These days, every time Sarah Palin opens her mouth it drives me crazy. She sounds like a blithering idiot.
However, if you want to see another side of her, including people’s perceptions of her, you have to go back to before the last election, before she was picked as VP. She did not come across as an idiot then, and she was capable of formulating paragraphs without shrieking or calling out to ‘Mama Grizzlies’.
For example, listen to this interview with Larry Kudlow. Now, I’m sure most of you won’t agree with her, but in this interview you can tell that she has pretty good command of the facts, and that she’s pretty fast on her feet in answering questions. Her vocabulary seems to be much larger than what she exhibits now.
Here’s another interview on Charlie Rose before she was a national figure, and again, she carries herself in a completely different manner than she does now.
Here’s a video showing some of her performance during the 2006 Alaska Governor’s Debate - a debate that she was widely considered to have won, against a long-term political professional and an academic challenger.
The video I was looking for, a four-part interview with Palin by C-SPAN in 2007 in which she answers questions unscripted from the interviewer and live phone audience, appears to have fallen down the memory hole. It’s no longer on YouTube, and a search for it on the C-Span video archive returns no results.
Before Palin became a national political lightning rod, the coverage of her was much more even-handed, and even Newsweek wrote good things about her, in an article that used Palin and Janet Napolitano as examples of women who were successful governors.
As I said, I’m not defending Palin - everything she says these days makes me want to jam needles in my ears. But she wasn’t always like that. I’m guessing the ‘new’ Palin is a combination of a careful media strategy coupled with fear of being caught saying anything wrong. So instead she speaks in vapid platitudes. She may also be a victim of her own ego with all this ‘mama grizzly’ crap.
But I have to say, if you’re looking for examples of her qualifications, don’t we have to apply the ‘Obama test’? Remember, when his executive experience was questioned, the argument was that he was qualified to be president because he was running such a masterful campaign.
By that criterion, I don’t see how Palin is unqualified. She has turned herself from a failed VP candidate and ex-governor into possibly the most powerful politician in the country outside of the White House. She’s making millions of dollars, her endorsements win elections for people she picks, and she’s got 20% of the country in her back pocket. She’s made other presidential challengers like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich look like second-class candidates, even though both of them could run rings around her when it comes to brains and policy knowledge.
Whatever it is she’s doing, it works. Whether her gift is timing, image, message, or whatever, she appears to have some kind of savvy that allows her to continually over-achieve compared to the predictions of her enemies.
Those are legitimate skills for a President. Whether they are sufficient skills is another matter, but certainly they should be be counted as qualifications.
