Gibson’s Interview with Palin…Round 2
Following Jean Raber’s suggestion, here’s round two of Gibson with Palin on domestic issues:
Jean writes, “I think Palin did considerably better (let’s all agree there should be fewer abortions and work from there) and Gibson considerably worse (asking about the nature of homosexuality and not her stand on laws regarding homosexual behavior; and failure to press on why, if Palin’s question about library book challenges was simply informational, the librarian was fired and only reinstated after a recall drive).”
For what it’s worth, here are a couple of New York Times editorials:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/opinion/13herbert.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/opinion/13sat1.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/opinion/13collins.html?hp
I agree with Jean that she does a bit better discussing these issues, but she is still evasive in areas where she is clearly out of her depth. For instance, on the economy, she repeats the same answer on increasing agency efficiency when Gibson is pressing her on entitlements. It makes one wonder whether she understands what an entitlement is…that’s a problem! Also, the three things she identifies that make her and McCain different than Bush are pretty weak. It seems clear to me from the Gibson interviews on the whole that when it comes to foreign policy and the economy, the two biggest issues in this election, she simply lacks sufficient understanding to co-lead the nation effectively.
Eric, thanks for the links. I enjoyed the Gail Collins piece, in which she suggests that the original candidates have been replaced by Pod People and androids:
“But we’ve still got the original Joe Biden, I think. Show me the artificial life form that would introduce a state senator confined to a wheelchair by urging him to ‘stand up.’ We worried that once Obama’s running mate got out on the campaign trail and started babbling, he’d have to be replaced by a terser model. But this week, when Biden announced that Hillary Clinton was not only qualified to be vice president, she also ‘might have been a better pick than me,’ we knew for sure we were still working with the original.”
I also wondered how all the bad noise about government programs and finding efficiencies (except in the military because that’s already so efficient, apparently) squared with her crediting, in part Title Nine, which mandated girls sports programs, for helping her grow up believing she could be governor and have a family.
An interesting post on how ABC edited the interview:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladnick/2008/09/13/abc-news-edited-out-key-parts-sarah-palin-interview
Watching these clips and the first interview I concluded ; as a VP she almost most certianly will be be President; McCain could not run in 2012 or if his melanoma returns she becomes the leader of the western world a lot sooner.. My sister survived just 3 months after a melanoma diagnosis! She is nowhere near qualified to be president by experience, intellect, temperment. She is weaker than Bush in all of these qualities. Foreign Governments would wince if she became president; not so with Obama.
Jean–I think it is pretty refreshing that Biden would consider himself less qualified than Hillary. Be that as it may, it does make me really wonder if the selection of Palin is a purely political move on McCain’s part, and of course, if so, what does that say about the rest of the judgements he will make? Does he really love his country as much as he stresses, when the selection of an inexperienced VP could put our country in harm’s way? Obama and company are really going to have to come up with a solid strategy to cut through the hype of this “hockey Mom”. Is Obama up to the challenge?
Not knowing who Mr. Gibson is, I thought to inform myself and found this:
“As moderator for the April 16, 2008 Democratic debate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which was televised by ABC, Gibson along with co-moderator George Stephanopoulos was roundly panned in the Washington Post[1] and other media outlets for his selection of insubstantial “gotcha”-style questions (such as the fact that Barack Obama has ties to co-founder of the radical left Weathermen Bill Ayers) The following day, the Associated Press filed a story saying “ABC News drew both record ratings and a heap of complaints about how Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos moderated the Democratic presidential debate,” and “more than 15,600 comments were posted on ABC News’ Web site, the tone overwhelmingly negative.”
Mr. Gibson seems to have spent his life as a media person. It makes me wonder how much he knows about the economy and about foreign affairs.
We can parse and analyze Sarah Palin’s responses until the moose come home. But how many votes will the Republican ticket win or lose based on these interviews? In my opinion, very few. The majority of voters have already identified with either the Republican or Democratic party (based on various emotional, cultural, regional, and in some cases, religious factors), and continue the same pattern of voting year after year. They won’t lose sleep over details like Palin’s ignorance of the Bush Doctrine or whether she supported the Bridge to Nowhere.
The only way Barack Obama can win is by attracting the true
“swing voters.” How many actually exist is unknown – unless you believe that people always tell pollsters the truth. And his appeal needs to be to the gut as well as to the brain. To paraphrase Drew Weston in “The Political Brain,” the problem for Democrats isn’t so much about moving to the left or the right but about moving the electorate.
A friend sent me a reflection on Ms. Palin by Deepak Chopra; unfortunately, I can’t seem to locate it again, but the brunt was that the presentations by her play to the psychology of the religious right, undermine higher values of social justice and enhance the divide of America.
I watched the beginning segmen tof Bill Moyers last night – the pastor of the United Church in Tennessee, where the man killed several parishoners because they were “liberal”,has been boning up on book and media talk by the hard right trying to understand how such a mindset eveolved and to deal with his own anger about what happened.
The program was shocking! Kill or ostracize those terrible liberals: gays, peace activists,even autistic children are excoriated by these crazies who are supported by millions of viewers and big bucks to back them.
If this is what one essebtially takes the truth, then hatred and division festers and grows and our democratic process is deeply undermined.
I think Chopra’s analysis is on target, viz. that Palin (and even MCcain’s) opponents are to be demonized and that demonization is ugly.
While I continue to beleive and hope my vote will be based on policy considerations, I think this country will continue to downspiral as long as candidates play into, by advertisinments or psudoclever attacks, the demonization of their opponents.
Bob,
Here is the link to the Deepak Chopra piece.
http://www.chopra.com/node/1064
According to James Poniewozik in Time mag. 9/22/08, states that “John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, made it clear that she was not running to seek ‘Themedia Elite’s’ approval. Palin, who majored in journalism but has since seen the error of her ways, not only out celebriteied Obama but also showed heim how REAL celebrities handle the press. Real celebrities don’t make themselves available to every tom, Dick and Katie. They play hard to get. And they have hard nosed handlers, like McCain campaign manager Rick Davis, who vowed that Palin would not do interviews until the media “treat her with some level of respect and deference.”
And from Joe Klein also in Time Magazine, from Joe Klein “Sarah Palin appeals to nostalgia for a country that no longer exists. This year, it might be enough to win.”
McCain needs Sarah Palin in his campaign– continuing Klein’s piece, “Palin embodies the basic American myth—Jefferson’s yeoman farmer, the fantasia of rural righteousness–updated in a crucial way: now Mom works, too. Americans like stories more than issues.”
In the long run, the Democrats have no myth to counter this powerful fantasy.
Little Bear–You make a good point and it just might work. Obama has a tall order to fill if he is going to land on top, and issues, not fantasy, is his best bet. Let’s see what the measure of the man is, as this counters his own “rock star” status and he has to dig a little deeper to get his points across to a public longing for that nostalgia you mention.
Deepak Chopra??? What does Dr. Phil have to say?
Look for SNL to shape or reflect the zeitgeist for Palin tonight.
The partisan and political juices are starting to flow. Rational thought is at the service of deeper cultural vistas, moods and desires. But, but they might be able to be very incisive.
Apparently Tina Fey is playing her and she is supposed to bear an uncanny physical resemblance. It will be interesting to see how they charicature her. The first charicature often reflects the prejudices/strenghts that are perceived.
Give Palin two points. Very shrewd of her to say that she will not judge those who choose abortion and homosexuality. No one on the right has granted that. At least not at this level.
Other than that she will have to explain how she can stay with people who throwing every conceivable falsehood they can against the wall. There is not room for vacillating there.
Further, the Obama campaign have to get there message out and pull the McCain-Palin campaign on their immorality. Especially the flagrant, absurd lies. W Bush beat two much better qualified candidates than he because he threw enough lies around so that some stuck. Same is going on now. The lies have to be seriously addressed.
I’m afraid this interview confirms my initial skepticism, not to say incredulity, at McCain’s choice of VP.
Points in Palin’s favor: She is fluent, self-assured, and — how to put this? — telegenic in an age when that matters much more than it should.
Points against her:
Her rhetoric contradicts her record in ways that no amount of fluency or self-assurance can disguise. The part of the interview about all the money Wasilla and Alaska get from the federal government was especially revealing, I thought. Gibson presented one inconvenient fact after another about Alaska’s dependence on “pork,” and Palin simply asserted that that was all different, without explaining why — because, of course, it isn’t. This was, to use Eric’s word, shameless.
More generally, she refuses to say “I don’t know” when she clearly doesn’t, and this is even more troubling than her ignorance. A need, born of insecurity, to seem sure about things you’re not sure of, and even of things that no one is sure of, is a serious vice in a president or vice president — witness the last eight years. Someone in the Bush White House once pointed out to David Frum that President Bush never asks questions. “Why not?” Frum asked. “Because he doesn’t know what it’s OK for him not to know.”
What troubled me most about the second part of this interview, though, was the egregious inadequacy of her response to Gibson’s questions about the economy. No mention of the mortgage crisis, or of the larger credit crisis; no mention of stagnant wages and the increased cost of living; no discussion of health care, which is quickly becoming a luxury market in this country. No, all we heard, again and again, was the word “efficiencies.” As if cutting government waste here and there would correct the serious structural problems in the country’s economy — and as if the most crippling expense in the federal budget were not the war she so uncritically supports. The same old boilerplate about letting Americans take care of themselves while their pensions disappear and their jobs go overseas. The same old bogus populism, which appeals to people’s vanity and fear rather than to their intelligence. This is a moment for politicians to challenge us, not to flatter us.
And speaking of intelligence, do we really need help from Deepak Chopra on this blog? There are a lot of smart people asking the right questions about Palin, people like Hendrik Hertzberg, Thomas Frank, and Paul Krugman, who all insist on the deep irrationality of Palin’s politics. Now we have a champion of comfortable irrationality complaining about Palin’s negativity and divisiveness. Criticism from a millionaire mystagogue is more likely to help Palin than it is to hurt her.
Matthew – I’m with you on Chopra! “Comfortable irrationality” could be yet another motto of the Bush Presidency, and I worry that it is also turning into the new McCain/Palin campaign slogan. I get so bummed out when I think that McCain used to be a voice of rationality in the Republican Party.
Here is the charicature sketch. Plays on the stereotypes. You can see the emerging ones for Palin versus the established ones for Hillary.
http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/palin-hillary-open/656281
I suppose the most disturbing thing about Sarah Palin is her projection and stress on an “unblinking” attitude and utter confidence not even to have hesitated even a moment when offered the post. Her total self-confidence is projected so very well in her attractive demeanor and it is so completely scary. How could someone who less than a month before expressed ignorance of what the vice-president does have such a sense that she is so able to do this well? It is a different type of psyche — similar to that of George Bush — that has no fear of what they don’t know that terrifies me.