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?
More importantly, does John McCain know or care if any of this is true? What else will we learn that McCain did or did not know?
Does he care that her signature claim, that she refused federal money for the Bridge to Nowhere, is a lie. She didn't refuse it, she diverted it to other projects after the bridge, which she was firmly behind a year earlier, lost most of its financial support.
When he claimed he chose her in part because of her opposition to earmarks and other pork projects, did he know she had packed more pork into her budget from the federal government than mayors of towns dozens of times larger?
But do we really want someone a heartbeat away from the Oval Office whose greatest political asset is that she knows little or nothing about Washington politics or world affairs?
This is not about whether a woman can be president. The question is whether this woman is ready to be president.
Because, if the answer is "no," then John McCain is not ready to be president.
I'm not trying to plot McCain's life expectancy on an actuarial chart. I hope he lives 100 years.
But this is a question of judgment. Did he, as he likes to say, put country first when he chose her to be next in line for the most powerful job on earth?
To me, it feels like a political move calculated to energize his base.
I hope they prove me wrong. If not, he doesn't deserve my vote or yours. *
Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith
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