My friend Jazz Shaw asks two provocative questions today at The Moderate Voice about Sarah Palin and the election.  They revolve around family and experience, two questions that have arisen from accident and design.  The answers to them will certainly provide a kind of political Rorschach test, but they are worthwhile questions.

What would the response be if Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, and his wife Michelle had a pregnant unmarried teenage daughter?

I’d like to think that most people would leave it alone.  Since that’s obviously not happening with Bristol Palin, then the next answer would depend on what the Obamas did about the pregnancy.  If the hypothetical daughter chose to keep the baby or put the child up for adoption, they would get lauded for their response.  If she had an abortion, it would stir up a hornet’s nest of reactions across the spectrum and turn into a political football.

The fact that a family has an unplanned teen pregnancy really isn’t that significant.  What matters is how they handle it.  In a way, I’d reject the framing of that question, because unless the Obamas locked their teenagers in dungeons, the pregnancy doesn’t reflect on the parents at all.

Would Sara Palin, given her breadth of experience, history, views and issues, been selected by Sen. John McCain as his running mate if she were a man?

Views and issues?  Absolutely, as well as “history”; it was her track record on reform that McCain most wanted on the ticket.  On the experience question, allow me to respond with another question, and let’s see if people still want to play the Identity Politics game.  Why did the Democrats nominate Barack Obama for the Presidency with only three years in the Senate, seven years in the Illinois legislature, with no executive, military, foreign-policy, or private-sector experience at all, and no legislative track record at any level?

That’s the trouble with questions like these.  They tend to lead to more questions.