Under the scrutiny of the entire free world, Sarah Palin cleared an ankle-high bar last week at the Vice Presidential Debate. Indeed, Palin proved her oratical prowess by opening her mouth and having sound come out of it, though not much else.
In an attempt to prove herself to a skeptical liberal media, Palin did little more than stay afloat in her head-to-head against Joe Biden. After a series of stumbles in her infamous Katie Couric interview, Palin was declared all but dead by headlines across the nation. Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times dubbed Palin’s encounter with Couric as the “worst interview Palin has ever done.” Over on the West Coast, James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times calls Palin "rambling, marginally responsive and even more adrift than during her network debut with ABC’s Charles Gibson."
Certainly, a woman who could not name a single Supreme Court decision she disagreed with or a newspaper she read was not capable of being the vice president.
As it turns out, this widespread doubt about Palin’s competence may have given her an edge in the debate. America had such low expectations of this self-styled “hockey mom,” that Palin needed only to say one or two sensible things to avoid an election-defining blunder for John McCain’s campaign. Yes, dodging disaster was all she needed to do to recover from her previous encounters with the "Gotcha" press and win the debate in the eyes of millions of Americans.
“Last night was a big, big win for Sarah Palin,” wrote Gail Collins in the New York Times the day after the debate. “Gone, long gone, are the worries about how good or well-prepared Sarah Palin is.”
Really? In the debate I watched, Palin was baffled by many of Gwen Ifill’s questions. This “moose-gutting, polar bear-trashing, aerobics-class-networking vice presidential nominee” (as Gail Collins styles her) seemed to lose her Wonder-from-Wasilla attitude when asked about details of McCain’s foreign policy plan, especially. Palin’s responses were not 100% accurate, to say the least. Besides getting the name wrong of the commanding general in Afganistan (McKiernan, not McClellan, Sarah), she also misquoted Obama on health care, the Iraqi war, and tax increases.
If all this is so, how did Palin manage to walk away from the debate with such a positive response from the press? I find this extraordinarily unusual, especially after Palin’s statement about the “Gotcha” press only a month earlier.
“Here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to win their good opinion,” Palin muttered angrily at a speech in St. Paul early this September.
If this current trend continues, I doubt she’ll be going at all.
(I read a few sources for this piece.. here are the articles I liked the best..)
-http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/opinion/04collins.html?em
-http://www.newsweek.com/id/162396
2 comments:
Hey Sarah,
I love this :D and I totally think it's true, the standards for Palin got so low after her initially horrible interviews that she really didn't have to do all that much to impress in the next interviews. Which isn't really what campaigning for vice president should be about. Honestly, it should take more than scraping by in interviews to recieve the press' approval.
Personally, I don't find her all that impressive, actually, the thought of her becoming VP quite concerned me. And I wasn't the only one I know. Plenty of polls said that even those for McCain would have been concerned if, for some reason, Palin had ever had to act as President.
Well, I'm certainly happy we don't have to worry about that for the moment. :)
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