Tag: Palin

A matter of choice

Ruth Marcus takes Sarah Palin at her word on the abortion issue and finds in her story a strong defense of a woman’s right to choose. Palin, of course, decided not to have an abortion when she became pregnant at age 44 with a Down syndrome child. She decided to keep the baby — a decision she made but that in her public statements she would deny others.

As Marcus writes,

I respect Palin’s decision not to “make it all go away.” She describes her doubts about whether she had the fortitude and patience to cope with a child with Down syndrome, and, with the force of a mother’s fierce love, the special blessing that Trig has brought to her life. She speaks as someone who is confident that she made the correct choice.

For her. In fact, the overwhelming majority of couples choose to terminate pregnancies when prenatal testing shows severe abnormalities. In cases of Down syndrome, the abortion rate is as high as 90 percent.

For the crowd listening to her at last week’s dinner, Palin’s disclosure served the comfortable role of moral reinforcement: She wavered in her faith, was tempted to sin, regained her strength and emerged better for it.

As for those us less certain that we know, or are equipped to instruct others, when life begins and when it is permissible to terminate a pregnancy, Palin’s speech offered a different lesson: Abortion is a personal issue and a personal choice. The government has no business taking that difficult decision away from those who must live with the consequences.

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Sarah Palin, plugged

Now that the debate is behind her, Sarah Palin appears to have little reason to hold back. As Kathleen Parker of The Washington Post explains, the vice-presidential candidate
has trained her moose-hunting sights on bigger trophies — Barack Obama and the media.

And in doing so, Parker says, she is proving to be especially adept at using Republican code words on the stump.

Palin successfully conveyed to those she was targeting that she is a Ronald Reagan-ish outsider who puts God and country first. And The Other is just like that elitist, flip-flopping John Kerry.

That’s a plateful of imagery and a buffet of touchstones familiar to those who distrust “elitists” and who recognize in Palin a kindred regularness.

Her folksy, but fiery, attacks are not new, of course. What the Palin stump speech amounts to is a distillation of the Karl Rove technique, of the divide and conquer approach used by the Republicans since the early 1960s when the country-clubbers were relegated to second-class citizens in a party that would come to be dominated by the angry and resentful. That was the lesson that Richard Nixon took from Barry Goldwater’s ill-fated 1964 presidential race, one in which he carried six states — his home state of Arizona and five traditionally Democratic southern states. Nixon read the political tea leaves, sensing a seismic shift in demographics that was reinforced when Ronald Reagan fanned the flames of racial resentment and anger at the hippies to take the California state house. Nixon then rode his Southern Strategy — building an electoral campaign on the same kind of disaffection — all the way to the White House. The divide-and-conquer approach became a Republican staple for 30-plus years.

One might have expected that, with the collapse of the so-called Republican brand with George W. Bush’s failed presidency, this verbal violence would have been relegated to the dustbin of history where it belongs.

It hasn’t, of course, and we have John McCain and Palin to thank (as well as Hillary Clinton, but that is a story for another time) for, as Parker writes, “amp(ing) up their rhetoric of difference.”

Neither McCain nor Palin would dare mention Obama’s middle name, Hussein, but they can play up Obama’s past associations and let others connect the dots. Terrorist. Muslim. Dangerous. Other.

It is legitimate to question character and dubious associations — and William Ayers is certifiably dubious. The truth is, Obama should have avoided Ayers, and his denouncement of Wright was tardy. But this is a dangerous game.

The McCain campaign knows that Obama isn’t a Muslim or a terrorist, but they’re willing to help a certain kind of voter think he is. Just the way certain South Carolinians in 2000 were allowed to think that McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh was his illegitimate black child.

The ugliness has a dangerous side, as demonstrated by reports on Politico and in The Washington Post (Parker cites these, as well). Dana Milbank describes a Palin rally that is chilling in its descent into something resembling fascism. Palin, he writes, continued attacking Obama for a loose connection to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers.

“Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” Palin said.

“Boooo!” said the crowd.

“And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'” she continued.

“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.

“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.

Chilling.

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Irritable candidate syndrome?

So, just to get this straight, Sarah Palin looked like she was a deer caught in a headlight during the Katie Couric interview, because of “irritation with the questions.”

“I was thinking, ‘Man, Americans wanna know about how I think we’re gonna win the war,’” and solve the country’s economic problems, she said, not learn about what she reads.

This is nonsense, of course, but we’re likely to keep hearing it over and over again until Nov. 4.

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Tongue twisters

Sarah Palin and the comedian Norm Crosby have a lot in common — though that is not a good thing.

Crosby was famous for being likably prone to verbal gaffs, building an entire career on mangling the language.

Palin, the Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate, has proven prone to what best can be described as verbal diarrhea, mangling her syntax as she rambles through her talking pints and cliches. (Read the transcript to understand what I’m talking about).

Consider this meandering, barely coherent answer to Gwen Ifill’s question about encouraging bipartisanship and curing the poisonous atmosphere in Washington:

You do what I did as governor, and you appoint people regardless of party affiliation, Democrats, independents, Republicans. You — you walk the walk; you don’t just talk the talk.

And even in my own family, it’s a very diverse family. And we have folks of all political persuasion in there, also, so I’ve grown up just knowing that, you know, at the end of the day, as long as we’re all working together for the greater good, it’s going to be OK.

But the policies and the proposals have got to speak for themselves, also. And, again, voters on November 4th are going to have that choice to either support a ticket that supports policies that create jobs.

You do that by lowering taxes on American workers and on our businesses. And you build up infrastructure, and you rein in government spending, and you make our — our nation energy independent.

Or you support a ticket that supports policies that will kill jobs by increasing taxes. And that’s what the track record shows, is a desire to increase taxes, increase spending, a trillion-dollar spending proposal that’s on the table. That’s going to hurt our country, and saying no to energy independence. Clear choices on November 4th.

Gail Collins offers what can best be described as a back-handed compliment, describing what is like to happen, now that the vice-presidential debate has come and gone.

(A)fter the Couric debacle, you can bet your boots that the campaign is going to take Palin’s debate performance, declare victory and wrap her up until after the election.

This is all a terrible shame. For us, mainly. But also for Palin, whose intelligence and toughness may wind up buried under the legend of her verb-deprived ramblings.

This is a good way to describe her linguistic approach, which Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, views as potentially indicative of an inability to grasp issues.

The debate, he says, was not a “test of clear thinking,” because its “format was far less demanding than a face-to-face interview — the kind Ms. Palin had with Katie Couric of CBS.”

Why? Because in a one-on-one conversation, you can’t launch into a prepared speech on a topic unrelated to the question. Imagine this exchange — based on the first question that the moderator, Gwen Ifill, gave Ms. Palin and Senator Joe Biden — if it took place in casual conversation over coffee:

LISA How about that bailout? Was this Washington at its best or at its worst?

MICHAEL You know, I think a good barometer here, as we try to figure out has this been a good time or a bad time in America’s economy, is go to a kid’s soccer game on Saturday, and turn to any parent there on the sideline and ask them, “How are you feeling about the economy?”

Lisa would flee. (This was, in fact, Ms. Palin’s response.) In a conversation, you have to build your sentence phrase by phrase, monitoring the reaction of your listener, while aiming for relevance to the question. That’s what led Ms. Palin into word salad with Ms. Couric. But when the questioner is 30 feet away on the floor and you’re on a stage talking to a camera, which can’t interrupt or make faces, you can reel off a script without embarrassment. The concerns raised by the Couric interviews — that Ms. Palin memorizes talking points rather than grasping issues — should not be allayed by her performance in the forgiving format of a debate.

Her ramblings, of course, are reminiscent of the ramblings of another former governor, one who did ascend to the White House and whose lack if intellectual curiosity is directly responsible for recklessly driving our foreign policy off a cliff.

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