Ross mentioned Palin’s old CNBC and C-SPAN interviews as evidence of what she was capable of when she is discussing subjects she is more familiar with, but what becomes painfully clear on reviewing these is that she has an established set of rote remarks on Alaska, energy production and “hungry domestic markets” that she honed over many years and yet she has nonetheless produced confusing or nonsensical answers in connection with her presumed area of expertise in just the last few weeks.  If you watch her interview with Bartiromo, you hear all the same things that you’ve heard over the last few weeks including the apparently incorrect 20% figure she keeps throwing around, and you begin to realize that if you pressed her much on any of these points she would resort to the same bizarre filibustering that she did in the Couric interview.  Her apparent fluency and ease in the CNBC interview in particular were the products of her being allowed to speak uninterruptedly about something extremely specific to Alaska along with the relative unfamiliarity of her interviewer with Alaska.  The questions were not challenging, and there were no follow-ups demanding elaboration or specificity.  

When faced with a challenging question, Palin seems to have a habit of taking the most severe position possible, as if to demonstrate her gravitas by saying that we might have to go to war with Russia or there could be another Depression.  Whether or not she believes this or understands why this would be so, she handles challenging questions by overcompensating and saying more than she needs to say in order to make her point.  This goes beyond a lack of experience handling members of the national media.  Instead of seeing a challenging question as an attempt to elucidate something that is obscure, she treats it as if it were a trick, and she thinks that by her own sort of “straight talk” on war and depression she has avoided falling for the trick.  Follow-ups and specific questions are where she gets tripped up worst of all.  As her old rival Halcro seems to have noted correctly about her debate performances in Alaska, she has a habit of falling back on generalities and “happy talk.”  Her interview with Couric was a glaring example of exactly that, but taken to a gruesome extreme as the cheerfulness and generalities seem to have overloaded all circuits and caused a system crash. 

It isn’t just that she is more comfortable discussing energy issues, but that she used to be able to talk about Alaska without many other people being able to gainsay her, and even on issues relating to Alaska she was not what you would call a detail-oriented person.  As the factcheck.org report suggests, even the details that she does cite may not be reliable.  She is essentially the anti-Romney; she is the antithesis of a technocrat.  If he thinks “getting into the weeds” is important, she wants to race right by them.  That is part of the reason why a lot of people love her, and why most people detest Romney.  This is not because she could not familiarize herself with these details; she just seems to have no inclination to do that.  As she said, “I look out over the audience, and I wonder: Is that really important?”  Her answer to that concerning most of these issues seems to be, as she might say, “Nope.”

If there is another thing that we’re learning from her record it is that she doesn’t respond at all well to criticism, and she has made such a habit of shielding herself from it or ignoring that I suspect she has not learned how to deflect or refute it, which compels her to keep repeating whatever tried and true lines she thinks might be remotely relevant to the question.   It cannot help when she is put on network television after being shielded from any and all contact with the media and asked about subjects she hasn’t practiced talking about very much, and it cannot help her that she probably was told early on that she knew nothing and she became aware that her handlers believed that she knew nothing.  Still, it seems clear to me that her flubbed interviews were not accidental, but were bound to happen when a politician elevated mainly through the “gut-level connection” had to say something coherent about the pressing issues of the day.  Palin’s political style is the logical extreme of the Bushian folksiness-trumps-expertise and McCainesque “authenticity”-trumps-policy approaches.  She is a natural product of mass democracy’s ongoing pursuit of charismatic mediocrity, in which voters not only seek someone with whom they can identify but also actively discourage politicians’ cultivation of expertise.  Expertise grates against their egalitarianism, and so they try to avoid it in their political leaders. 

Ironically, McCain’s efforts last night to portray himself as an expert on foreign policy, combined with his irascibile put-downs of Obama, probably did more to sabotage his cause than anything else.  Like a lot of Palin defenders after the Gibson interview who complained that they, too, couldn’t have explained what the Bush Doctrine was, many of the undecided voters watching the debate probably took umbrage at McCain lecturing on this or that policy that they may not have understood very well, either.  In this way, the candidate so often described as “aloof” and professorial managed to establish that “gut-level connection” with viewers in a way McCain never did, because he expressed empathy and paid at least some lip service to the average voter’s concerns.         

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