Where Were They Then?

Back in March, I chronicled where the people in the political news were in 1969. Let's play again.

The "beauty queen" sneer has been brought out enough times that it deserves comment. At 20, Sarah Palin was a Miss Alaska contestant while a journalism student at U Idaho. Not much of a positive as a VP candidate, but hard to see it as a negative.

At 20, Obama was a cocaine-user at Oxy (but not a dealer! And that's important.) Biden was an unremarkable student at U Delaware, flunking ROTC but getting A's in Phys Ed. He would shortly go on to be a law school plagiarist, lifting 5 pages of a law review without attribution and putting it in his 15 page paper. That actually may be a qualification for public office these days.

Or if you prefer to ask what they were doing in the 1984 year that Sarah was Miss Wassilla, Obama was working for a PIRG, a student run non-profit in NYC. Nothing wrong with that, but not much of a positive either. Biden was plagiarizing again, this time from British politician Neil Kinnock. Joe was also insisting to Henry Kissinger that the USSR could be reasoned, but Reagan was unnecessarily ticking them off.

If you prefer considering what they were doing more recently, an example is here.