Sarah Palin and the fruit fly controversy

When you start hearing criticism of Sarah Palin for her position on fruit flies, you know it's time for the election to be over--just so the liberals can have some time to chill and get some oxygen to their brains.

Is Sarah Palin stupid? No, says former Ms. Magazine editor

I promise not to ever do this again, but here is a former editor in chief of Ms. Magazine, writing in the Daily Beast, on Palin's critics:

It's difficult not to froth when one reads, as I did again and again
this week, doubts about Sarah Palin's “intelligence,” coming especially
from women such as PBS's Bonnie Erbe, who, as near as I recall, has not
herself heretofore been burdened with the Susan Sontag of Journalism
moniker.

That's one of those comments you always imagine someone blowing the smoke from the end of her pen after she finishes writing it.  Elaine Lafferty makes some very interesting observations about Palin after spending some time with her.  "What is often called her 'confidence,'" says Lafferty, "is actually a rarity in national politics: I saw a woman who knows exactly who she is."

Sarah Palin may or may not have beaten Biden, but she did beat Tina Fey

Tonight's debate was interesting for a lot reasons, first and foremost in regard to whether Sarah Palin was going to continue as a viable political presence. What Biden did was largely irrelevant: he doesn't help or hurt his ticket. In fact, he did just fine, although his Washington-speak can't have won over any converts in middle America. As Jennifer Rubin at Commentary Magazine put it about Biden's remark about the time he spends at Home Depot, "What’s he doing there — trying to find someone to deliver a lecture to?"

Sarah Palin may or may not have beaten Joe Biden in the debate, but the fact is she didn't have to. What she had to beat was the media image of a political newcomer out of her water, and this she did in spades.

This debate wasn't about beating Joe Biden. This debate was about beating Tina Fey.

Sarah Palin not only exceeded expectations, I think she saved her political career. She was in danger of becoming a political joke because of poor performances in unadvisable interviews the geniuses at the McCain campaign unwisely put her in. This debate completely rewrites all of that current wisdom. I think it was Fred Barnes who pointed out that he could not remember any vice presidential debate that rewrote the future of a partipant. This one clearly did.

The only comparable such event I can remember was the second presidential debate between Reagan and Mondale, when Reagan, after a lackluster performance in their first debate, and facing questions about his fitness for office because of his age, made the remark about "my opponent's youth and inexperience," and hit it out of the park.

If you are scoring a debate card, I think it was a draw for Palin at best, but we all know these debates cannot be scored that way. They are about much more than the words the candidates say. Debates like this come down, not to who has the better arguments (and there were cogent arguments on both sides), but to who is more appealing. On this criterion, Palin won hands down.

Palin exceeded expectations, which is what the current wisdom said she had to do to win. But she not only exceeded expectations, she exceeded the expectations by more than she was expected to exceed them.

What really told you about how this debate went was the remarks of the opponents, and you could detect the talking points Democrats had prepared in the case of a Palin win. Paul Begala (who you can always count on to follow his orders) said it best: Palin may have helped herself, but she didn't help McCain. When you can't say what you want to say about something you just saw, say something about something no one could see.

Begala and the Democrats might be right, but I suspect not. Whether the McCain/Palin ticket converts the unconverted as a result of the debate isn't really what you would expect anyway. But what the Obama campaign has to be equally concerned about is what this does for Republican turnout. Palin had energized the base, and that energy was eroding.

It is back now.

Bringing back the hockey mom: Sarah Palin needs to declare her independence

The mishandling of Sarah Palin by the McCain campaign could go down as one of the greatest lost opportunities in modern politics. The squandering of the political benefits of a potential political folk hero has been painful to watch. All the promises Palin's convention speech held out for conservatives are in dangers of being lost unless the campaign can turn a corner in this week's debate.

Don't get me wrong. Palin's appeal is still strong among white women even though her appeal outside those bounds has been tarnished by the bungling Bush handlers who have had her ear since the convention.

The mistakes the McCain campaign made are plain as day: I can see them from my house. According to reports, McCain himself is fully aware of the situation and has dispatched several competent hands to salvage the situation.

What went wrong? More importantly, how do you fix it?

Palin's greatest appeal was her normal person credentials. She was mother of five who had upset the political powers of an entire state. She was the female Mr. Smith going to Washington to stand up for the little guy. So what do McCain's handlers do? They take her behind closed doors and fill her with political, economic, and foreign policy arcana and try to turn the Hockey Mom from Wasilla into Brainiac from Alaska.

If it had worked it would have failed.

As it is, they have produced a vice presidential candidate whose words don't fit her speech. It isn't that what she says is necessarily inaccurate or embarrassing per se--you have to go visit the other party's running mate if you want to get a taste of that. The problem is that she appears to be trying so hard to sound like an expert. Her remarks have the earnest ring of someone's first high school term paper on current events.

Every question elicits a stream of disconnected facts you can tell have been drilled into her in interminable quiz sessions on the campaign plane. Her coaches (all candidates have them) should have been telling her to do what all good PR coaches tell their clients: answer the question you wish the interviewer had asked and to do it in a few words as possible. Instead, her presentation has all the feel of being beaten over the head with an almanac. Anyone who has seen the footage of her performance in debates running for governor knows that, before the Bush advisers got to her, she was perfectly competent in such an environment.

Is it Palin's fault? She has to shoulder some of the blame here, but let's face it, when you get picked to be a presidential running mate, you're in a position of having to do what the guy at the top of the ticket tells you. It's a hard position to be in no matter who you are. That Biden has not been kept on as close a leash is more a function of no one caring what he says than the actual quality of what he has to say.

What where they thinking when they decided to have her play to her weaknesses rather than her strengths? Why in the world would you play on your opponents terms rather than your own? Did these people fail Politics 101?

From the last word of her convention speech it has been downhill. The decisions made by the McCain campaign in using her are simply inexplicable. On the one hand, they keep her from making small talk with reporters on the campaign trail where she would have easily acclimated to the national stage, and then they thrown her in the lion's den with people like Charlie Gibson and Catie Couric. I'm surprised they didn't send her to Jon Stewart first thing. They might as well have.

This is simply political malpractice. Who made these decisions? Find them and send them packing: they don't belong in politics. Give them their walking papers and whisper in their ears as they leave headquarters, "Electronics."

Palin should have gotten a good night's sleep after the convention and headed straight over to Sean Hannity's studio. Then maybe Bill O'Reilly and Greta Van Susteren. And when a full week had been spent at Fox News' studios, get on the talk radio circuit. Spend an afternoon with Rush. Go see Michael Reagan. Visit the studios of every conservative talk radio host on the air.

And when the mainstream media complained that she was being kept from them, she could have adjusted her hood and told them what nice teeth they had, but that they needed to get out of the way because she had a basket of goodies to deliver to the next conservative interviewer. Every conservative would have cheered her on.

To put it simply, Americans were promised a normal person, but they have succeeded only in giving Tina Fay new notoriety.

If Palin is smart, she'll run away from the campaign in the dead of night and refuse to tell her handlers where she is or what she intends to do. She eloped once. She knows how to do this. Then she can go out scouring the countryside for like-minded populists, gathering an army of peasants with pitchforks, and serve the only legitimate role of a community organizer: raising Cain. In the wake of the financial crisis, enthusiastic followers should be easy to find.

She can tell her inept advisers she'll see them at the debate. Maybe.

McCain should spend the rest of the campaign reinventing her image back into the mold of the hockey mom. They need to forget about trying to make her look more experienced than she is. Palin's appeal was never that she was experienced. In fact, her appeal was that she was like most Americans few of whom are experts on anything in particular.

Right now there are millions of Americans inexperienced in economics who have been told one thing by one set of experts and another by a different set of them. Sarah Palin could voice their frustrations--the frustrations of normal people who don't know who to trust. If she comes out trying to sound like another expert with a solution (and not doing it very well), she loses. If she comes out voicing the fears and frustrations of people who have watched their "experienced" leaders demonstrate their ineptitude even in trying to do what many Americans think was the wrong thing anyway, she wins.

Palin needs to drop the expert act. It isn't convincing, and isn't what she should have allowed her handlers to foist on her in the first place. She needs to act like who she is. This is the woman who said, "I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion." The problem is, that's what it seems like she's trying to do. To try to become the very thing you got into politics to oppose in the first place is an idea only political experts who have lost touch with normal people could have come up with.

Anyone interested in the what has happened to Palin needs to see Frank Capra's classic film "Meet John Doe," starring Gary Cooper. It is a movie about a man who is picked off the street and who, through the skills of people who have neither his nor the people's best interests at heart, becomes a political hero to millions because he is just like them. After reluctantly going along with the plan, he finds out that his sponsors are going to use his tremendous popularity for their own selfish purposes, and he rebels. But in the course of their exploitation of him, he has become the very person they have portrayed him to be--the everyman who identifies with normal people. No longer reluctant, he refuses to go along with their plan, and strikes out on his own, giving his own speeches. As a result, they try to destroy him. Rather than betray those who loved him for what he was portrayed to be--and what he in fact has become, he risks his own life to save the country from them.

There are obvious differences in Palin's position, but the contrasts to Palin are as instructive as the comparisons. John Doe's handlers, unlike Sarah Palin's, actually understood what image they wanted to project. They knew the power of populism. And John Doe's enemies are in fact his own supporters, not a hostile media. Palin's problem is not being manipulated by evil benefactors, but incompetent advisers.

But she is the female version of John Doe, and if McCain's campaign is smart, they'll go watch the film and see how to develop a populist personality, not try to turn her into something else. If they don't, the Palin should do like the movie hero, who, in everyone's best interest, strikes out on his own.

That's what a real maverick would do.

The Democrats double standard

Why is it that when liberals want to put a woman in a position of importance, her gender is the only important consideration, but when conservatives want to do it, qualifications are all that matter?

Who got the "Bush Doctrine" wrong?

Several conservative writers have already weighed in on the question of who made a mistake in Charlie Gibson's interview with Sarah Palin--Gibson or Palin.

One was John Podhoretz:

For the record, when a distressed friend called to say he was made nervous by her failure to identify the Bush Doctrine off the bat, I had to stop for a moment and think about it because I wasn’t instantly sure whether the Bush Doctrine was the policy of preemption or the democratization of Arab lands. And I wrote an entire book about the Bush presidency. She answered it, after a pause, by assuming it was the “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” line Bush promulgated right after 9/11.

It turns out Charlie Gibson meant the preemption doctrine — but then, he didn’t know what he was talking about either, since he told her in the weirdly patronizing voice in which he interviewed her that it was enunciated in September 2002.

The doctrine of preemption was, in fact, enunciated in June 2002 at West Point; September 2002 was when Bush declared Saddam Hussein in violation of 16 U.N. resolutions and declared that it was the responsibility of the U.N. to unseat him.

In fact, ABC News' own site has several different versions of the Bush Doctrine.

Now comes this, from the person, as the author states, who first coined the expression, Charles Krauthammer:

The Times got it wrong. And Charlie Gibson got it wrong.

There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today.

He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?”

She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?”

Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, he grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”

Wrong.

I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of The Weekly Standard titled, “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,” I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine.

...If I were in any public foreign-policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume — unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise — that he was speaking about Bush’s grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda.

Not the Gibson doctrine of pre-emption.

...Yes, Palin didn’t know what it is. But neither does Gibson. And at least she didn’t pretend to know — while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, “sounding like an impatient teacher,” as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes’ reaction to the phenom who presumes to play on their stage.

Part of the significance of Krauthammer's remark comes from the fact that he has not been a terribly enthusiastic supporter of McCain's choice of Palin.

Newest slam on Palin: She's not really a woman

That's right. Thanks to Rod Dreher for pointing out this interesting article by Wendy Doniger at the Washington Post's On Faith:

Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.

Oh brother. And I love Dreher's retort:

Well, useful to get that learnt. If there's anybody I trust to define womanhood and to be sympathetic to the lives of working-class women, it's a divinity school professor in Chicago who has constructed womanhood ideologically.

Just more evidence that the reason they don't like Palin is the shattering of their ridiculous illusion that the women of this country really share their feminist resentment of Western civilization

The article is also interesting as a good example of all of the liberal shibboleths about Palin:

But I object strongly when anyone (and especially anyone with political power) tries to take their theology out in public, to inflict those private religious (or sexual) views on other people. In both sex and religion (which combine in the debates about abortion), Sarah Palin's views make me fear that the Republican party has finally lost its mind.

Where did Palin bring up religion? It seems to me that it is people like Doniger who are constantly bringing it up--and then only to bash other people over their heads with it. Isn't it strange that is the people who charge other with being obsessed with religion who are really the ones obsessed with it?

As for sex, the hypocrisy of her outing her pregnant daughter in front of millions of people, hard on the heels of her concealing her own pregnancy (her faith in abstinence applying, apparently, only to non-Palins), is nicely balanced by her hypocrisy in gushing with loving support of her teenage daughter after using a line-item veto to cut funding for a transitional home for teenage mothers in Alaska.

Outing her pregnant daughter? The woman was being attacked for supposedly covering up her daughter's pregnancy of Trig. Was she supposed to think they weren't going to go after her daughter for really being pregnant? Does it matter that she actually increased the funding for the transitional home for teenagers rather than reducing it?

Is Palin a rebuke to feminism?

One of the raging ironies about the Palin nomination is that for years the media has been trying to foist feminist women on the public as the appropriate models of what women should be, an attempt that has been met mostly by a collective feminine yawn. Now a conservative woman has been set before the public and many of those women who are supposed to harbor a secret desire to be like Gloria Steinem are enthusiastically joining the Palin bandwagon.

The Democrats strange charge against Palin on the Bridge to Nowhere

The Democrats are accusing Sarah Palin of lying about opposing the "Bridge to Nowhere" on the grounds that, before she opposed it, she didn't oppose it. That's a rather strange argument. On that logic Barack Obama never stopped using cocaine, since, before, he stopped using it, he used it.

Here is South Carolina Sen. Jim Demint on Palin's record on the Bridge to Nowhere and a few other things.

Hell Hath No Fury: Watching the Obama campaign alienate half the electorate

The Democrats are in a very serious strategic bind: if they attack Palin, they anger women voters. If they don't attack her, they have to stand by helplessly and watch as her political star continues to rise. This is why the Palin pick will, in the end, prove to have been a political master stroke.

The Obama campaign strategy had been premised on completely different political fault lines. They had solved their woman problem when Obama defeated Hillary in the primary. But defeating Hillary was a manageable problem. Many women did not identify with Hillary. There was simply little danger that a significant percentage of women would ever see her--Washington insider that she was, as like them. That, and Hillary was a good girl and fell in line with the Obama campaign at their convention.

Besides, the Republicans wouldn't nominate a woman anyway. They thought.

Then came the Palin nomination. Now the Democrats are in a fix. The political realities have utterly changed, and the campaign strategy that they spent the past year formulating is completely obsolete. Still they appear loathe to discard it. If they don't, they're cooked.

The political world is totally different than it was just two weeks ago. There are things you could have said then, that you simply can't say now. Despite this, however, they just keep saying them. I have already said that I think Obama's "lipstick on a pig" remark was not an intentional slam on Palin, but a gaffe--but it's looking now like it could be a very costly one. Just Palin's appeal to women could put the Republicans over the top in the fall, but it is mistakes like this that could ensure it.

If you combine Palin's appeal to women with the anger at Obama's campaign that is already palpable because of what are perceived as unfair attacks on her, there is already enough momentum to propel the Republicans into the White House once again.

Take a look at this:



I'm tellin' ya folks, this could do the Democrats in. You can talk all you want about Palin's lack of experience and qualifications, and for all I know that may be right. That still remains to be seen. But all of that will be irrelevant if, because of politically inept Democratic attack rhetoric against this woman, the tick off half the electorate.

If it keeps going the way it's going, she won't have to win her debate with Biden. There will be millions of women rooting for her. If she wins, they cheer Palin; if she loses, they boo Biden. If there is one person in this campaign I would hate to be right now, it's Biden. He is in a no-win situation.

I literally don't know how the Democrats escape from this pincher movement the Republicans have performed.

So here's the question: Assuming I'm right (and my analysis isn't too much different from that of Willie Brown, Mayor of San Francisco), what should the Democrats do? If you were advising the campaign, how would you tell them to proceed from here?

Palin: the Democrat's tar baby

In the Uncle Remus stories, B'rer Fox makes a trap for the arrogant and excitable B'rer Rabbit: a tar baby. B'rer Rabbit finds him along the road, says "Howdy", and when the tar baby doesn't respond, B'rer Rabbit gets mad and finally punches him. When his hand gets stuck, he hits with the other hand. When both his hands get stuck, he kicks, at which point he is completely subsumed in the stuff . The more he struggles with the tar baby, the more stuck he gets.

The Democrats would do well to review their children's literature. The more they attack Sarah Palin, the worse they look. Other than Obama's appeal to lay off Palin's personal life, they haven't made a good political decision in two weeks, and the McCain campaign has made a whole string of them.

They will wake up one morning and kick themselves for it.

How will Palin affect other political races around the country?

One thing I haven't heard anyone address, and that is the effect of the Palin nomination on other races around the country: everything from Congress down to state legislative races. If the Republicans stay as energized as they seem to be now, there could be long coattails in all of these races, render the initial predictions of greater Democratic inroads in Congress and in other places obsolete.

The high Republican turnout Palin may bring about could spell national disaster for the Democrats.

8 Lies: The lengthening list of false charges against Sarah Palin

Liberal Democrats and their friends in the media have leveled charge after charge at Sarah Palin, none of which has actually had any basis in reality. They include:

• That her child Trig was actually her daughter's child
• That she was having an affair with a staffer
• That she was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party
• That she supported Pat Buchanan
• That she slashed money for a program benefiting teen mother

And my personal favorite:

• That she named her children after witches

Now we can add two more:

• That she banned books at the local library
• That she opposes mention of contraceptives in schools

But we should be careful about getting off topic and remember our Democratic talking points about the inaccuracies in Sarah Palin's speech.

Sarah Palin cartoons from the Sunday papers

A collection of cartoons about the Palin nomination from the Sunday papers.

If Obama were the newly-picked running mate, would the Democrats be cautious about rushing him before the public?

I think the criticisms of the lack of access to Palin are perfectly appropriate, but I think it has less to do with Palin, as the critics seem to suggest, than with other factors. I would bet that if it were up to Palin, she would want the leash lengthened a bit. McCain's campaign people, on the other hand, obviously want to make sure not only of Palin's grasp of the issues, but also that she fully understands her role in the campaign and where McCain himself is on the issues so there is no confusion.

There are a lot of reasons you would want to keep the newly-acquired pit bull on a short leash, even if (and maybe especially) it wears lipstick.

Since her pick appears to have been a late game inspiration on the part of McCain, his campaign has to be nervous about her level of expertise--simply because she is an unknown commodity to them--as well as about her ability to complement McCain in the way they want.

Ten bucks says that if Joe Biden were at the top of the Democratic ticket and he picked a relatively unknown Black freshman senator from Illinois, the Democratic campaign people would be doing exactly the same thing--only liberals wouldn't be complaining about it.

Sarah Palin in gubernatorial debate on Alaskan public television

Sarah Palin's November 2, 2006 gubernatorial debate on Alaskan public television.

The Atlantic Enquirer: another tabloid attack on Palin falls flat

The Atlantic fires another tabloid attack on Palin, only to see it, like so many others, miss its target.

Francis Beckwith vs. Andrew Sullivan on the Dies Irae

Francis Beckwith on Andrew Sullivan's critique of Larry Croon, Sarah Palin's pastor, who had the temerity to utter what he believes:

In this case, an Atlantic.com writer seems to think (from the quote he publishes and the link to which it is sourced) that it is somehow controversial for Christians, including Gov. Palin, to be members of a church that believe that their theology is true, that it teaches a last judgment and that one ought to rely on Christ and his grace, both in word and in deed, in order to avoid such a fate. Apparently, the Atlantic writer also thinks that there is something prima facie outrageous when a church’s pastor speaks from the pulpit of a last judgment of the entire world that includes residents of all the Earth’s geographical regions including Wasilla, Alaska and the United States of America.

This, by the way, is called Christianity, and it is well-documented as an essential doctrine in the catechism of the Church of which the Atlantic writer aligns himself. It’s also in the Nicene Creed: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” Surely, the Catholic Atlantic writer believes the Nicene Creed? Even Presbyterians believe it, for God’s sake!

Surely this will never happen if Palin is asked a foreign policy question

I wonder if, when Sarah Palin is asked a foreign policy question, she will say it is "above her pay grade"?

Update: More on Biden as Catholic moral philosopher.

A funny thing happened on the way to the coronation

Gallup, among others, has McCain-Palin moving ahead of Obama-Biden.