What Just Happened
| Wed Nov. 12, 2008 12:36 PM PST
WHAT JUST HAPPENED....Despite all the grief she's gotten, I continue to think that the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate represents the breaking of a consensual cultural barrier far more fundamental than most people realize. It's not just that she was inexperienced (Spiro Agnew and John Edwards weren't much more experienced than Palin when they ran for VP) but that she was — obviously, transparently, completely — uninterested in and uninformed about national policy at nearly every level. 
We've simply never seen someone so completely unmoored from the normal requirements of national office before. She was chosen purely at the level of celebrity, and an awful lot of people seemed to be just fine with that.
Unfortunately, I've never really been able to find the words to describe just how corrosive I think her choice was. The whole affair just left me gobsmacked. So instead I'll turn the floor briefly over to Andrew Sullivan:
Let's be real in a way the national media seems incapable of: this person should never have been placed on a national ticket in a mature democracy....The impulsive, unvetted selection of a total unknown, with no knowledge of or interest in the wider world, as a replacement president remains one of the most disturbing events in modern American history. That the press felt required to maintain a facade of normalcy for two months — and not to declare the whole thing a farce from start to finish — is a sign of their total loss of nerve.
....This deluded and delusional woman still doesn't understand what happened to her; still has no self-awareness; and has never been forced to accept her obvious limitations. She cannot keep even the most trivial story straight; she repeats untruths with a ferocity and calm that is reserved only to the clinically unhinged; she has the educational level of a high school drop-out; and regards ignorance as some kind of achievement. It is excruciating to watch her — but more excruciating to watch those who feel obliged to defend her.
Andrew's obsession with Palin was often hard to take, and I sometimes wished I could reach through the screen and strangle him whenever he started talking about Trig Palin again. Still, aside from the "clinically unhinged" crack, I agree with all of this. Disturbing hardly begins to describe what we've gone though with Palin over the past two months.
UPDATE: Via email, here's an excerpt from Wolf Blitzer's interview today with Palin:
BLITZER: Another question. What are your new ideas on how to take the Republican Party out of this rut that it's in right now? Give me one or two new ideas that you're going to propose to these governors who have gathered here in this hotel.
PALIN: Well, a lot of Republican governors have really good ideas for our nation because we're the ones there on the front lines being held accountable every single day in service to the people whom have hired us in our own states and the planks in our platform are strong and they are good for America. It's all about free enterprise and respecting the ...
BLITZER: Does that mean you want to come up with a new Sarah Palin initiative that you want to release right now.
PALIN: Gah! Nothing specific right now. Sitting here in these chairs that I'm going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it's our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don't get away with that. We have to balance budgets and we're dealing with multibillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations.
Should I laugh or should I cry? I think it depends on whether Palin disappears back into well-earned obscurity over the next few months.
Continues Below
Continued From Above
Comments
It's not just that she was inexperienced... but that she was ? obviously, transparently, completely ? uninterested in and uninformed about national policy at nearly every level.
Really though, how different does this make her than George W. Bush?
I'm not asking that to be snarky. I really am torn about this myself and am curious what you think. Is Sarah Palin a degree worse than our notoriously "incurious" president?
I'm not sure, but I will say this: when you have a political party that exists solely to get itself elected, which is the way the post-Rove Republicans are currently configured, then know-nothings like Bush and Palin are really a logical consequence. If a party is completely uninterested in making policy, than a figure like Palin is a feature rather than a bug. The only problem this time was that A) she couldn't disguise it as well as Bush could and B) for a variety of reasons the media climate of 2008 is less sympathetic to that sort of politician.
As an intellectual exercise, consider this. Switch the two figures around and imagine if Palin had been the president in 2000 and McCain had picked popular but inexperienced Governor George W. Bush as his running mate. Would we be having the exact same conversation about how Bush "represents the breaking of a consensual cultural barrier." I think we might.
Thersites, what's the point of that observation? Do you really think sexism is behind criticism of Palin? Kevin has attacked the ignorance/incuriosity of Ronnie & W as well.
But more importantly, the comparison doesn't hold. W was governor of Texas, one of the most populous states in the country, for 5 years (1995 to 2000). That is vastly more experience than Palin -- even if Bush remained stunningly unintelligent, ignorant, and incurious.
Likewise, Reagan spent 8 years as Governor of California (1967?1975), another state far more populous than Alaska.
Those men may share much of Palin's inability to speak coherent English and her lack of a grasp/interest in policy, but they clearly had far more experience than she did. It is thus somewhat understandable that the media might have treated their candidacies differently (even if I also certainly agree with you that the media's coverage of W was near-criminally incompetent).
I used to wonder what language Palin speaks. I would re-read her statements trying to figure out what she was saying. But then I saw this from her communications person, Kate Morgan, and I decided it must be a regional dialect:
"Other issues facing the state ? what some people consider to be inaccurate ? how would I put that ? listings of certain Alaskan animals as endangered or what is that second term that they use? They're at risk? No? That's not the technical term. Anyway, there's two listings there specifically dealing with polar bears and there's also the issue with beluga whales. So there's different things and the issue there is of course wanting to provide a substantive lifestyle for our first Alaskans here which are the indigenous people and also wanting to protect our environment wanting to be good stewards to that and to take care of the animals that make Alaska. What it is however if they are improperly categorized then that can run snags on other types of development that would benefit not only people of Alaska but the world such as depending on certain kinds of drilling that we do off-shore either or people are in a hurry to list groups of whales as endangered or at risk than that might impede the progress that we'd be making to free or to lighten the the load that America has us obtaining oil from overseas." (Got it?)
There's more here:
http://www.wowowow.com/post/palins-communications-guru-discusses-govs-ga...
Submitted by Undertoad (not verified) on Thu Nov. 13, 2008 5:38 AM PST.
Sure, the election was over last week, but let's keep talking about Sarah Palin!
I love it because the hate festers in my heart. My blood boils and it reminds me why I got interested in politics in the first place: to call people names!
I feel smart when I call other people dumb! Because that's what it's really about, not issues and stuff like that. Both parties kinda govern from the middle, and have to - so the only thing that's really important is how good they are on TV. Whether they can get through an interview without muffing anything, that's my main criteria for the Vice-Presidency. And if they muff things, it means they're incurious!
...while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, "We are not enemies, but friends?though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection."
-- President Barack Obama's acceptance speech
It's not just that she was inexperienced... but that she was ? obviously, transparently, completely ? uninterested in and uninformed about national policy at nearly every level.
Really though, how different does this make her than George W. Bush?
I'm not asking that to be snarky. I really am torn about this myself and am curious what you think. Is Sarah Palin a degree worse than our notoriously "incurious" president?
I'm not sure, but I will say this: when you have a political party that exists solely to get itself elected, which is the way the post-Rove Republicans are currently configured, then know-nothings like Bush and Palin are really a logical consequence. If a party is completely uninterested in making policy, than a figure like Palin is a feature rather than a bug. The only problem this time was that A) she couldn't disguise it as well as Bush could and B) for a variety of reasons the media climate of 2008 is less sympathetic to that sort of politician.
As an intellectual exercise, consider this. Switch the two figures around and imagine if Palin had been the president in 2000 and McCain had picked popular but inexperienced Governor George W. Bush as his running mate. Would we be having the exact same conversation about how Bush "represents the breaking of a consensual cultural barrier." I think we might.
Thersites, what's the point of that observation? Do you really think sexism is behind criticism of Palin? Kevin has attacked the ignorance/incuriosity of Ronnie & W as well.
But more importantly, the comparison doesn't hold. W was governor of Texas, one of the most populous states in the country, for 5 years (1995 to 2000). That is vastly more experience than Palin -- even if Bush remained stunningly unintelligent, ignorant, and incurious.
Likewise, Reagan spent 8 years as Governor of California (1967?1975), another state far more populous than Alaska.
Those men may share much of Palin's inability to speak coherent English and her lack of a grasp/interest in policy, but they clearly had far more experience than she did. It is thus somewhat understandable that the media might have treated their candidacies differently (even if I also certainly agree with you that the media's coverage of W was near-criminally incompetent).
I used to wonder what language Palin speaks. I would re-read her statements trying to figure out what she was saying. But then I saw this from her communications person, Kate Morgan, and I decided it must be a regional dialect:
"Other issues facing the state ? what some people consider to be inaccurate ? how would I put that ? listings of certain Alaskan animals as endangered or what is that second term that they use? They're at risk? No? That's not the technical term. Anyway, there's two listings there specifically dealing with polar bears and there's also the issue with beluga whales. So there's different things and the issue there is of course wanting to provide a substantive lifestyle for our first Alaskans here which are the indigenous people and also wanting to protect our environment wanting to be good stewards to that and to take care of the animals that make Alaska. What it is however if they are improperly categorized then that can run snags on other types of development that would benefit not only people of Alaska but the world such as depending on certain kinds of drilling that we do off-shore either or people are in a hurry to list groups of whales as endangered or at risk than that might impede the progress that we'd be making to free or to lighten the the load that America has us obtaining oil from overseas." (Got it?)
There's more here:
http://www.wowowow.com/post/palins-communications-guru-discusses-govs-ga...
Submitted by Undertoad (not verified) on Thu Nov. 13, 2008 5:38 AM PST.
Sure, the election was over last week, but let's keep talking about Sarah Palin!
I love it because the hate festers in my heart. My blood boils and it reminds me why I got interested in politics in the first place: to call people names!
I feel smart when I call other people dumb! Because that's what it's really about, not issues and stuff like that. Both parties kinda govern from the middle, and have to - so the only thing that's really important is how good they are on TV. Whether they can get through an interview without muffing anything, that's my main criteria for the Vice-Presidency. And if they muff things, it means they're incurious!
...while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, "We are not enemies, but friends?though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection."
-- President Barack Obama's acceptance speech
I did Model UN in high school, and we had to pass a test to go and actual represent the country we were applying for.
These are the kinds of answers that got people disqualified. They're dumb and vacuous - if you don't know 3 countries bordering on Syria, you don't get to represent Syria. If you can't name 1 thing you would do as committee chair, you don't get to be committee chair, etc.
Submitted by Nils (not verified) on Wed Nov. 12, 2008 12:42 PM PST.
"Consensual culture barrier" is the key term in this post, Kevin. The question is not about whether the public accepts Palin (that verdict I think has been rendered), but about whether the result of Palin's nomination is that the public comes to accept Palinism, that is, the idea that anyone is qualified to be President as long as they are sufficiently "like us" (or like what "we" wish "we" were).
Should Palinism take hold, then the 2008 election will become another example of the GOP systematic undermining of the core political civilities that are necessary in order for a democracy to function. The political-cultural norm that a party should not embrace a patently unqualified candidate is one that can't be legislated; but without it, a democracy ceases to be functional or meaningful.
So she evaded the question. This is a big deal?
Her sentences wander all over the place, but try punctuating the extemporaneous remarks of some of our more respectable political leading lights sometime.
Whoever transcribed this one doesn't have a basic grasp of punctuation and grammar him or herself, and makes the rambling sentences look a lot worse than they actually are.
Y'all are going way overboard on this lady just as you did with Hillary Clinton. S'pose that's some kinda amazing coincidence?
Kevin, the claim that John Edwards wasn't "much more experienced than Palin when [he] ran for VP" is complete BS. By 2004, Edwards had served a full, 6-year term in the U.S. Senate (he was elected in 1998). Edwards sat on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and U.S. Senate Committee on Judiciary -- two key and important committees. Serving on those committees necessarily prepared him FAR more for dealing with important national/federal issues and gave him vastly more experience than 18 months of governing a tiny petro-state and being mayor of a tiny 12,000 person town. Also, in his time in the Senate, Edwards co-sponsored 203 bills. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_edwards)
You really ought to defend that parenthetical observation or strike it through.
. . . well-earned obscurity . . .
This is a quibble, but I believe you mean well-deserved obscurity. Palin has earned every bit of the media attention she's received, much like other bizarre personalities such as Michael Jackson and Madonna (yes, I'm too old to come up with contemporary popular loons).
That said, I strongly disagree with some other commenters and agree with you Kevin (and with Andy) -- the Palin pick was an unmitigated disaster, and she is utterly unqualified to occupy one of the two highest national offices. That our country pretended that she might be for some two plus months has been terrifying. She and every moron like Kristol who supported her deserve to be marginalized in our collective discourse.
Apparently no one with the best interests of either the Republican party or John McCain talked to Gov. Palin before she was selected. I blame the folks who vetted her for not doing much of a job. I also blame McCain for going along without spending at least a day with her. If memory serves, John McCain spent some serious time talking to the other folks on his short list.
As a Democrat all I can say is heck of a job, heck of a job.
I guess this is where all the men are supposed to say Palin is smart because seeing it otherwise makes you a sexist?
I agree that many people are way more negative about her than they need be, but you'd be blind not to notice that she speaks REALLY poorly.
Your assignment, gyrfalcon, is to move around the punctuation ONLY in that last Palin quote until it is clear and makes sense.
Submitted by Legacy on Wed Nov. 12, 2008 12:52 PM PST.
Bob: I agree with BarryG. No, there was no way to know beforehand what Palin was like, but even a minimal vetting process would have made it clear. McCain deserves all the flack in the world for choosing an inexperienced VP after no more than an hour-long conversation.
gyrfalcon: I don't understand how you can even mention Palin in the same breath as Hillary Clinton. Get real.
J: Six years as senator, especially with no previous political experience, is pretty light on experience. Not as light as Palin, but Edwards was still one of the least experienced VPs ever.
The big difference, of course, is that Edwards had a good grasp of policy and issues. Palin didn't and doesn't. That was the main point of that sentence.
gyrfalcon:
The question she evaded is "What are your new ideas?"
What possible good reason could she have for evading that question? There are multiple plausible answers, she no longer has to consider whether she is on message with McCain, it doesn't require any arcane expertise. She could have said "My ideas are x, y, and z" and even if they weren't "new" that would be a fine answer. But she can't even come up with any policy ideas she is in favor of off the top of her head?
Just like she wouldn't name a newspaper or magazine that she reads off the top of her head? Why is she unable to answer that question?
Submitted by Eric Scharf (not verified) on Wed Nov. 12, 2008 12:55 PM PST.
"Unmoored" is spot on. Palin was the perfect candidate for an audience that embraced reality television, that dispensed with standards, logic, and inquiry. Millions of people failed to appreciate that if the subject is aware of the camera, the show cannot be "unscripted" but is just poorly scripted. Fortunately, that audience didn't constitute an electorally-decisive majority.
As someone who fell early for Survivor, it is understandable that Kevin is having difficulty parsing how he feels about Palin's candidacy.
Kevin, saying that Edwards was "still one of the least experienced VPs ever" doesn't validate your claim that Edwards wasn't much more experienced than Palin. At all. It's not logically connected in any way.
That is, say that prior VP nominees' experience level fell between 75 and 90 on a 1-100 scale, and you claim Edwards had a 50, the lowest ever. But then Palin comes along with a 10. It may still be true that Edwards was relatively under-qualified, but it is NOT then true to say, as you did, that Edwards "w[as]n't much more experienced than Palin." In my crude hypo, he was 5 times as experienced as her.
At bottom, you have 6 years in the United States Senate, serving on key committees, and an incredibly successful career as a lawyer vs some 18 months as Governor of a tiny petro-state, and some time as a mayor of a tiny town. I'd say Edwards remains substantially more experienced than Palin, even granting your claim that Edwards perhaps was on the lower side of experience for past VP nominees.
Submitted by Stewart Dean (not verified) on Wed Nov. 12, 2008 1:00 PM PST.
Haven grown up in South, I don't find anything particularly unusual in having glossy (or very unpretty) people with brains of well seasoned hardwood. They litter the landscape and are proud (I tell you, PROUD!) of their ignorance and never more so than when they are running for public office. Happy Chandler (am I showing my age or what?) of KY had the aphorism coined for him that "Great oafs from little icons grow".
I left the South in the late '60's, delighted to leave its
narrow-gauge purblind religion and politics behind, never dreaming that they would metastasize to the nation at large and we would end up with morons like Palin and Bush putatively qualified for the highest office.
Submitted by Chris Brown (not verified) on Wed Nov. 12, 2008 1:01 PM PST.
"Should I laugh or should I cry?"
I think you should hope that she doesn't descend into obscurity. Each time she speaks her vacuity becomes even more manifest, further damaging her approval rating and the republican brand.
She is so vacuous, in fact, that she apparently believes that her fellow republicans, other than the most simple minded extremists, will embrace her 2012 candidacy.
I'm with everyone else. To compare the situation with Sarah Palin to Hillary Clinton is a major slap to Clinton and women in general. Is that what feminism is today ? We can't dish out valid criticism of a female candidate for office without it being sexist ?
BTW, the big deal Gyrfalcon, is exactly what Kevin posted. Our media basically played along with the idea that Palin was fit for office, when it was clearly not. Absent the other real issues that we're confronting, this woman could be our VP-elect. Bush in 2000 and Palin in 2008 are strong indicators that there is something seriously wrong with the information that is being disseminated via the current media powerhouses.
Finally. Thank you Kevin and Andrew for finding the words. You had me at "deluded and delusional." I think from here we go directly to a diagnosis next. There are shrinks out there hard at work on the evidence, as we speak. I suspect it will be somewhere in the autistic range?
It's not just that she was inexperienced... but that she was obviously, transparently, completely uninterested in and uninformed about national policy at nearly every level.
Really though, how different does this make her than George W. Bush?
I'm not asking that to be snarky. I really am torn about this myself and am curious what you think. Is Sarah Palin a degree worse than our notoriously "incurious" president?
I'm not sure, but I will say this: when you have a political party that exists solely to get itself elected, which is the way the post-Rove Republicans are currently configured, then know-nothings like Bush and Palin are really a logical consequence. If a party is completely uninterested in making policy, than a figure like Palin is a feature rather than a bug. The only problem this time was that A) she couldn't disguise it as well as Bush could and B) for a variety of reasons the media climate of 2008 is less sympathetic to that sort of politician.
As an intellectual exercise, consider this. Switch the two figures around and imagine if Palin had been the president in 2000 and McCain had picked popular but inexperienced Governor George W. Bush as his running mate. Would we be having the exact same conversation about how Bush "represents the breaking of a consensual cultural barrier." I think we might.
Your assignment, gyrfalcon, is to move around the punctuation ONLY in that last Palin quote until it is clear and makes sense.
That, sir, is an impossible assignment. She is a dream case study for my daughter's college linguistics class.
Submitted by Daryl McCullough (not verified) on Wed Nov. 12, 2008 1:17 PM PST.
What is weird about the whole Sarah Palin thing is that are many people (thankfully, less than 50% of the voting public) who love Sarah Palin. They considered her to be a breath of fresh air, they consider her to be "honest" in a way that no "Washington politicians" are. I have no idea why anyone has that impression of her, but they do. In particular, why do people think of her as honest when nothing she says is true?
Of course, the same dynamic was at work in the 2000 election. Bush routinely told falsehoods, but for some reason, many people viewed him as more basically honest than Gore.
Andrew Sullivan isn't the issue here, he's a blogger and anyone who wants to can easily ignore him.
Sarah Palin could have been vice president and now is just waiting for "God to open a door" that she can plow through to be President.
I join in with the others who challenge gyrfalcon to punctuate to his heart's content to make her answers to Blitzer look even semi-literate.
Gah!
Thersites, what's the point of that observation? Do you really think sexism is behind criticism of Palin? Kevin has attacked the ignorance/incuriosity of Ronnie & W as well.
But more importantly, the comparison doesn't hold. W was governor of Texas, one of the most populous states in the country, for 5 years (1995 to 2000). That is vastly more experience than Palin -- even if Bush remained stunningly unintelligent, ignorant, and incurious.
Likewise, Reagan spent 8 years as Governor of California (19671975), another state far more populous than Alaska.
Those men may share much of Palin's inability to speak coherent English and her lack of a grasp/interest in policy, but they clearly had far more experience than she did. It is thus somewhat understandable that the media might have treated their candidacies differently (even if I also certainly agree with you that the media's coverage of W was near-criminally incompetent).
Submitted by goethean (not verified) on Wed Nov. 12, 2008 1:42 PM PST.
> when you have a political
> party that exists solely to
> get itself elected, which
> is the way the post-Rove
> Republicans are currently
> configured
That's not true. they exist to make the rich richer.
"But more importantly, the comparison doesn't hold. W was governor of Texas, one of the most populous states in the country, for 5 years (1995 to 2000)"
Under the weird constitution of Texas, the governorship is a strangely weak post. See this description:
Yet there are reasons why no Texas governor has ever clinched a major party's presidential nomination or claimed the Oval Office. One may be that, unlike other states that have sent chief executives on to the presidency, Texas has a governor whose role, by constitutional design, is to be a relatively feeble public servant.
As governor of Texas, Bush is not allowed to appoint all the members of his Cabinet. He does not write the state's budget, and his ability to write legislation is limited by his constitutional authority and the fact that the Legislature meets only once every two years.
The impressive part of Bush's record is the political skill he has displayed in mounting an effective presidential campaign from a relatively powerless post, said former Texas congressman Charles Wilson, and not the broad or deep experience the governor earned during five years in office.
''It's probably the weakest governership in the country,'' said Wilson, a Democrat. ''It's riding in parades and appointing people to commissions.''
''The lieutenant governor has more power in Texas than the governor,'' said historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who once put the Texas governorship in a tie for last place when ranking the constitutional and legal powers of the 50 state executives. A similar survey by Congressional Quarterly ranked the Texas governor in 49th place.
http://graphics.boston.com/news/politics/campaign2000/news/Texas_governo...
The only thing W. Bush knew before becoming president was oil companies need big profits. After 9/11 W. Bush learned to invade small, poorly defended countries, because defense contractors need big profits, too. Palin does not have a father who was a president, which is why W. Bush was assumed to have known more than he did.
I see this more as a Republican trend, beginning with Reagan and stretching out and down to Palin, and we may not yet have touched bottom.
If you don't have a logical or pragmatic understanding of the world and the United States as it actually is rather than what you ideologically believe it or want it to be, if you don't believe in government or the necessity of it, and don't know what policy is if it jumped up and slapped you in the face, you'd vote for chirpy, self-deluded, vacuous, disinterested, waterlogged presidential timber as well.
They have seen themselves and it is her!
Thanks Richard, I did actually know that and considered pre-rebutting it. At bottom, I still think that 5 years of experience as governor of a major state, even if the position is relatively weak, vastly trumps 18 months as head of Alaska, distributing petro money to citizens. Also, W did play some roles in his father's campaigns, and some folks have defended Obama's experience by pointing to the strength of his campaign organization and the experience running it and so on. That could also apply to W.
In any event, I have no desire to defend W, Reagan or Palin. All were ridiculous figures who should not have had any role in our national politics.
J: ... Do you really think sexism is behind criticism of Palin?
Not what I meant at all. I was just making the observation, in a sarcastic manner, that this was not the first time a person -- regardless of their sex -- with no knowledge of or interest in, etc. ... has been a candidate for national office.
I consider W and Reagan to be the two worst presidents to have served in my lifetime. (59 years.) Palin may or may not have been worse. Thankfully, we'll never find out.
