STRIKES

In baseball, you get three strikes, and then you are "out." In real life, you may be "out" after only one or two strikes or you may get many more.

My wife walked in this morning as I was working at my home desk, and she told me that the 17-year-old daughter of the Republican vice presidential candidate was five-months pregnant.

We already knew that the Republican vice presidential candidate was a woman, had a five-month-old baby with Down syndrome, and was breast-feeding. To some people, this information already added up to three strikes. Did this latest "strike" mean that Governor Palin is "out"? I sure hope not! Life is too complicated to make decisions simply by adding up strikes. I am not even sure which, if any, of these facts is a strike when it comes to choosing a vice presidential candidate. Surely, there must be more important criteria than the candidate's gender and family issues.

Is Governor Palin a good candidate for vice president of the United States? Many people will be debating this issue up until Election Day. If her running mate at the top of the "ticket," Senator McCain, and she are elected in November, this debate no doubt will continue for years to come.

I hope that the real issues are the ones that will be debated. These issues revolve around policies, experience and judgment. Reliability and integrity also are factors, but I hope we find better ways of evaluating them than through micro-inspection of each candidate’s child-rearing practices and other very personal information.

It is always tempting to make decisions about complex issues based on concrete and easily established facts. If these facts are relevant to the decision, there is nothing wrong with considering them. Nevertheless, we must prioritize consideration of less concrete but more relevant factors when making our decision. These priority considerations do not include a candidate's gender or the reproductive condition of her children regardless of their age or marital status.