Palin – Page 2 – Hank Kalet

First polls are in on debate

The initial polling appears to show that the public viewed Joe Biden’s performance last night as the stronger one during the debate, which is probably not good news for the McCain campaign.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. said 51 percent of those polled thought Biden did the best job, while 36 percent thought Palin did the best job.

But respondents said the folksy Palin was more likable, scoring 54 percent to Biden’s 36 percent. Seventy percent said Biden was more of a typical politician.

Both candidates exceeded expectations — 84 percent of the people polled said Palin did a better job than they expected, while 64 percent said Biden also exceeded expectations.

I’ll have more later — I want to give the transcript a good going-over, because I think it is important that the cliches, talking points, etc., be dissected and examined.

VP debate post-mortem 3

The transcript of the debate is available at The New York Times and I thought I’d offer a few thoughts about her use of catch phrases.

From Gov. Sarah Palin’s first response, talking about the bailout plan and John McCains (uhem) role in it:

I think that the alarm has been heard, though, and there will be that greater oversight, again thanks to John McCain’s bipartisan efforts that he was so instrumental in bringing folks together over this past week, even suspending his own campaign to make sure he was putting excessive politics aside and putting the country first.

Now, consider: The ticket apparently is still prepared to foist the kanard of McCain’s selfless decision to abandon his campaign and broker a bailout deal, a deal that failed to materialize and that most of those involved say he had no role in.

That said, this response offers a glimpse into the basic themes she will be pushing throughout the night, through the use of campaign catch phrases — “John McCain’s bipartisan efforts” and “putting the country first.”

She then launched the “maverick” meme — “maverick, maverick, maverick” — which left me thinking of the Biden joke about Giuliani (noun, verb, 9/11), only in this case it was the noun, verb, maverick, noun, verb, bipartisan, noun, verb, country first.

I wasn’t impressed, but I wasn’t the target audience. We’ll have to wait a few days to see what the polls say.

VP debate post-mortem 2

I think Sarah Palin probably calmed some of the fears being expressed by conservatives this week, but I have my doubts as to whether her performance did anything to convince the undecided voter. Joe Biden was strong and often passionate, while Palin was folksy and cliche-driven. I’d hope that most Americans could see through her facade.

I think she prefers this format to the one-on-one interviews she’s been doing, because it doesn’t allow for the direct follow-ups that have tripped her up recently. The debate actually allowed her to avoid answering a lot of questions.

VP debate post-mortem 1

Wow. Chris Matthews hit the two most important points — that Sarah Palin wants to explore an increased legislative role for the vice president and that she has no interest in dealing with the press (or even answer the questions that Gwen Ifill asked).

My sense in watching it was 1) that she had a short list of talking points and phrases and stayed with them as much as she could, 2) that she often fell into a garbled syntax that may indicate a lack of analytical skill, and 3) that a McCain-Palin administration is dangerous.

Palin talks and says nothing

The reviews of Sarah Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson are mixed and I’m not sure why. The parts I’ve seen showed her to be out of her element, uncomfortable answering questions that any presidential or vice-presidential candidate should have no problem addressing.

I think Juan Cole sums up best how she did:

Sarah Palin revealed herself in the Charlie Gibson interview on ABC to be nervous, uninformed, green and generally not ready for prime time. The interview was full of stock phrases she was made to memorize, and which she repeated over and over again when stumped. She knows nothing about how Iran is run, or about Pakistan, or about al-Qaeda, and even is ignorant of the Bush doctrine of preemptive warfare. It was a shockingly bad performance.

She had the hubris to suggest that her lack of knowledge and experience is a virtue. Why Americans, practical people, would fall for this line is beyond me. Would you want your car to be worked on by an inexperienced and ignorant mechanic? Would you want a plumber messing around with your pipes who did not know his way around wrenches?

I’m tired of her trumpeting being from a small town as if that is qualification for high office. It isn’t where you are from that matters. My parents are from Star Tannery, Va. and Winchester, Va., respectively, and I was born in Albuquerque, NM (not then a big city) and grew up mostly on army bases or in small places like Fuquay Springs, NC (near Ft. Bragg). These were not exactly Manhattan. We did not have a lot of money when I was growing up and I went to Northwestern on a scholarship. My background isn’t so different from hers. But Palin futzed around at this campus and that, at one point switching from the University of Hawaii because the campus was on the rainy side of Oahu. How frivolous! She isn’t well educated and doesn’t appear to have thought it was important to become so. She has never shown any interest in the world at large, which she now wants to run. She is clearly ambitious, but nothing is more dangerous than ambition with no qualifications.

Quite true. But what he found most appalling, however, was her willingness to BS her way through a discussion of the Bush Doctrine — the president’s declaration that we have the unilateral right to act prevent the possibility of an attack even before an imminent threat is likely.

She not only had no idea what the Bush doctrine was, she tried to BS her way through the question instead of being honest about not having heard of it. It is one thing to be ignorant about something, another not to be willing to admit it. The whole interview is painful for the narrow-minded and ill-informed view of the world it displays, but this is the nadir. And remember, McCain could have chosen Kay Bailey Hutchison if he wanted a woman on the ticket.

James Fallows adds this:

What Sarah Palin revealed is that she has not been interested enough in world affairs to become minimally conversant with the issues. Many people in our great land might have difficulty defining the “Bush Doctrine” exactly. But not to recognize the name, as obviously was the case for Palin, indicates not a failure of last-minute cramming but a lack of attention to any foreign-policy discussion whatsoever in the last seven years.