I have become a fan of Merlin Mann more and more in recent months. His Inbox Zero presentation should be required viewing for just about anybody who uses e-mail in a business setting today.

I just saw his How to Blog presentation, and it’s worth spending some time with, even if you don’t consider yourself a blogger. Anyone who is involved with any type of social media — blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. — would benefit from watching this thing. It’s a little long, so if you have a limited attention span, you’ve been warned.

Lawrence Lessig put together a very nice analysis of Sarah Palin’s experience as a qualification for her candidacy for the vice presidency. It’s about 12 minutes, and you can watch it below.

I think this is a very fair treatment of the facts. Unlike so many Democrats and Obama supporters, Lessig deals with facts and not emotions. Rather than wasting time talking about Palin’s personal life or her role in some larger cultural narrative about feminism or whatever other tactic they have employed, Lessig asks a couple of simple questions:

1. How does Sarah Palin’s experience stack up against previous vice presidents’ experience?
2. Does her relative lack of experience and the 20% chance that she may be called upon to serve as president thereby disqualify her candidacy?

Lessig does a nice job running through the experience of 46 vice presidents and concluding that, with the exception of two, Palin is the least qualified.

He then concludes that because nine of the 46 vice presidents have been called upon to serve as president (and the likelihood that McCain as the oldest president with prior health problems would raise the odds of Palin succeeding him), and because of the looming financial crisis, multiple wars, and global warming, Palin would not be a fit president.

Fair enough. I think that’s a strong argument. But I do think that there are some further questions that ought to be asked before this conclusion can be met with any certainty.

The question of experience is an important one. It’s generally assumed that a person with extensive experience makes for a better president or vice president. But is that true? Lessig fails to take that next step and actually show a link between experience and performance in the office.

There have been plenty of very experienced men who have been terrible presidents and vice presidents. In fact some of the most experienced men have been mediocre or miserable chief executives. George H.W. Bush comes to mind as an emminently qualified vice president and president whose tenure was marked by very little substantive accomplishment. Richard Nixon was another incredibly qualified candidate whose record will forever be tainted by terrible decisions.

Is there a correlation between experience for an office and performance in that office? If so, how close are the two related? In recent memory, we’ve had several presidents who came into office with limited, but comparable, executive experience (Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush), none of it at the federal level. How did they fare?

At the same time, we ought to apply this same test to Barack Obama. Republicans have spent a lot of time pointing out his lack of executive experience. Does it matter? If it matters for Palin, should it also apply to Obama?

I think this is a good discussion to have, and I’m glad somone is approaching it from this perspective.

When Brian McLaren writes stuff like this and this, I wonder if he realizes that he’s doing exactly what guys like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell were doing nearly 30 years ago.

I think that Christians in positions of prominence, like McLaren, ought to be very hesitant to support political candidates. I think this should apply to Republican candidates as well as Democratic candidates.

One of the reasons our country has found itself in the right-vs-left mentality that has dominated the political conversation for so much of the last generation is because Christians have allowed themselves to be seduced into the practice of attaching their names, churches, ministries, radio programs, publishing houses, etc. to political candidates. Instead, Christian leaders should support ideas that reflect the ideas that advance the Kingdom of God, not the candidacy of Bush, McCain, Clinton, or Obama.

Imagine what it would look like if guys like McLaren, Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, and Tony Campolo on the left got together with Jim Dobson, Pat Robertson, Richard Land, and Chuck Colson on the right and listened to each other, prayed with each other, studied the Bible together, and put together an agenda that advanced the things that Jesus cares about. Rather than worrying about conservative or liberal ideology, what if Christians got together and said, we need to talk about ways that the government and the church can co-exist in this world and take care of people as Jesus would?

Could you imagine what this conversation would sound like on issues like abortion? Maybe we could get beyond the pro-life vs. pro-choice nonsense and actually talk about caring for pregnant mothers with unwanted pregnancies. Maybe we could talk about ways to help those women and their families in ways that have nothing to do with Roe v. Wade.

Could you imagine what this conversation would sound like on the environment? Maybe we could start to talk about caring for God’s creation. Maybe we could talk about stewardship and conservation in ways that don’t demonize people or institutions needlessly. Maybe we could talk about ways of showing our love for God spill over into a love for the earth.

Could you imagine what this conversation would sound like on poverty, race, national security, marriage, justice, opportunity, taxes?

But I don’t think we’ll ever get there. Instead, Brian McLaren (and plenty of stupid people on the right, as well) will perpetuate the us-vs-them, right-vs-left stereotypes that ultimately will never lead to solutions.

An interesting perspective on Sarah Palin, from the former chief of staff to Jerry Falwell:

Mark DeMoss, former chief of staff to Jerry Falwell and now a leading Christian public relations executive, is hoping that Palin turns out well but has been shocked and worried by the reflexive Christian embrace of her.

“Too many evangelicals and religious conservative are too preoccupied with values and faith and pay no attention to competence. We don’t apply this approach to anything else in life, including choosing a pastor.” Imagine, he said, if a church was searching for a pastor and the leadership was brought a candidate with great values but little experience. “They’ve been a pastor for two years at a church with 150 people but he shares our values, so we hired him to be pastor of our 5,000 person church? It wouldn’t happen! We don’t say, ‘He shares our values, so let’s hire him.’ That’s absurd. Yet we apply that to choosing presidents. It blows my mind.”

There’s been a lot of vitriol spewed by certain segments of the media during the last week in regards to Gov. Sarah Palin’s candidacy. Much of it has been completely ridiculous.

Setting the politics aside, I find Dan Kimball’s observation the most intriguing so far:

It is dawning on me however, as I have been reading some blogs and hearing which Christian leaders are excited about her - that many of them are from complementarian churches. Which means as they are enthusiastic about her becoming vice president and making incredibly important decisions for our country for both men and women and make speeches and lead - she couldn’t teach the pulpit, or be an elder or pastor in their church and make decisions or lead men and women in a church setting.

How about that? The theology of the Palin pick is something that I have yet to see fleshed out, but I think this is a great place to start.

UPDATE: So I saw this interview with Richard Land on CT’s website. Here’s his take:

The only restrictions we find in Scripture are, that for whatever reason women are not to be in charge of a marriage and women are not to be in charge of a church. That has nothing to do with governor, or senator or the House of Representatives, or president, or vice president.

And now the mainstream press is catching on.

I think it’s curious that so many people have been comparing and contrasting Sarah Palin with Barack Obama in the last few weeks. In some ways, they are quite comparable. In other ways, they are a study in contrasts.

I’m a little befuddled by assertions like this, though, from Publius:

She may be a dud, or she may be the next Abraham Lincoln. The point is that no one knows.

What’s troubling then is not so much her, but the way in which both the conservative base and apparently a decent chunk of swing voters have embraced her on the basis of essentially nothing but media images and prepared speeches. It’s surface politics gone wild.

99.9% of the American public has known Palin for approximately two weeks. Her great moment was a prepared speech written by someone else. Even though people know very little about her, that’s not stopping them from projecting their own policy preferences upon her.

But people know PLENTY about her. Within two weeks, we’ve learned all about her, her family, her upbringing, her church, and just about anything else you could think of. Oh, and because she’s an elected official, she’s got a record of accomplishments, both good and bad. In fact, there might not be a more thoroughly vetted candidate in American politics at this point.

Publius goes on to compare Palin’s ascent to Obama’s:

Obama isn’t the nominee because of that speech. He’s the nominee because he was tested over the course of a grueling 2 year campaign that took out the Clinton political team. He’s also been a Senator in that time, and has showed an almost eerily efficient managerial competence under extremely high stress.

This is just absurd. Obama is the crown prince of surface politics. He’s never had to run in a competitive election in his brief political career. He was a virtual unknown in the Illinois legislature (where he voted “present” nearly 130 times) until he ran for Senate in 2004. That campaign featured the good fortune of multiple opponents suffering both critical and mortal political wounds that paved the way for Obama’s quick ascension to the US Senate.

Once in the Senate, Obama declared he would not run for the White House. Then, he changed his mind after barely settling into his new digs. During the brief time he was actually representing the people of Illinois in the US Senate, his leadership was so unremarkable, that Gov. Palin was able to get away with claiming that he had not authored any substantive legislation. Now, technically she’s incorrect, but can anybody name the legislation that Obama has authored?

Meanwhile, during the “grueling” two-year campaign that Obama has been so efficiently waging, he’s done very little to make his position on just about any issue clear.

First, he was against the troop surge in Iraq. But now, he claims it has been wildly successful. But he still would not have voted for it if he could do it over again.

Then, he was all about raising taxes …  Oh, but now he’s re-thinking that position, because, well, raising taxes during a recession is a stupid idea.

And after Mr. Bipartisan has made several flippant remarks about abortion, most recently at the Sabbleback forum, he’s now trying to clean up after himself, even though he has one of the most liberal pro-choice voting records in Washington.

Nearly all of Obama’s success has come from the fact that he’s been treated like a celebrity from the day he began his campaign. At no point has Obama’s stance on any issue become the focal point of his campaign. In fact, Obama continues to dodge and weave on issues, trying to find nuance and parsing language to appeal to as many as possible.

Say what you will about Palin, but let’s not pretend Obama has not enjoyed much of the same media adulation, resulting in the same kind of 25 feet wide, 2 inches deep kind of candidacy. The difference? Palin’s been on the ticket for 2 weeks. Obama’s been campaigning for 2 years.

Obama: “I’ve got two daughters … [and] if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”

Palin: “We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support.”

In 2000, the Democratic Party platform included a plank that read, “Our goal is to make abortion less necessary and more rare …” [PDF]

In 2004, the only reference to abortion in the party platform is this: “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” [PDF]

In 2008, the platform looks like this: [PDF]

The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all
efforts to weaken or undermine that right.

The Democratic Party also strongly supports access to comprehensive affordable family planning services and age-appropriate sex education which empower people to make informed
choices and live healthy lives. We also recognize that such health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for
abortions.

The Democratic Party also strongly supports a woman’s decision to have a child by ensuring access to and availability of programs for pre- and post-natal health care, parenting skills, income support, and caring adoption programs.

The word “rare” has disappeared from the platform. Instead, there’s a paragraph that links “affordable family planning services” and “age-appropriate sex education” with the ability to reduce the number of unwanted pregancies and the need for abortions.

So is the goal of the Democratic Party to actually reduce the number of abortions to achieve “rarity”? Or is it simply to contintue to fund so-called “family planning services”? I guess Planned Parenthood falls under that heading. That would be Planned Parenthood, who recorded record revenue of $1.018 billion in FY2006 [PDF]. Roughly a third of that revenue came from government contracts and grants. In that year, they performed 289,750 abortions, up from 264,963 the previous year. The number of “adoption referrals”? 2410.

According to the Democrats platform, more family planning means fewer unwanted pregnancies, which means fewer abortions, right? Ummm … the data doesn’t seem to support that. Planned Parenthood is well-funded, and by all accounts, performing all kinds of family planning services. But the number of abortions they are performing is actually increasing. Now, the overall number of abortions nationwide has been on the decline in recent years, but there is nothing to suggest that there is a connection between the funding of family planning or sex ed and this decline.

And what’s Barack Obama’s plan to reduce the number of abortions?