Let’s face it: things have not gone well for Sarah Palin lately. She apparently views tonight’s debate against Joe Biden as her opportunity to get aggressive and regain the initiative. That’s her campaign’s plan, anyway:
“This is going to finally put her back into a position where we see her like we saw her the first couple weeks,” a McCain official said. “She was herself. She was authentic, and people related to that. … Tonight, she’ll get into a rhythm. You’re going to see her in a way that you haven’t seen her yet.”
If by “see her in a way [I] haven’t seen her yet,” the official means playing the flute while looking painfully cross eyed, he’s going to have to try again. I’ve seen her do that. If he means she’s going to strip down to a bathing suit and heels and walk around the stage — sorry. Seen that too. On the other hand, maybe the official means that tonight we’ll see Palin name a Supreme Court case she doesn’t like. I haven’t seen her do that. Or he might mean that she’s going to come up with the names of some newspapers and magazines she reads to keep up with the world. If she couldn’t name even one, she would sound pretty dumb.
Maybe the McCain campaign official means simply that tonight, she’s going to sound erudite, informed, and ready to lead. Now that would be different.
The problem with the McCain campaign’s plan is that in those first two weeks, Palin gave no real interviews. She participated in no debates. She wrote no revealing essays or letters. She never spoke off the cuff, as she’ll have to tonight. She did nothing other than read speeches she did not write. She was an organ grinder with a teleprompter.
Once Palin was forced to answer questions (and not particularly difficult ones), she fell apart. There are a lot of very sophisticated explanations about why she performed so poorly in those interviews. The McCain campaign says that CBS edited the smart-sounding portions of the Katie Couric interview. Maybe. But it seems to me that the more logical explanation is this: she sounded uninformed, unprepared and unqualified because she’s uninformed, unprepared and unqualified.
Good luck to her tonight and good luck to all of us if she and John McCain win.
UPDATE:
Palin didn’t have any major Couric moments, so she came through okay. Utterly substance-less, rehearsed lines, nonresponsive on most points and wrong on most others, but she didn’t implode, so in terms of expectations, she passed.
Joe Biden was masterful. He had the facts at his fingertips, was emotional when emotion was called for. He connected in ways most people didn’t expect and he absolutely demolished his friend John McCain.
If the standard is whether she looked like a complete moron, she passed. But if the question is which of the candidates is ready to be president, it wasn’t even close. Biden is, Palin isn’t. Not even close.
