon of gas in California if prices keep rising out of control. OPEC, perhaps a bit worried by John McCain’s commitment to increased drilling in the US under the “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” campaign, has become divided as Saudi Arabia has pledged to increase production by an additional 200,000 barrels a day by July, and up by nearly 3 million barrels per day by the end of 2009.

In spite of these aggressive new commitments, demand continues to outpace supply and refinery capacity, rising at a pace this year of about 1 percent, with production rising by only one-fifth of that pace. Clearly, depending on OPEC is not a winning strategy to guarantee future oil supplies and low prices going forward. Drill here, drill now, pay less.

As reliable as Nautica watches, presidential contender Sen. Hillary Rodham has not yet conceded the Democratic presidential race to Barack Obama, despite Obama exceeding the required delegate and superdelegate totals necessary to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination.

Here’s my advice to Hillary: Don’t concede. Take it all the way to Denver, all the way to the convention floor. And if the party successfully nominated Barack as the standard-bearer? Hah! Laugh it off! It’s only a minor setback for you, girlfriend. Keep fighting the good fight and reminding us of Rev. Wright and whatever other flaws you can dig up on this rookie Senator from Illinois. Who is he to deny you what’s yours by the Lewinsky Rule, right?

If necessary, go after the White House on the third-party bid. Call it the Hillary Party! Just keep hammering away at ol’ Barack and the Democratic Old Boys Club. Get nasty, get down with your bad self. Remember, this race is all about you defeating Barack, baby!

Never mind the nebbishy little liberal Republican in the corner. Global-warming Kool-Aid drinker John McCain? Why, he’s harmless. Just keep your sights on Barack, hon, and McCain’ll — I mean, YOU’LL go far!