Ignorance Is Strength?
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Still, as her former running mate would say, the fundamentals of Sarah Palin are strong. Her conservative detractors—Colin Powell, David Brooks, and Christopher Buckley among them—were put off not by her personality but rather her lack of knowledge about certain national and foreign-policy issues. Such deficiencies can be addressed easily [bold mine-DL]. ~Chris Beam
This is a claim I keep seeing repeated again and again to bolster the claim that Palin will be back. New reports from inside the McCain campaign put this in a rather harsh perspective, since they suggest that the deficiencies are so great that if they are to be addressed at all it will not be easy.
Carl Cameron reports:
There was great concern in the McCain campaign that Sarah Palin lacked a degree of knowledgeability to be a running mate, a Vice President, and a heartbeat away from the Presidency. We are told by folks that she didn’t know what countries were in NAFTA….We’re told that she didn’t understand that Africa was a continent….a whole host of questions that caused serious problems about her knowledgeability….[She] was particularly angry about how the Katie Couric interview went. She didn’t accept preparation for that interview, and aides say that was part of the problem.
Obviously, we should take what disgruntled McCain staffers dish to reporters with a grain of salt. They have an agenda, and part of it is to make her look even worse than she already does to deflect some of the criticism away from McCain. The claim that she didn’t know Africa was a continent is the sort of thing that almost sounds as if it belongs to a caricature of a person who knows nothing, but it seems remotely possible that it is true. Americans’ knowledge of world geography is notoriously poor, which does not excuse it in this case if true, but neither is it all that far-fetched. The troubling thing is that I get the sinking feeling that a lot of people who want her to become the future of the party couldn’t care less about this. I can almost hear some dedicated pundits rehearsing the next defense, “Well, how many people understand that Africa is a continent? Do we expect our elected officials to understand the conventions originally invented by ancient geographers? Besides, technically, Africa is attached to the landmass of Asia and so you can see why she might have been hesitant to identify it that way.” A more aggressive defense might say, “Who cares about Africa? Palin is interested in helping this country.” The claim about NAFTA seems hard to believe–how could a governor of Alaska not know which countries were involved in this agreement? Then again, this tends to confirm everything we have come to know about her lack of interest in policy details. These claims about her are so bizarre and yet specific that it is hard to dismiss them outright.
Still, the report that she refused to prepare for the Couric interview makes everything quite clear. She wasn’t overwhelmed with scripted answers and talking points that they had been forcing on her–she was genuinely at a loss for coherent answers because she had not even attempted to prepare for the questions she would be asked, and so she tried to bluster her way through to rather calamitous results. Far from being a distorted or misleading image of what Palin knew on her own, that may have been the clearest picture of her understanding of the issues that we had in the last two months. In the last few days, I have seen remarks to the effect that “anti-Palin” conservatives are going to end up feeling foolish in the future for having doubted her qualifications, but with every passing day and each new revelation I am even more convinced that everyone who criticized her fairly on her record and statements will have no reason to feel that way.
Update: In a new NYT story, the claim about the interview is qualified here by an anonymous McCain advisor:
Ms. Palin, who had prepared for and survived an initial interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News, did not have the time or focus to prepare for Ms. Couric, the McCain advisers said. “She did not say, ‘I will not prepare,’ ” a McCain adviser said. “She just didn’t have a bandwidth to do a mock interview session the way we had prepared before. She was just overloaded.”
I’m not sure that this helps Palin that much, but it does complicate the picture a little.
Filed under: politics
You hit it on the head right here:
“… I get the sinking feeling that a lot of people who want her to become the future of the party couldn’t care less about this.”
This is precisely the situation. The whole idea that she will be prepared in 2012 is based on the notion that it takes very little preparation to be President, other than holding some kind of office for a few years and looking good in front of the cameras, that one can simply rely on advisors who know about these things, as long as one has the right “gut” instincts. This is how W. got chosen, and he didn’t have much interest in the details of foreign policy either. These people simply don’t change, and as long as the Republican party is run by these people, they will continue to back people like W and Palin. And I don’t see how some other group of conservatives with different values is going to take control of the party, because there is no pressure at all from the base for them to do so. The base wants Palin.
Let me remind you of who ran in the primaries: Fred Thompson, who has no visible qualifications whatsoever other than a gravelly voice and television crime drama expertise. Mike Huckabee, who is charming and skilled politically, but has no serious knowledge of most issues, especially foreign policy. Rudy Guilliani, a total whackjob with no comprehension of what governing a country actually means. McCain, who as you know has spent a lifetime flaunting his POW status to mask a serious lack of interest in any policy details about anything, including foreign policy, but who has limitless confidence in his own power to accomplish anything he sets his mind to, even though he’s never actually accomplished anything he set his mind to. Ron Paul, who though beloved by his fans and relatively knowledgable, was completely rejected by the party as a whole. And Romney, of course, who is actually relatively intelligent and reasonably well inforned, but who alienated almost everyone outside his own circle of supporters. So how is it exactly that Palin is overshadowed by these giants? It’s not as if Republicans have set a high bar of knowledge, expertise, judgment, and accomplishment. Their “high bar” is all about theatrical performance and nerve, both of which Palin has in abundance.
There’s a reason for this. Any candidate with real intelligence, judgment, and expertise would not support the policies of the Republican party platform, plain and simple. As long as those basic policies remain unchanged, the candidates who will succeed must be able to practice deep denial while acting with full confidence in their righteousness. This means the qualifications to be the GOP nominee are mostly ones of psychological imbalance and theatrical skill. To change that situation, the entire policy agenda of the Republican party would have to change, and that simply isn’t going to happen.
They have an agenda, and part of it is to make her look even worse than she already does to deflect some of the criticism away from McCain.
The confirmation of Palin as a twit should only result in more criticism for McCain, shouldn’t it?
“The confirmation of Palin as a twit should only result in more criticism for McCain, shouldn’t it?”
That’s a fair point. Everything that tears her down makes him look more and more foolish for having chosen her, so perhaps there is some other goal here.
I’ll admit that I’m a Palin supporter. (I mean I like her and haven’t written her off for anything yet.) But I also believe in being reasonable. I always said that if she turned out to be a fool then that was it for me. But rumors that she is a fool don’t fly. Certain interviews did not go well at all. But she did not come across as a fool, at worst she came across as someone not well informed about stuff that many extremely well educated and thoughtful people are not well informed about. (Albeit stuff that is more relevant to being vp than to many other jobs, although it is difficult for me to imagine a circumstance in which those specific lacks of knowledge would be a problem for her.) I know lots of Ph.Ds, for example, who don’t know court cases or what the Bush doctrine is. Or at least, they didn’t until they looked them up so that they could make fun of Palin.
I thought the place where she would show herself to be a fool would be the debate. And she turned in a fine performance. Biden turned in a great performance, and she wasn’t completely outclassed by him. As it turns out, Biden’s great performance was the result of the notorious performance enhancing drug: confident lying. Or else Biden is just such a fool that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Either way, it is hard for me to see why I should think more highly of Biden than Palin.
The point is, if Palin ever says that Africa is a country, or anything else like that, then I will take that into serious consideration. (Of course, people say stupid things all the time: “I’ve campaigned in all 58 states”, etc.) All I want is for people to proportion their beliefs to the evidence. And remember, if saying she is a fool is going to be relevant, it has to mean that she is a fool relative to the other potential vp picks. I certainly don’t think she’s a high caliber thinker, but I certainly don’t think Biden (for example) is either.
perhaps there is some other goal here.
Clearly, McCain’s career is over; I’d be stunned if he ran for re-election. His reputation among GOP partisans is now permanently trashed. On the other hand, we can probably start the countdown to his come to Jesus moment with the press who once loved him so. Which means we can start the countdown to the articles in Time and Newsweek about how McCain was cruelly forced by Steve Schmidt &co. to sacrifice some of his honor (fortunately for him there turns out to be an infinite supply) by picking Palin. In other words, there’s no downside whatsoever.
The upside? I’d assume this is about making sure she has no future as a national figure, possibly because (a) McCain or those closest to him genuinely fear for the harm she could do in a position of real power, but that’s almost surely a subordinate motive to (b) revenge.
“I know lots of Ph.Ds, for example, who don’t know court cases or what the Bush doctrine is.”
And how many of them were on a major party ticket to be Vice President? It is not the business of the English Ph.D. who works on Chaucer, for example, to be able to talk about Kelo or Boumediene or Casey, but it *is* the business of a national political figure to be able to say something about them or at least about some general ideas relating to judicial philosophy. There might be plenty of Ph.D.s and doctoral students I know who are very busy with their own work and cannot keep track of these things, but they are not asking to be made first in line to the Presidency.
Knocking Biden for getting things wrong and lying is all very well, and it’s perfectly fair to do that, but that doesn’t make Palin look any better. It just makes Biden look worse. Have we really reached a point where we debase standards for what we consider acceptable and qualified on the grounds that the other guys are also lowering theirs?
She did well in the debate because follow-up questions were specifically forbidden under the rules negotiated by the campaign, and she simply didn’t answer many of the questions put to her. Follow-up questions get her every time. That’s why she avoids taking them, that’s why she stayed away from the press for as long as she did and that’s why she never held a single full press conference.
If you want someone who was actually qualified – in the accomplishments sense of that term – for President, try Eisenhower as a contrast to show how far we’ve sunk.
Five-Star General in the U.S. Army.
Supreme Allied Commander of Europe in World War II.
Military Governor, U.S. Occupation Zone, Germany.
Supreme Commander, NATO.
President, Columbia University.
After all of this, then he became President of the U.S. That is the sort of resume that (although you can easily criticize actions he undertook in those positions) you’re looking for in President of the United States, I think.
“Knocking Biden for getting things wrong and lying is all very well, and it’s perfectly fair to do that, but that doesn’t make Palin look any better. It just makes Biden look worse. Have we really reached a point where we debase standards for what we consider acceptable and qualified on the grounds that the other guys are also lowering theirs?”
The way I see things, there is a dilemma. If we want our politicians to be deeply informed, knowledgeable and insightful, then I’ll agree that Palin isn’t. But which politicians are? I don’t think we have evidence that Biden or Obama are, for example. (And I think that if any politician is, Obama is high on the list. And even if he has these intellectual virtues, he is still dreadfully wrong about matters of utmost importance. His intellectual virtue simply allows him to convince more people to join his disastrous causes.) In any case, I think it is unfair to pick on Palin if this is the standard–even if she is less of an intellectual than Obama, we don’t have any evidence that she is a particularly un-intellectual politician or vp candidate.
If we’re measuring Palin by a more “realistic” yardstick, then my claim is precisely that she hasn’t demonstrated herself to be more of a fool than Biden, who is supposed to be one of the most well informed members of the Senate.
In either case, I don’t think it makes sense to single Palin out for criticism. If you say to me that politics is rubbish and all politicians are frauds, I’ll agree with you (knowing that that’s a bit of hyperbole, but basically correct). If you tell me that the Republican party is deeply diseased, I will agree with you. (So is the Democratic party.) What I disagree with is only the claim that Palin is or represents a particularly noteworthy diseased aspect of the Republican party. The problem is Rush, and Coulter, and Ted Stevens, and the racists and homophobes that have somehow become the constituency of the Republican party, and…It would be so convenient, and, well, cheerful if the problem with the Republican party was Palin. That’s a manageable problem. But the problem with the Republican party is much deeper and less manageable than that.
“she never held a single full press conference”
I don’t know if this is true or not but she certainly has taken a lot of questions from the press, it just doesn’t get covered. My understanding is, however, that she may well have been cumulatively more available to the press than Biden.
“She did well in the debate because [...]”
She did *passably* well in the debate, given very low expectations. Much like W. in his debates. She clearly had little grasp of the issues, and even outright stated that she wouldn’t answer the questions put to her, with some implicit, strange feminist twist of reasoning (I’m a woman, and you can’t boss me around! or something like that).
Can’t conservatives see that they’re walking into the same situation as the last 8 years with a Palinesque figure – do they really want to do that again? (Having said this, if Palin really is as good as some of her devotees say, let her *prove* it. No more of this pig in a poke thing.)
even if she is less of an intellectual than Obama, we don’t have any evidence that she is a particularly un-intellectual politician or vp candidate.
Under gentle questioning from a former host of The Today Show Palin was repeatedly stumped and responded by spewin gibberish. Even if we acknowledge that the bar is set relatively low for American presidents and vice presidents she plainly fails to clear it.
Just saying, “She’s no worse than Biden” doesn’t make it so. Biden may say many silly things, but he generally manages to string words together into sentences, and then string those sentences together into paragraphs, thus making arguments that English-speakers can understand, evaluate and fact-check. That puts him in another league from Sarah Palin–not because he’s such hot s**t, but because she’s a joke.
“Just saying, “She’s no worse than Biden†doesn’t make it so. Biden may say many silly things, but he generally manages to string words together into sentences, and then string those sentences together into paragraphs, thus making arguments that English-speakers can understand, evaluate and fact-check. That puts him in another league from Sarah Palin–not because he’s such hot s**t, but because she’s a joke.”
And saying she is worse doesn’t make it so either. Biden expressed more false propositions during the debate than Palin did. Did Biden express more propositions overall? Perhaps. My point is that Biden is supposed to be the gold standard, and it isn’t clear that Palin made any more of a fool out of herself during the debate than Biden did. And I don’t think you can claim that this was because Palin expressed significantly fewer propositions than Biden did.
As an aside (I don’t quite see how it is related), `she’s a joke’ does not express a proposition–one couldn’t give an argument that it is true or false–but it does communicate to me how you feel about her.
Knocking Biden for getting things wrong and lying is all very well, and it’s perfectly fair to do that, but that doesn’t make Palin look any better. It just makes Biden look worse. Have we really reached a point where we debase standards for what we consider acceptable and qualified on the grounds that the other guys are also lowering theirs?
Proof positive that it’s happening is going on right here, as it is elsewhere. Identity politics are alive and well.
As for Biden, he’d been working the smaller news media outlets, getting local coverage. Honestly, she was such a distraction, most people didn’t care where he was. He’s a known quantity and she remains an enigma.
As an aside (I don’t quite see how it is related), `she’s a joke’ does not express a proposition–one couldn’t give an argument that it is true or false–but it does communicate to me how you feel about her.
I meant “she’s a joke” as shorthand for, “she’s laughably unqualified to be president, and therefore laughably unqualified to be vice president,” which is a perfectly defensible (I’d say self-evident) proposition. But I suppose a case could also be made that Palin is, literally, a joke. Rather than argue that point I’ll just offer a prediction: by the 2012 presidential election Palin will be thought of primarily as the inspiration for Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live impression, and not as a credible national political figure.
The number of comments on this post, generated relatively quickly, shows the fascination that Sarah Palin almost invariably generates.
We’ll have a few years to see how much of the snark about her lack of general culture is true. There’s time to get a clearer picture. I don’t think, though, that she’s going to fade quietly into the woodwork, whether or not she thinks Africa is a suburb of Minneapolis.
The Roman Republic had the cursus honorum, whereby an aspirant went through a series of lower offices before qualifying for the top. Sometimes we follow that pattern, and sometimes we prefer grey mares, young or old, coming out of the wilderness.
If the entire premises of our political culture are mistaken, as I believe them largely to be, experience such as Biden’s may be worse than nothing. The GOP is not going anywhere if it continues to select deserving dotards. It may do worse with the occasional ninny newbie such as our outgoing, seemingly Clueless Leader.
Let’s hope there’s a competent outsider around. Gov. Jindal, how’s your geography?
Palin, asked a question in front of a friendly crowd, on the energy issue, on which she is putatively the country’s foremost expert:
“‘Oil or coal, of course, is a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know, the molecules where, where it’s going to, where it’s not, but and in the, in the sense of the Congress today they know our very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So I believe that what Congress is going to do also is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it’s Americans who get stuck holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here; it’s gotta flow into our domestic markets first.”
This thread is fading, but as a PhD whose PhD husband in fact *does* work on Chaucer, I’d like to add that the day after Palin’s ignorance about Supreme Court cases was disclosed, we stood in our kitchen and — without looking anything up in order to mock Palin — quickly reeled off Dred Scott, Brown, Roe, Kelo, Boumediene, and Padilla. One would expect that these first three, particularly, would be part of any American’s basic equipment, even if not legal scholars or running for national office. (To say otherwise is simply to endorse Americans’ abysmally low standards on information as well as geography.)
JohnnyD et al. can repeat *ad infinitum* their two (conflicting) memes: a) Palin is incredibly smart in the way you elites want her to be, but bizarrely since August she hasn’t had the “chance” to display it; b) Palin may not be smart in the way you elites want her to be (catching cultural cues, knowing what Porcellian is, etc.) but she’s smart in a completely different, intuitive way that doesn’t involve, say, knowing that South Africa is not the same as southern Africa. Fine. If you want a president whose most oft-displayed talent thus far is extorting other people’s money to clothe and transport her husband and children, and who has not yet publicly spoken intelligently about any issue, that’s your prerogative in a democracy. But do me (and I’m a libertarian, so don’t bother just attacking Obama and Biden as a phantasmatic defense of Palin) the favor of not denying reality. She has answered questions from the press, yes, but she has never given a press conference. She did not give a secret, brilliant one that was simply not covered. “We don’t have any evidence that she is a particularly un-intellectual politician or vp candidate.” Maybe you don’t, but I do–having watched her interviews, read her public statements, and read older articles about her in the ADN. Call me an arugula-eater (and I’m from a *lower* class background than Palin!), but my evidence that she is a particularly un-intellectual candidate is that, well, I’ve never heard her say anything smart about *anything*. Including hockey. In my crazy empirical world, you don’t get to say only non-smart things, omitting the smart things, and still after 2.5 months enjoy a reputation as a smart person.
Such defenders of Palin are exactly like my students and their parents who repeatedly tell me Billy is “really” an extremely intelligent “A” student despite a semester of incoherent papers and failed tests. There too a predetermined ontology is confused with performance. There too I’m told in the face of all evidence that the student “just hasn’t had a chance” to “show what he’s learned.” (Those failed tests and incoherent papers are “gotcha” assignments, and don’t count.) Forget it. There are too many students who deserve As for smarts and hard work to lower the standards for the lazy dullards whose chief energy is expended not on improvement but on “up is down!” claims that they’re “really” smart. There are better candidates out there for the GOP, which needs to stop this Palin obsession with a) denying reality and b) setting its standards so low that a candidate who has still, after 2.5 months, not proven herself to be that vaunted “quick” study is the best it’s got.
Seeing transcripts of her responses makes my eyes bleed.
Daniel, if Palin is even remotely considered the future of the Republican party, do YOU consider yourself a member of that same party?
What common intellectual ground remains between you and the Republican party? The party is not fiscally conservative, it is not actually socially conservative (okay, it is if you are white and Christian, neither of which is actually a precondition for citizenship), it governs poorly, and has been dumbed down the to the “dumbest” level. Policy free, all but thought free, the party runs on pure tribalism and greed (depending, of course, on the percent of the populace into which you fall – top 10 or everyone else – not that tribalism and greed are necessarily mutually exclusive). What bones remain for you to gnaw?
If Palin isn’t the future for the GOP, just who is?
She’s not the first person to get throught school and not actually learn anything she doesn’t think she needs to know. She didn’t know Africa was a continent? I know lots of people like that. Details are for eggheads dontchaknow. I have no problems with these kinds of people working as snow plow operators but they don’t go to Washington. At least they shouldn’t IMO.
The thing is, even if you buy all of the excuses that her supporters make for her, it’s really hard to see her overcoming the negative first impression that she made with the bulk of the public. It won’t be enough for her to be smart, informed, and less committed to an “us” versus “them” narrative (where the “us” unfortunately for her represents much less than half of the nation’s voters). Erasing the public’s poor impression of her would take a level of intelligence, policy knowledge, and cultural reaching out that probably no politician is capable of.
Of course, given that most of the excuses are bullshit anyway, and the public impression is (on the whole) a reflection of simple reality, the above paragraph is moot.
I suspect that the powers that be in the GOP, as well as most GOP primary voters, will realize this soon enough if they don’t already, and that her campaign in 2012, if she chooses to run, will be a sad joke. If I’m wrong though – if she really does end up as the GOP standard bearer – then maybe the talk about the demise of the GOP won’t be so silly afterall.
[...] From the comments at Larison’s: [...]
Johnny5: “But [Palin] did not come across as a fool, at worst she came across as someone not well informed about stuff that many extremely well educated and thoughtful people are not well informed about. I know lots of Ph.Ds, for example, who don’t know court cases or what the Bush doctrine is. Or at least, they didn’t until they looked them up so that they could make fun of Palin.”
OK, I’ll bite. Do your PhD friends consider themselves prepared for the Presidency of the US? If they had been asked to be Obama’s running mate, would they have accepted without “blinking”? And if so, why wouldn’t that constitute being a “fool”?
She can be forgiven for not knowing a few facts, but the pattern of mistakes and ignorance was astonishing, including:
Claiming that seeing Russia qualifies as foreign policy experience.
Repeating this claim over and over despite the absurdity of the claim.
Claiming that the fact that Putin flies over Alaska has any relevance to anything.
Not knowing what the 1st amendment is about…
and so many others..
These are not just a ‘few facts’. She didn’t even know what the job description of vice president was.
She was a total embarassment from day one. Every day after when she opened her mouth, it became clearer and clearer that she might actually be more stupid than Bush, and that is one low/high bar to crawl over/under.
Most Palin supporters I’ve met, and they’re precious few here in Los Angeles, argued for her on the merits of her “gut” knowledge; that is, she instinctively knew the right thing to do. One of my neighbors went so far to describe her as brilliant but when asked for some actual evidence of her brilliance had nothing to offer except for his own “gut” reaction to her and the disproven story about how the teleprompter had stopped during her covention speech but she kept on talkin’. He then went on to repeat the Faux-news talking points about how the press was against her from the beginning and Katie Couric’s interviews was a series of “gotchas.” I felt like I was living in an alternate universe after that conversation, so different was my experience of the Palin phenomenon than his.
Long story short–the people to whom Palin appeals are those who equate charm, charisma, and pure animal magnetism with intelligence, and for whom “instinct” reigns supreme over intellect.
Ha, she doesn’t know Africa is a continent… how do I know that?
Someone said it to a reporter, and wanted anonymity so nobody knows who said that. So I’m perfectly willing to believe random anonymous comments.
Also, I got an e-mail on a penny stock that is going to make me millions. Someone I don’t know told me so, and I don’t have their name, so it must be true.
Or is one anonymous source here more credible than another? I’d really like to believe that I’ll make millions on a penny stock; probably more than you’d like to believe that Palin is an idiot…
Why don’t I believe I’m going to be a millionaire on anonymous stock advice? If you believe anonymous tips = fact then let me know; I can forward you some stock advice that I guess you’ll really enjoy.
My best guess re Palin is that she shares Bush’s incuriousity about the world and Biden’s habit of operating the mouth before engaging the brain.
It’s possible that she really didn’t know that Africa is a continent but it’s more likely, if there’s any truth to the story, that she was running off at the mouth, same as Biden’s remark about FDR being president in 1929 and going on television after the stock market crash. I don’t think that Biden literally believed that any more than he literally meant to say “literally” the numerous times he said “literally” when he meant “figuratively”.
Dan is right, though about the general Americano ignorance of geography, so it could be true. I know of people of average intelligence or better who think that New England is a U.S. state and that New Mexico is a foreign country.
Im sorry but didnt you guys vote for GEORGE BUSH???
INTELLEGENCE??Was it EVER on your short list?Palin is just a symptom of the vile tumor of ignorance you call the REPUBLICAN party!Whats it like to be the party of bigots and wackos and morons?Maybe you could just tour as a carnival sideshow!
“That’s a fair point. Everything that tears her down makes him look more and more foolish for having chosen her, so perhaps there is some other goal here.”
I wonder whether it is possible that many of these people are good people who went to work for McCain because they truly respected him and believed in his cause, only to find themselves thrust, through no choice of their own, into a totally unanticipated Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass universe in which they were forced to put a good face on a Veep candidate who at every turn said or did something that made her nomination more unpalatable and McCain’s judgment more questionable. It seems to me possible that some people might have found themselves struggling with a difficult and unexpected moral dilemma: the desire on the one hand to stand loyal to the man and cause they first undertook to support, and on the other hand a desire to stand for sanity, reason, and integrity. I can imagine that someone who genuinely believed in McCain, but also genuinely believed that it was mortifyingly foolish to promote someone as ill-informed and unadept as Sarah Palin as a legitimate candidate to step into the most powerful job in the world, might find him or herself mired in a truly terrible morass of indecision and worry.
In such a case, it seems to me possible that some people might, now that no further harm can be done to the McCain cause, choose a sort of better-late-than-never route to salvaging some self-respect by telling the truth. I have no idea whether that is what has happened; I do not pretend to have any actual information on the subject. Nor do I mean to try to decide here whether such a course of decision-making would be either wise or just. But if we are looking for a reasonable explanation of why McCain campaign staffers might reveal unpalatable truths about Sarah Palin now that the campaign is over, it does seem to me entirely plausible that some of them, having initially chosen loyalty over truth, might have suffered real pangs of guilt over that choice and might now try to assuage those feelings by offering the truth late in the game. I doubt that such a choice has any power to make someone feel much better in the long run; if you’re in the position of having to try to redress an error of judgment on a moral issue, you’ve already acknowledged to yourself that your choice was wrong, but it is the sort of thing that people do.
I offer the suggestion by way of demonstrating that what we are seeing in the revelations about Palin as a member of the McCain campaign doesn’t necessarily have to be a mere matter of sour grapes or petty, vindictive, in-fighting. It MIGHT be, at least in part, an example of the way people behave when they try to cope with extremely difficult moral dilemmas.
Im sorry but didnt you guys vote for GEORGE BUSH???
INTELLEGENCE??Was it EVER on your short list?Palin is just a symptom of the vile tumor of ignorance you call the REPUBLICAN party!Whats it like to be the party of bigots and wackos and morons?Maybe you could just tour as a carnival sideshow!
I think you could more profitably troll another site and another comments section. This is the website of a magazine co-founded by a man who left the GOP and subsequently ran for president against George W. Bush in 2000 as a third-party candidate. It’s the blog of a man who does not and has not supported George W. Bush, and who is not a Republican.
I can’t speak for the other posters here, but I became disgusted with Bush and the GOP during Bush’s first term and have not called myself a Republican in nearly five years. So if you’re looking to offend people by shrieking about the various deficiencies of the modern Republican Party you’ll have more fun doing it elsewhere.
Daniel,
I’m a bit disappointed in this post. I think you’ve become rather vindictive and mean regarding Sarah Palin.
Seriously, it makes you look petty.
You basically write that while you think Sarah Palin knows Africa is a continent, it wouldn’t surprise you if she did not.
Come on, that’s cheap.
I have a feeling what happened is that she slipped and said something like “Africa the country” etc just like Obama said there were “53 states”….
The book to read here is Fraser’s Marie Antoinette. I think the “Africa” comment has a “let them eat cake” feel to it….and I’m sure just as she never said “I can see Russia from my house”, it will enter into the collective of conventional wisdom.
A pity, because I actually enjoyed reading this blog- I think not anymore.
It isn’t cheap, it’s objective.
You’re “sure” she said things? You “have a feeling” ? Granted, this is all gossip and should be taken with a tablespoon of salt, but still, doesn’t the Couric interview make it plausible? It is pretty widely known that Americans as a whole are terrible with geography. Palin herself bounced around 5 different undergraduate colleges before getting a degree in sports journalism. Considering her cringeworthy performance in interviews, why is it not plausible?
Let me guess. You like her. You identify with her small town roots. Maybe you’re a woman and really are wowed by the symbolism of what the vice presidency meant with a woman at the post. Or maybe you’re a man and you’re sexually attracted to her. Either way, those qualities of who she is has nothing to do with her qualifications for office. It is not an indictment of her way of life. She just isn’t ready, and it blatantly showed.
If you will quit reading this blog because of Sarah Palin, you have bigger problems.
Comparing Sarah Palin to Marie Antoinette (ducinaltum two posts above)? And without irony? Nor a nod toward “the soft bigotry of low expectations”? And this is how her SUPPORTERS feel about her.
Come to think of it, other Palinphiles have compared her to Joan of Arc. And McCain’s campaign was always talking about the “last charge”, the Alamo, etc. during the campaign, McCain himself being obviously associated with the Vietnam War. Thrown in the Republican Southern Strategy and the Party’s lurch into the gutter of White resentment politics, and it seems clear: the GPO has become a party for losers and those who identify with losers.
Conradg has it exactly right: “Any candidate with real intelligence, judgment, and expertise would not support the policies of the Republican party platform, plain and simple. As long as those basic policies remain unchanged, the candidates who will succeed must be able to practice deep denial while acting with full confidence in their righteousness. This means the qualifications to be the GOP nominee are mostly ones of psychological imbalance and theatrical skill.”
Now, that doesn’t mean there’s not a way forward for the Republicans. Take the foreign policy sanity of Ron Paul, graft onto it the compassion & genuine concern for the poor of Mike Huckabee, and make sure this person isn’t an anti-gay or anti-abortion extremist, and you’ll have a path back to power. Heck, Olympia Snowe may even fit that definition.
Of course, the chances of nominating Snowe for President are presumably zero. But she really may be your last, best hope. If you do nominate Palin in 2012, you will lose far more independents than you did this year. Assuming Obama does a better job than Bill Clinton did, he’ll be able to take all comers. And if the Democrats are smart enough to nominate Brian Schweitzer in 2016…you could be looking at a long time in the wilderness.
I’m just back from Yale, very tired and am about to go to sleep. However, a few important points. This seemed to be a story worthy of attention because it showed 1) the deterioration of Palin’s public image, regardless of whether she did or did not know the things in question; 2; a possibly severe lack of knowledgeability that renders claims that Palin can easily make up what she doesn’t know harder to credit; 3) the scapegoating of Palin, which I said would happen on the first day after she was selected. The things she allegedly did not know sound far-fetched, as I said, but it is legitimate to bring it up in light of her genuine lack of knowledge regarding other matters of policy and her general lack of knowledge of foreign affairs. How much weight do I put on this story? Not that much, but I thought it deserved to be addressed in light of efforts to declare her the future of the right and someone who is going to make her critics look foolish in years to come.
If I were intent on simply mocking Palin, there are many other things–the stupid business about the clothes, the prank call, etc.–that I could have spent time on. I believe I am no more caustic or “mean” in my criticisms of her than I am in criticisms of other public figures when I find some flaw in them. If you find some genuine double standard, show it to me and I will try to correct for it.
I don’t take the trivial pseudo-scandal things about her seriously, and I don’t waste your time with them, because they ultimately don’t mean very much. I think it is remotely possible that the claims against her in this story are true, or at least partly true, and that is something that the public and conservatives in particular should know before they opt to make her into their champion/martyr/whatever. A significant part of this post was to ridicule the tendency of her more enthusiastic pundit supporters to make outlandish justifications for her mistakes.
A lot of people thought it was amusing and cute that Bush called the Greeks “Grecians” and didn’t know the names of foreign leaders–after all, how many average Americans knew the answers?–and then we discovered the hard way that someone poorly informed about the rest of the world tended to make poorly informed decisions about important policy matters relating to foreign affairs. Palin is being seriously feted in some circles on the right as a possible future presidential candidate and possible nominee in as little as four years; it matters whether she knows these things and many other things besides these. Had more people been a little more “mean-spirited” (i.e., critical and skeptical) about Bush’s lack of curiosity and lack of knowledge, we might have avoided some of the calamities that have befallen us in the last eight years.
That was my thinking behind this post, and that’s why I think this is not a post that should drive anyone away. I try to offer my honest views here, and I try to entertain as many other views as possible, and I would hope that whatever is worthwhile about this blog cannot be undone by one post out of the thousands upon thousands I have written here.
An important update on this story is here:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWViMjhiZjI4ODlkZjg0NDg5MTJmNmIwYmFiNDRmNWU=
That clears things up on this question, as far as I’m concerned. Not that I really trust Biegun’s word, but that is a plausible explanation that would account for the reports we have heard.
But it doesn’t sync up with a woman who is on record as wanting to give a speech during McCain’s concession as if it were a completely reasonable request.
I don’t privilege either set of tales very highly, but the diva-persona meshes more with reports from out of Alaska from people who have put their names out there speaking of her pre-VP days.
funyun,
The reason Palin probably thought it was reasonable to ask to speak after McCain’s concession is that she simply had no idea that this isn’t done, that no losing VP candidate had ever given such a speech before, and that it would be seen as being in very poor taste. This simply confirms how ignorant and out of touch she is with the general norms of political society in the lower 48. On the other hand, this example of her ignorance shows how her instincts are all self-serving, ego-maniacal, and bordering on the infantile. It’s the kind of request a child would make who simply didn’t know better. I think we have to see Palin in that light, as an ignorant and somewhat self-obsessed child who simply doesn’t know better, and can’t be expected to know better, until they grow up. We don’t expect children to know much about the world, in part because they are so much more interested in themselves and their immediate relations, and haven’t had the time to expand the sphere of their interests to the much wider world. The question is, if she’s this immature at the age of 44, how much maturity can we expect of her in another 4-8 years? How much real interest in the wider world can we hope she will develop in that time? Let’s face it, some people never get over their own narcissism and become interested in other people to any serious degree, and they never learn about them as a consequence. Palin’s lack of knowledge about the world should be seen as a symptom of this deeper failing in her character.
Conrad, your post is an opportunity for me to give props to James Fallows for pretty much calling the course of events back in August: http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/08/my_prediction_about_sarah_pali.php
On the Africa geography matter, my guess is the same as Daniel’s: it’s probably untrue that she didn’t know Africa was divided into numerous countries, just like it’s an exaggeration to attribute to her the claim that Russia was visible from her house, whereas she was simply claiming that Russia is visible from parts of Alaska (parts that she’s never visited apparently, not that this would have made her claim to being qualified in foreign affairs due to her state’s geographical proximity to an unpopulated Siberian outpost any less preposterous). Nevertheless, these are the sorts of things that get repeated and “stick” because they’re embellishments of underlying impressions of candidates. In Palin’s case she has an, IMHO, well-earned reputation as a pathological liar, diva and bullshitter, and thus urban legends like these seem plausible to the masses.
It’s likewise false to attribute to Al Gore a claim to have invented the Internet, but since he has a reputation for exaggerating his role in things, and since the urban legend is an embellishment of a claim to have helped “create” the Internet while he was in Congress, it will persist, even if most people who joke about it know it’s not literally true. Like many of the delusions suffered by mentally ill people, exaggerations like these have a basis in reality.
Palin’s open to running as president in 2012. Lack of self-knowledge…