More About Palin on Special Needs and Obama on Disability

Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin on the issues she intends to focus on should John McCain and her be elected in November, from Jonathan Martin’s blog on today’s Washington Examiner:

“John and I have worked out a plan, what I want to concentrate on and what he would like to kind of tap into me to help with,” Palin said at a rally just outside Denver this morning. “My mission is going to energy security and government reform. And another thing near and dear to my heart, it’s going to be helping families who have special needs and children with special needs. And we’re going to be pushing for innovative cures for diseases.”

Martin notes that Palin has a child with Down Syndrome and an autistic nephew.

From her statement, it seems that she views whatever conditions fall under “special needs” as diseases (including, one may infer, autism) and hence is speaking about “cures.” What “innovative” means, is much vaguer.

I blogger earlier today about Palin and the broader disability community and noted in particular her “dismissive mockery of community organizing and its portent for the disability community,” as stated in a guest post by the directors of the Beach Center on Disability in Kansas. For more on Palin’s saying that she plans to be an “advocate” for those with special needs, see today’s Body Impolitic, which also refers readers back to an April analysis by disabilities scholar Michael Bérubé on the topic of Obama and Clinton and disability, and on notions of accessibility and truly understanding the world from a disability perspective.