“Mama Grizzlies” Early Campaign Spot?

By ANDY BARR

Sarah Palin released a video Thursday that has the feel of an early campaign spot.

The video, titled "Mama Grizzlies," is produced by her political action committee and splices shots of Palin speaking and appearing with supporters and at tea party rallies.

Palin’s remarks in the video, which borrow heavily from her speech to the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, touts this year as the year of conservative women.

Sarah palin as a cartoon

“This year will be remembered as a year when common sense conservative women get things done for our country,” Palin says at the beginning of the nearly two-minute video. “All across this country, women are standing up and speaking out for common sense solutions.”

As Palin speaks, the video shows images of women young and old watching Mrs. Palin and holding signs protesting the Democratic majority in Washington.

One elderly woman in the video is making her way through a tea party rally in a wheelchair with a “Don’t Tread on Me” sign on back.

Another sign reads: “Annoy Liberal: Work Hard & Pay Your Own Bills.”

“These policies coming out of D.C. right now, this fundamental transformation of America — well a lot of women concerned about their kids' futures are saying we don’t like this fundamental transformation and we’re going to do something about it,” Palin says. “It seems like it’s kind of a mom awakening in the last year and a half where women are rising up and saying ‘no, we’ve had enough already.’ Because moms sort of just know when something is wrong.

Palin’s Deception

We’re going to turn this thing around. We’re going to get our country back on the right track,” she continued. “Look out Washington, cause there’s a whole stampede of elephants crossing the line and the e.t.a. for them stampeding through is November 2, 2010.”

 

 

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Lies and Ignorant Statements by Sarah Palin

By Jason Linkins

As much as I try to hew to what I call Weigel's First Constant — which asserts that a diminished value should be placed on the social network statements that emerge from somewhere in the camp of Sarah Palin — this is just too bizarre not to mention.

See, as everyone knows, Palin is pretty much defined as the ultimate in "Drill, Baby, Drill". And she has so many thoughts on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and What It Means. Mostly, her thoughts evolves slowly, as she learns from other people what she is supposed to think about any given issue. But today, Sarah Inc. took to its Twitter account to offer some lessons about What The Gulf Oil Spill Teaches Us. Her bottom line: don't trust the foreign oils!

Gulf: learn from Alaska's lesson w/foreign oil co's: don't naively trust- VERIFY. Livelihood affected by spill?Don't sign away remedy rightsless than a minute ago via OpenBeakSarah Palin
SarahPalinUSA

Yes, it's obviously the fault of those devious Brits! Commence the racial profiling, right?

Of course, while it's based in Britain, BP is a massive, publicly-traded, multinational energy conglomerate, commonly referred to as a "supermajor". It's just one of three companies that are heavily involved with the Deepwater Horizon facility. The other two are Halliburton, an American company, and TransOcean. Spawned from a U.S. company called Sonat, TransOcean became what it is today after mergers with and acquisitions of various foreign entities. It's now headquartered in Switzerland.

Fun fact! I'm not sure that Palin knows this, but another "supermajor" is ExxonMobil, a United States company that I seem to recall has a rather complicated history with the state of Alaska for some reason.

UPDATE:  For eighteen long years, that dodgy, not-to-be-trusted foreign oil company known as British Petroleum_ Alaska employed Todd Palin  

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Sarah and Todd Palin are liars and hypocrites!! Why are they allowed to continue in their lies and ingnorant statements?

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PalinSpeak: Why does she talk that way?

….” But Palin, doing this even when speaking to the whole nation, is no further outside of her head than we are when talking about what’s going on at work over a beer. The issues, American people, you name it, are “there” — in other words, not in her head 24/7. She hasn’t given them much thought before; they are not her. They’re that, over there.

 

Sarah is a Disgrace

By John McWhorter

Why does Sarah Palin talk the way she does? Just what is this sort of thing below?

We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there and understand the contrast. And we talk a lot about, OK, we're confident that we're going to win on Tuesday, so from there, the first 100 days, how are we going to kick in the plan that will get this economy back on the right track and really shore up the strategies that we need over in Iraq and Iran to win these wars?

Just forty years ago people would be shocked to read something like this as a public statement from someone even pretending, as Palin pretty much had to have been by the time of this quote, that they were going to be serving in a Presidential Administration.

It’s not quite Bushspeak, which, with the likes of “I know what it’s like to put food on my family,” was replete with flagrantly misplaced words with a frequency that made for guesses, not completely in jest, that he might suffer from a mild form of Wernicke’s aphasia, interfering with matching word shapes to meanings. (Bush the father wasn’t much better in this regard—there just wasn’t an internet to make collecting the slips and spreading them around so easy.)

Rather, Palin is given to meandering phraseology of a kind suggesting someone more commenting on impressions as they enter and leave her head rather than constructing insights about them. Or at least, insights that go beyond the bare-bones essentials of human cognition — an entity (i.e. something) and a predicate (i.e. something about it).

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What truly distinguishes Palin’s speech is its utter subjectivity: that is, she speaks very much from the inside of her head, as someone watching the issues from a considerable distance. The there fetish, for instance — Palin frequently displaces statements with an appended “there,” as in “We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there…” But where? Why the distancing gesture? At another time, she referred to Condoleezza Rice trying to “forge that peace.” That peace? You mean that peace way over there — as opposed to the peace that you as Vice-President would have been responsible for forging? She’s far, far away from that peace.

All of us use there and that in this way in casual speech — it’s a way of placing topics as separate from us on a kind of abstract “desktop” that the conversation encompasses. “The people in accounting down there think they can just ….” But Palin, doing this even when speaking to the whole nation, is no further outside of her head than we are when talking about what’s going on at work over a beer. The issues, American people, you name it, are “there” — in other words, not in her head 24/7. She hasn’t given them much thought before; they are not her. They’re that, over there.

This reminds me of toddlers who speak from inside their own experience in a related way: they will come up to you and comment about something said by a neighbor you’ve never met, or recount to you the plot of an episode of a TV show they have no way of knowing you’ve ever heard of. Palin strings her words together as if she were doing it for herself — meanings float by, and she translates them into syntax in whatever way works, regardless of how other people making public statements do it.

You see this in one of my favorites, her take on Hillary Clinton’s complaint about sexism in media coverage:

When I hear a statement like that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism, or maybe a sharper microscope put on her, I think, 'Man, that doesn't do us any good, women in politics, or women in general, trying to progress this country.

For one thing, the that again. And then “that” use of perceived: properly it would be “perceived criticism,” wouldn’t it, rather than a “perceived whine”? All whines worthy of note, we assume, are perceived — whines unperceived don’t make the news and thus do not require specification as such. There are two explanations for how Palin used perceived here.

She may have meant that she perceived the whine despite its being perhaps disguised in some way, in which case she just plopped in the perceived part when it occurred to her, which was apparently after it would have been logically placed, earlier in the utterance, such as in place of hear in “When I hear a statement …” It’s almost deft — she thought of perception, and plugged it in before whine by rendering it into an adjective as perceived. In any case, though, this is someone watching thoughts go by at a certain distance and gluing them together willy-nilly — for the first time.

Or, she may have meant “perceived criticism,” but thought of the perception early, and instead of waiting, just stuck it in early. It’s a kind of linguistic silly string — and in that, hardly unknown among ordinary people just talking. But it’s a searching kind of expression, preliminary, unauthoritative. To a strangely extreme degree for someone making public utterances with confidence.

Then if you read the quote straight it sounds like she means women shouldn’t progress. But what happened is that she thought first of the complaint, and then tacked on a reference to women progressing; in her own head she thinks of it as something good, but she perceived no need to make that clear to those listening. She in there, in her head.

"And Alaska — we're set up, unlike other states in the union, where it's collectively Alaskans own the resources,” Palin will tell us, where the fact that it is not, in blackboard sense, a sentence at all is only the beginning. She means that the arrangement in Alaska is collective, but when it occurs to her she’s about to say Alaskans such that “collective Alaskans” would make no sense. So, if it can’t be an adjective, heck, just make it an adverb — “it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources.”

Palinspeak is a flashlight panning over thoughts, rather than thoughts given light via considered expression. It bears mentioning that short sentences and a casual tone can still convey information and planned thought.

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“Sarah Palin needs to go to college”

Bill O'Reilly appeared on "Good Morning America" Thursday with George Stephanopoulos, where the two talked about the health care crisis and the landscape for the 2012 presidential election.

Stephanopoulos asked O'Reilly if, like Evan Bayh, he believes there's room f

Fantasy & Incompetence

or "someone to come up the middle" in 2012.

"It depends how articulate they are and how they're gonna handle all the slime factor," O'Reilly said. "You get into this game now, they're gonna tear you to pieces on both sides. Do you have the stomach for it? You wanna put your family through that? That's what scares them away. The press is so vicious now with a capital 'V.'"

Would O'Reilly be interested in running? He says no.

"I have more power doing what I'm doing than getting involved with the political process," he told Stephanopoulos. "Plus you have to kiss butt to get money."

As for frequent "O'Reilly Factor" guest Sarah Palin, O'Reilly says she absolutely wants to run but has to weigh whether she wants to put her family through the process. And, he added, she needs to study up.

"Sarah Palin needs to go to college," O'Reilly said. "Political college, world affairs college, and she is. She's hired a bunch of advisers and they're giving her a whole bunch of tracks to learn, because it is a sophisticated deal."

 

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I feel I Knew Too Much—about The Woman Who Knew Too Little.

Sarah, you got some splainin to do.

By Andrew Sargus Klein

 

Sarah Palin recently nabbed the spotlight in another news cycle regarding her upcoming speech at the National Tea Party Convention. Politico reported that the ex-Governor rakes in “$100,000 for each speech she delivers, though she gives a $75,000 discount for West Coast appearances,” and has “reportedly waived her fee for speaking at some charitable events.”.

That’s some serious cash for the raging populist from Alaska. In the ensuing backlash (tickets to the Tea Party Convention cost several hundred dollars), Palin has declared she will charge no fee for her appearance – the press is uninvited, of course.

Amidst the current news cycle, we have learned of Palin joining FOX News—a veritable cornerstone of the mainstream “gotcha” media, where she will surely reap an enormous salary for sitting in front of a camera and crowing (the norm for roughly 96 percent of cable news anchors).

As a liberal I’ve long since burned away my Palin ire, and now see her as a political figure, her approval ratings, and, as such, she is almost certain to crash and burn as a Republican/third party candidate for president (her disapproval ratings) or settle into comfort as yet another FOX demagogue.

Palin's appearances with Bill O’Reilly aren’t the stuff political dreams are made of, but are a far cry from her disastrous interview with Katie Couric in ‘08, though some of the old Palin resurfaced during this exchange with Glenn Beck. When asked who her favorite Founding Father was, she hemmed and hawed like only classic Palin (or maybe Caroline Kennedy) can and answered “all of them.” Beck presses the question, and here is her answer, emphasis mine:

They were led by, of course, George Washington. So he’s got to rise to the top. Washington was the consummate statesman. He served, he turned power to the people. He didn’t want to be a king. He returned power to the people. Then he went back to Mount Vernon. He went back to his farm. He was almost reluctant to serve as president too and that’s who you need to find to serve in government, in a bureaucracy—those who you know will serve for the right reasons because they’re reluctant to get out there and seek a limelight and seek power. They’re doing it for the people, that was George Washington.

"Reluctant” is hardly a word anyone would use to describe Palin’s relationship with the spotlight.

These minor developments in the Palin saga are significant in the context of how her defenders treat her. And by defenders I mean right-of-center thinkers making honest attempts to reconcile her explosive popularity with her obvious shortcomings. It’s an all too common dance—with an obvious parallel with President Obama and the liberal blogosphere re: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; the Defense of Marriage Act; military tribunals; and the escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

But the struggles intelligent conservatives face, concerning Palin, are a world away from the liberals’ issues with Obama. Those seeking to find a middle ground with Palin inevitably twist themselves in irrevocable knots.

Palin is Valley Trash

It's Painful To Watch a Level-Headed Conservative Defend Sarah Palin

 

My case in point appeared at Front Porch Republic, a wonderful salon-style online publication that traffics in deeply thought-out libertarian, conservative, local and similar issues. Jeff Taylor, writing from Jacksonville, AL, (the site almost always attaches datelines to its articles, as if such analytical and theoretical columns were dispatches from the real America) put down nearly 6,000 words on Sarah Palin—the spillover from a 3,000-word review of Going Rogue that ran in The American Conservative (also not a terrible place for the left-thinking).

The review opens,

I want to like Sarah Palin. But to borrow a title from Hitchcock, I feel like The Man Who Knew Too Much—about The Woman Who Knew Too Little. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t care that Palin is not a policy wonk. In some ways, that’s a plus

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It takes Taylor all of 49 words before he’s tiptoeing around the rational—she’s not a policy wonk—and the irrational—he wants to like her. Everything that ensues in the review and the spill column falls along those lines. He makes an admirable attempt to view her strengths and weaknesses in as fair a light as possible—characteristic of a lot of the reasoning going on at those two outlets, regardless if you agree with the conclusion or not—but simply can’t avoid using broad strokes to skirt around larger issues nor the tendency to present straw man binaries.

Before I get into those I want to mention “Sarah Palin the Moose Killer,” wherein Taylor offers perhaps the most cogent analysis of the trope:

All of us have heard about Sarah the moose slayer. Not everyone is charmed by the image. I recently received an email from an impassioned critic: “Sarah Palin is a wolf killer. She is also a bear killer. Sarah Palin is a destroyer and a murderer. Sarah Palin is despicable.” In response, I told the writer that while I, too, support animal rights, the vast majority of Americans do not. They see nothing wrong with shooting a wolf (from an airplane or the ground), or killing a moose, bear, deer, cow, pig, or chicken. There’s no use trying to hold Palin to a higher standard. In my book, the gratuitous killing of a goose by a costumed John Kerry for the sake of a campaign photo op is more disgusting. I’m guessing the two hours he spent in an Ohio cornfield and the bloody goose he hauled out lost him more votes than he gained. At least Sarah Palin hunts without inviting the press.

It’s hard not to mention the ridiculous turkey slaughter clip, but his point is well taken.

But later on Taylor concludes that Palin was over-prepped for the infamous Couric interview and the VP debate, to which one can only ask, “Really?” Even if she was force-fed talking points she was still unable to regurgitate them in any coherent way and mostly without any regard for syntax.

 

In the spillover piece, Taylor’s civility cracks slightly when he writes,

People don’t like to be talked down to or have their communities dismissed as fly-over country. There is a reason why we find a sea of red with islands of blue, mostly representing the metropolitan centers, when we look at a map of U.S. counties for recent presidential elections. Maybe talk of “real Americans” is the revenge of the demeaned. When compared to cosmopolitan elites, there is an element of truth to it.

How he follows “revenge of the demeaned” with “there is an element of truth to it” is simply beyond me. Is Palin’s potential as a fired-up populist who leaves liberals (and not a few conservatives) almost literally foaming at the mouth just too much to deny? There is a whiff of resignation in Taylor’s pieces, one of, “Well, she’s here and a lot of people like her so we might as well try to reconcile her tangible negatives with her intangible positives.” Since she quit the governorship she lost any accountability—she’s a FOX pundit now for god’s sake—and so her statements and speeches exist solely in the echo chamber. Obama catches flack on the far left for the issues listed above, but he’s an elected official leaving behind policies both good and bad in his wake.

On the topic of Palin leaving the Alaskan statehouse, Taylor twists himself around reality and projection once again:

Admittedly, resigning the governorship is a strange move when you have 1½ years left in your term—years, not months. Having over one-third of your time left is not lameduckery! At the time, there was speculation that a scandal or indictment would soon follow, but the other shoe has not dropped. Maybe it does have something to do with Palin’s unsophisticated maverickhood. Perhaps she really did want to allow Alaska government to move on without being tangled up in political controversy, simultaneously freeing her to pursue her national ambitions without being tied up back home. The resignation may have been a mistake, and it’s doubtful that she was completely honest about her reasons, but it does reinforce her reputation as an unconventional politician.

For someone who considers Palin’s character as her “strong suit,” that Taylor thinks she was full of crap about her intentions for leaving the governorship is pretty transparent. He writes, near the end of the spill piece, “With typical lack of nuance, Sarah caused a stir when she accused Obama health care reform as paving the way for ‘death panels’ which might pass judgment on imperfect babies and ill grandparents.” What Taylor perceives as a “typical lack of nuance” is amoral fear mongering, deliberately coercing and lying to her supporters with demonstrably false information.

In the conclusion of his review, Taylor switches back to level-headed mode:

The contradiction of populism is that the sincere champion of the common people must be better informed, more astute, and more steadfast than the people themselves in order to serve them effectively. Identification with the people must coexist with discernment about the world of power and wealth. Or, as the Galilean said long ago to His disciples, “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” Spiritually and politically savvy yet true in intention and pure in action. That is a high calling, and it remains to be seen if Sarah Palin has what it takes.

I have seen no evidence of any savvy from Palin outside of scoring cheap political points on the issues of the day. What I’m left with at the end of these 10,000 words is the repeated feeling that this good-intentioned, freethinking conservative is in a bind. Palin isn’t a non-starter, but she’s far from a finisher—the notion that she can improve or better verse herself in the issues is pretty close to saying, “she’ll be prepped and handled better and will spin better.” Palin’s speaking fees and move to FOX only say one thing: She looks out for Sarah, either in the form of money-power-respect or straw polls.

The twisting and over-rationalization isn’t going to stop anytime soon—and I fully recommend reading both of Taylor’s pieces to the end. Overall, his commentary is a good lens for the broader conversation: what we look for in a leader. 

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Immaculate Misconception

 

Narcissism- It’s dangerous

Jonathan Martin snuck into the Palinfest in Wisconsin and reports that the crowd was not so wowed:

While she drew applause during her remarks, Palin’s extemporaneous and frequently discursive style was such that she never truly roused a true-believing crowd as passionate about the issue at hand as she. Not once during her address did they rise to their feet. In a closing exhortation, she urged the audience, “Don't ever let anyone to tell you to sit down and shut up.” She then got a standing ovation from most of the crowd, but a few had begun to leave before she even finished and within seconds of her concluding, scores more got up and put on their jackets as they walked away.

But they were half a mile long in line to see the Immaculate Misconception beforehand. It seems to me like a Mass. Her very divine presence is all that matters; what she says is largely irrelevant. There's some small news in her re-telling of her fifth pregnancy story (more on the latest version tomorrow), but what strikes me from Jonathan's report is that she has been watching Glenn Beck closely. To wit:

Noting that there had been a lot of “change” of late, Palin recalled a recent conversation with a friend about how the phrase “In God We Trust” had been moved to the edge of the new coins. “Who calls a shot like that?” she demanded. “Who makes a decision like that?” She added: “It’s a disturbing trend.” Unsaid but implied was that the new Democratic White House was behind such a move to secularize the nation’s currency. But the new coins – concerns over which apparently stemmed from an email chain letter widely circulated among conservatives – were commissioned by the Republican-led Congress in 2005 and approved by President Bush.

The whole technique of mentioning strange events or codes or numbers and implying that there is some sinister force behind them is classic Beck. And since the anti-Christ is now in the White House, we are all left to wonder what is next. Of course: it's euthanasia of the elderly and state-mandated abortion of disabled or special need kids. Next up: the ritual killing of white new-borns or some such. 

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Palin and Beck, would gladly see the Republican Party die.

 

By FRANK RICH

 

BARACK OBAMA’S most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.

The governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia were once billed as the marquee events of Election Day 2009 — a referendum on the Obama presidency and a possible Republican “comeback.” But preposterous as it sounds, the real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada. That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or not.

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.

The New York fracas was ignited by the routine decision of 11 local Republican county chairmen to anoint an assemblywoman, Dede Scozzafava, as their party’s nominee for the vacant seat. The 23rd is in safe Republican territory that hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress in decades. And Scozzafava is a mainstream conservative by New York standards; one statistical measure found her voting record slightly to the right of her fellow Republicans in the Assembly. But she has occasionally strayed from orthodoxy on social issues (abortion, same-sex marriage) and endorsed the Obama stimulus package. To the right’s Jacobins, that’s cause to send her to the guillotine.

Sure enough, bloggers trashed her as a radical leftist and ditched her for a third-party candidate they deem a “true” conservative, an accountant and businessman named Doug Hoffman. When Gingrich dared endorse Scozzafava anyway — as did other party potentates like John Boehner and Michael Steele — he too was slimed. Mocking Newt’s presumed 2012 presidential ambitions, Michelle Malkin imagined him appointing Al Sharpton as secretary of education and Al Gore as “global warming czar.” She’s quite the wit.

The wrecking crew of Kristol, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Michele Bachmann, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the government-bashing Club for Growth all joined the Hoffman putsch. Then came the big enchilada: a Hoffman endorsement from Palin on her Facebook page. Such is Palin’s clout that Steve Forbes, Rick Santorum and Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor (and presidential aspirant), promptly fell over one another in their Pavlovian rush to second her motion. They were joined by far-flung Republican congressmen from Kansas, Georgia, Oklahoma and California, not to mention a gaggle of state legislators from Colorado. On Fox News, Beck took up the charge, insinuating that Hoffman’s Republican opponent might be a fan of Karl Marx. Some $3 million has now been dumped into this race by outside groups.

Who exactly is the third-party maverick arousing such ardor? Hoffman doesn’t even live in the district. When he appeared before the editorial board of The Watertown Daily Times 10 days ago, he “showed no grasp” of local issues, as the subsequent editorial put it. Hoffman complained that he should have received the questions in advance — blissfully unaware that they had been asked by the paper in an editorial on the morning of his visit.

Last week it turned out that Hoffman’s prime attribute to the radical right — as a take-no-prisoners fiscal conservative — was bogus.

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Defy Economic 101? Palin did it…

Sarah Palin's Economics Lesson

by Conor Clarke of The Atlantic

Sarah Palin gave a speech about economics on Wednesday

"Some in Washington would approach our economic woes in ways that absolutely defy Economics 101, and they fly in the face of principles, providing opportunity for industrious Americans to succeed or to fail on their own accord," she said. "Those principles it makes you wonder what the heck some in Washington are trying to accomplish here."

Wow. Whatever else might be said about Sarah Palin, I hope we can all agree that there's absolutely no reason to take her seriously as a fiscal conservative. In particular, that line about "industrious Americans" succeeding and failing of their own accord made we want to take a look at the federal dollars Alaska receives per resident relative to its federal tax burden. So I went and made this chart:

(This is drawn from the right-of-center Tax Foundation using their most recent data.)

Alaska gets $13,950 per resident from the federal government, more than any other state in the nation. It ranks number one in taxes per resident and number one in spending per resident. It's also number one in pork-barrel spending. Each Alaska resident receives a check for $3,200 a year from state oil revenues — which Palin bumped up from $2,000 last year. Palin once justified this by saying that the state of Alaska was "set up, unlike other states in the union, where it's collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs." (Sounds socialist!) Industrious indeed.

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Sarah Six Pack

Commentary by Margaret Carlson

 Sarah is always pointing her finger

Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) — Just as every Super Bowl is going to be the game of the century, tonight's face-off between Governor Sarah Palin and Senator Joe Biden is touted as settling once and for all, well, nothing. History tells us that no one but family members cast votes for vice president.

This one should matter, given that the next president may be a 72-year-old, four-time cancer survivor who lately is behaving more like a cocky fighter pilot than captain of the ship of state. Palin could be president on Day Two, Three or Four, before she had time to learn on the job, if such learning is possible.

Palin with a prepared text on a large stage does fine. Without a script, not so fine. Expectations for her at the debate in St. Louis are at about curb level because of some rocky interviews. The press complains that John McCain's handlers have kept Palin in a cocoon when actually she's been spending every waking minute with Katie Couric, an inexplicable decision whose proponent may be looking for other work now.

No matter what Palin does tonight it may not erase the impression left by Tina Fey and You Tube clips of Couric patiently asking, “Can you be specific?'' without success. Many of Palin's answers floated a familiar noun (experience, reform, terrorists, maverick) untethered to an object or verb, let alone a principle or a policy.

Just a routine question about what Supreme Court rulings she disagrees with other than Roe v. Wade set Palin off on a winding highway. “There's, of course, in the great history of American rulings, there have been rulings, that's never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are those issues, again, like Roe v Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So you know going through the history of America, there would be others.'' And that's just the half of it.

Sizing Up Russia

Surely, Palin knows that proximity to Russia as a basis for foreign-policy experience is laughable. Yet here is her explanation: “As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States… it's from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there next to our state.''

The performances have been so poor that several conservative pundits have said she isn't prepared for the job. Conservative Columnist Kathleen Parker suggested she step aside and cite the need to spend more time with her family, a claim that would ring truer for Palin than for most politicians who've used it.

Palin isn't likely to perform similarly in tonight's highly structured format. She's shown she can deliver zingers at earlier debates in Alaska. Even if the setting by a creek in Arizona seems low-key, the coaching has been intense by McCain's team. Their stated goal is to let Sarah be Sarah, to get her off ill- fitting talking points and on to even greater generalities like freedom, strength, prosperity, fairness.

Play the Refs

In case she bombs having recieved the questions in advance, the campaign has an excuse ready. Although the campaign signed off on PBS's Gwen Ifill well after it was known she has a book on race and the '08 campaign coming out in January, aides now contend that renders her a poor choice to moderate.

And let's not forget that Palin is personable, especially to Wal-Mart Moms. I'm more a Target Mom but I'd like to go shopping with her. In a Marist poll, 65 percent found her more likeable than Biden.

She described her constituency in an interview with radio host conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt: “It's time that normal Joe Six-Pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency.''

No disrespect for Joe — my family's full of them — but were Palin asked to spell “cat'' and miss by two letters, the “base'' would likely love her more.

Winning Bubba's Heart

But Palin isn't just winning the Bubba vote. She's won Bubba himself, Bill Clinton.

Part of the explanation is that a two-term Barack Obama administration makes a Clinton restoration almost impossible. Women age in dog years, and Hillary Clinton will be 69 times seven in 2016. The other is that Bill likes Palin's type. He's spoken excitedly of her (“I come from Arkansas, I get why she's hot out there''), but in a barely audible monotone regarding Obama.

Perhaps the endless two-ways with Couric weren't a mistake. They deflected attention from McCain's sputtering: The economy is sound. No it isn't. The only way to save the country is to “suspend'' his campaign, except for a few interviews and a New York photo-op before arriving 22 hours later at the White House to save the plan he was too busy to read.

Debate? Not without getting a bailout deal. No Deal? OK, just kidding. Back to Washington from Ole Miss because it's not right to “phone it in.'' Arrive and spend the weekend phoning it in from his Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. To top it off, take credit for getting emergency legislation passed just before it didn't.

Tending to the Elite

Yesterday McCain said he's pleased Palin doesn't appeal to the “Georgetown cocktail party person who calls themselves conservative,'' that her not going to Harvard “is a plus.'' 

Bush quietly made the elite more so by tending to their economic interests while playing up his love for Nascar Dads and barbecue. As long as you drop your g's, you can be way wealthier than Wal-Mart patrons (the Palins earn more than $200,000 a year) as long as you aspire to the same cultural class.

Obama's problem isn't only that he's black, it's that he speaks like the detached, analytic law professor he was.

With people's jobs, houses and retirement at stake, the elitist strategy might not work this time.

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“Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!” Less than ordinary to be a VP

The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth's surface (she didn't have a passport until last year), or that she's never met a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother and a great American success story—but she is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history.

 

Debate with Andrew Halcro

The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary.

We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.

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