I disagree. A knockout performance by Palin could potentially be a game-changer. There is clearly a lot of yearning for someone like her among the public - witness the huge bump McCain got after her convention speech. And even with all the damage she’s taken, she’s still drawing crowds in the thousands, when Biden is lucky to get a hundred or two.
I don’t think Palin has hurt McCain. I think what has happened is that she has been effectively neutralized, and thefore isn’t helping much. McCain’s numbers are probably about where they’d be if he had picked a ‘safe’ pick like Lieberman or Romney.
If she gave an absolutely commanding performance, she’d get her shine back, and McCain would probably get bump of a few points. Probably not enough to win, but it would get a lot closer and give him a chance.
The thing is, I don’t think she can give that commanding performance. In my judgment, she’s not ready for the national stage, and it shows. And it will show in the debate. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but my expectations for the debate are pretty low. She may exceed them, but that’s only because the bar is set really, really low for her. But just exceeding low expectations isn’t enough at this point. She has to be so good that she effectively erases the last month of bad publicity. And I don’t think she will.
To be charitable, I think that’s what’s happened. She’s in over her head. Way over.
But that’s no excuse for not being able to recall the names of any newspapers or magazines. Not even the Wasila Herald-Tribune-Gazette-Telephone-Times-Standard-Picayune.
A bump that, as far as I can tell, was exactly the bump that 538 predicted from the RNC before running mates were chosen and that faded exactly as 538 predicted, as well.
In other words, McCain should have gotten a bump. He did. That doesn’t show that Palin was the cause. Every candidate gets bumps from conventions and those bumps always go away. Obama got a very sharp bump from his convention, that doesn’t mean everyone was thrilled by his choice of Joe Biden.
I can’t link to them in any way that’s going to make them easy to find, I’m afraid, as the only source I know of with a stockpile of them is Harry Shearer’s Le Show, and I couldn’t tell you which episodes specifically have them in them. There’s one around the time of the last Super Bowl which has a metric buttload of them, IIRC. I’m assuming he’s pulling 'em from the web, otherwise he’s got a mole buried deep within CBS News feeding 'em to him. (They’re not Harry impersonating her [which he sometimes does], but definate clips of her prepping for broadcasts.)
I could feel bad for her, except I don’t like her enough to feel bad for her. I think she’s a highly opportunistic person. She’s probably nice enough in person, charming and all that, but I wouldn’t want her in public office.
How does it feel to be the lone voice of reason? If everybody thought like you then we wouldn’t have all of these “Candidate A should resign!” and “Is Candidate B forked yet?” threads to [del]enjoy[/del]avoid.
I’ve got a problem with the “she just does badly in interviews” view.Everyone gets second chances. Consider the foreign policy question. Okay, she blew the answer, and everyone is laughing about her saying her experience comes from being able to see Russia. But they had the chance to give her actual experience. All we got was the photo-ops at the UN. The McCain campaign had ample opportunity to give her real credentials, and we’ve heard nothing.
Don’t you think they would have turned her loose if she had aced the ABC interview? I don’t see how letting her have lots of interviews would have helped. From the reports on the Alaskan debates, she can think on her feet. It is tough for anyone to campaign and learn the details of both foreign and national policy in a matter of weeks - details to the level of being able to convincingly respond to trick questions from experts.
She’s also got to know how to toe the McCain line, which is nothing new. From Tom Lehrer’s “Hubert”
Once a fiery liberal spirit
Now when he speaks he must clear it.
So probably half the stuff she could speak to authoritatively (humans and dinosaurs ) she wouldn’t be allowed to say.
In fairness, that isn’t what he said. But then, it’s a fucking topsy-turvy world when any living human being can make GEORGE W. BUSH look refreshingly honest. We have truly jumped into the looking glass.
But as Sam has pointed out, it’s hard to say if she’s dishonest or just hopelessly out of her league. Others have pointed to markers in her mannerisms that suggest panic and a fanatical desperation to not say anything controversial. I, too, suspect she’s been so heavily coached - and by “coached” I mean “Drilled” - to stick solely to a handful of talking points, and once the discussion veers away from them she’s afraid to say anything and just starts babbling talking points.
She could win the debate; it’s also possible the Bengals could win the Super Bowl but that ain’t where the smart money is. A single question she’s unprepared for could result in a babble of Miss South Carolina “th’Iraq” proportions.
I think this is the moralistic fallacy… that since it would be so nice if this were true, that it must be true. Unless, of course, you can provide one of these apocryphal examples you’re talking about. And I will not accept a clip of her spouting empty fluff like “ABC is just another example of what’s wrong with America”.
I must have missed those… could you link them again?
Assuming that this bit of wishful thinking were true, if she cannot recognize an obvious trap, or makes herself look like a dithering idiot over every innocuous question, she doesn’t have the acumen to be on the political stage. At this point she’s been handed nothing but softballs, and she has done nothing but duck and bobble. What would she do in a tense negotiation?
I’ll see your just-so statement and raise you an Occam’s razor.
On, I believe, the first (possibly second) page of this thread there is a link to a brief interview with Charlie Rose, posted by Shayna. She’s pretty fluent and coherent in it. No display of knowledge of foreign affairs or national affairs, but at least able to form complete sentences and sound like a fairly intelligent person - one with whom I disagree on almost everything, but one I could respect as not being a complete bimbo. That’s how they should have left her.
I think she couldn’t possibly do as bad as everyone thinks she will, the bar could not be set lower at this point. She might flub a line or two, might sound incoherent talking about things most people have no clue about in the first place, she might sound like shes just reciting memorized lines. Obama made people feel a lot safer about him being president after his debate, i think even if she does “well” Palin will not come out looking presidential at all and that will show in the polls even if its called as a “win” for her.
I know she was drawing crowds in mid September (and of course crowd sizes are notoriously hard to estimate, and subject to wide interpretation). I was unaware that she was STILL (ie recentlyl?) drawing crowds in the thousands.
I wonder if you could cite to her drawing crowds in the thousands in the past week (Say Sept 23 - 30?)
I don’t think she was making public appearances this week.
Prelude, to some extent, I think Steve Schmidt et al. have probably so shaken her confidence in herself and her own ability to bs that she may very well have problems that she wouldn’t have had before. They outsmarted themselves this time, by taking a natural talent and trying to hide her until they’d “trained” her themselves. It was stupid, and they’ve realized it, but I think the damage may already be done. She’s got to know McCain is on the edge - he’s got nothng to lose and could dump her (ask her to resign for family reasons) any time. She’s been force fed information that hadn’t interested her enough to follow for years in a month, and no one could remember it all. Plus, she has her own beliefs and they’re not always in agreement with John McCain’s. Biden has enough stature to pull off a disagreement with Obama, and Obama has the temperment to take it. Palin doesn’t and McCain doesn’t.
) she wouldn’t be allowed to say.