You are currently browsing the daily archive for September 30th, 2008.
“Yeah, she’s a lot of friend-talk and little friend-action.”
Oh, we’ve noticed.
Oh, yes.
From The NYTimes article:
‘Polling suggests that the number of Americans who think she is not fit to be president has increased since her introduction to the country last month. A number of conservative columnists and thinkers have publicly turned against her, or criticized Mr. McCain for choosing her, including George Will, David Brooks and Kathleen Parker, who wrote a column entitled “She’s Out of Her League” for the National Review Online.
Mr. Frum noted the difficulty that Dan Quayle, who was elected vice president in 1988, had in recovering from an early set of mistakes that led him to be ridiculed as an intellectual lightweight. “The story of Dan Quayle is he did probably 1,000 smart things as vice president, but his image was locked in and it was very difficult to turn around,” he said. “And Dan Quayle never in his life has performed as badly as Sarah Palin in the last month.”
Several Republicans said that all of this could ultimately play to Ms. Palin’s benefit, lowering expectations for her so much that a mediocre performance in the debate could be hailed as a success.
“Thanks to the mainstream media, quite a low expectation has been created for her performance,” said Ron Carey, chairman of Minnesota’s Republican Party. “The style of Sarah Palin is going to amaze people. She is going to be able to amaze people with the substance she is going to deliver.”
…
Katon Dawson, the Republican chairman of South Carolina, said the debate was important to clear up what he described as misapprehensions about her created by “a pile-on by the media elite.”
“You don’t have this kind of negative, media attack without a question mark being put up,” he said. “She’s going to have a chance to erase that question mark.”
But Mike Murphy, who used to work as a senior adviser to Mr. McCain, said Ms. Palin’s performance in the campaign had underlined his argument that she was a bad choice for Mr. McCain. Mr. Murphy said he was skeptical that she could turn it around in one debate.
“She has the opportunity to undo some of the damage with a very strong debate performance,” he said. “That’s plausible. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
The rapid change in fortunes has led some Republicans to question the decision by Mr. McCain’s advisers to restrict her exposure to unscripted settings — town-hall-style meetings, news conferences or interviews — saying such events would have helped her prepare her for such high-profile interviews as the one with Ms. Couric, and the debate.
“I disagree with the campaign’s approach,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican consultant. “I think they ought to toss her into the deep end from the outset; let her get it over quickly. Everything else after that is, you’ve seen the elephant.”
Ms. Palin has traveled with a briefing team since Sept. 10. Two people close to the campaign, addressing her difficulties, said she had been stuffed with facts as if preparing for an oral exam and had become nervous and unnatural in the few interviews.
Advisers said she was a diligent worker and was frequently up until the small hours of the morning in her hotel room trying to cram as much information as possible before the debate.
“I think she has to be careful not to be overprogrammed for the debate,” said Robert T. Bennett, the Ohio Republican chairman. “I think she’s a lot brighter than people are giving her credit for.” ‘
Commentary about Palin with Couric, and then a clip of the Couric interview with both McCain and Palin: here.
And here, the SNL skit re: Couric/Palin interview.
And this little gem:
“Of concern to McCain’s campaign, however, is a remaining and still-undisclosed clip from Palin’s interview with Couric last week that has the political world buzzing.
The Palin aide, after first noting how “infuriating” it was for CBS to purportedly leak word about the gaffe, revealed that it came in response to a question about Supreme Court decisions.
After noting Roe vs. Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases.
There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather silence.”
from here.
And then, how the VP debate will look this Thursday:
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Biden’s strategy: Go easy on Palin |
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| If Sarah Palin goofs, flounders, stumbles or blunders during her debate against Joe Biden on Thursday night, Biden is going to let it slide.“If she makes a gaffe, he underplays it,” one of the people prepping Biden for his vice presidential debate told me. “At most, he says, ‘I am not sure what Gov. Palin meant there.’”
There are three reasons for this. First, Biden does not want to look condescending. For the same reason, he plans on referring to Palin as “Gov. Palin” during the debate and never as “Sarah.” (He will sometimes refer to John McCain as “John,” however, because they have been senators together for many years.) Second, Biden knows the press is going to pounce on any mistakes, and so he does not need to. Third, and most important, Sarah Palin is not Biden’s true target. “Joe Biden’s No. 1 job during the vice presidential debate is to keep the focus on the top of the ticket,” the Biden debate prepper told me. “He is going to keep the focus on John McCain.” This is an arguable strategy. After all, McCain is the experienced one on the Republican ticket, the one whose credentials to be commander in chief from Day One are not in much question. So why attack him instead of Palin, whose lack of readiness has been the subject of endless discussion as well as late-night comedy? Because, at least in the past, Americans have not concentrated on the bottom of the ticket when it comes time to vote. They care about who the president is going to be, not who the vice president is going to be. Dan Quayle had a disastrous debate against Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. Even before Quayle stumbled into the trap of comparing himself to John F. Kennedy, Quayle had enormous difficulty answering this basic question from Brit Hume: “Let us assume … the president is incapacitated for one reason or another, and you have to take the reins of power. When that moment came, what would be the first steps that you’d take and why?”
(Gratuitous advice to Biden and Palin: Have an answer ready for this one, just in case.) Quayle had no answer, looked shellshocked and mumbled something about how he would “say a prayer for myself and for the country.” (He wouldn’t have been the only one.) After the debate, Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis’ campaign manager, came into the press filing center wearing a blue button that said “President Quayle?” Other Democrats wore more grisly red buttons that showed an EKG graph with the words “Quayle — A Heartbeat Away.” Quayle was considered a joke after that debate. But he got to the White House. Americans decided that the top of the ticket — George H.W. Bush — was a lot more important than the bottom of the ticket. But wait. Things are different now, aren’t they? We are engaged in shooting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our economy is teetering on the verge of collapse, and the top of the Republican ticket is 72 years old and a cancer survivor. So won’t Americans care more this time about whether Sarah Palin is really qualified to be president should she need to be? Won’t they care more this time about who the running mate is? Probably not, says the Obama campaign. “Who a candidate chose as his running mate may be one factor in how a voter feels about the presidential candidate,” a top aide to Barack Obama told me. “But at the end of the day, voters go into the booth and vote for who they want as president.” Biden is prepping hard. While he does not expect to make much of any gaffes Palin might commit, he is preparing his own lines of attack on her record. But at the end of the debate, he will not judge his success on whether the audience believes Biden is a better choice than Palin. He wants the audience to believe Obama is a better choice than McCain.
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