Look, I’m no Obamaite; I don’t even get to vote. But there is just no comparison to be made here. Obama has never in his adult LIFE sounded as bad as Palin sounds answering almost any question. I challenge you to come up with an answer he gave early in his campaign as flatly stupid as this:
Look, that’s not an answer to any question that could possibly be posed by a sane English speaker. It reads like a flustered contestant trying to guess the final answer on “The $64,000 Pyramid” with Betty White giving the hints, fishing for the answer “Importance of credit in industrialized world.” It is very, very obvious that she does not know the answer, doesn’t even know how to fake an answer, has no personal opinion or understanding of the fiscal crisis, and is just repeating things she remembered her handlers saying.
Her responses to Couric were so devoid of intelligence and understanding that they might as well have been Mad Libs.
Obama is inexperienced by the standards of Presidential candidates, of that there is no doubt. But every available peice of evidence is that he’s really, really smart, and he’s really, really educated, and he has clearly studied the issues at hand. And I have to tell you, I can’t think of a single more important qualification that being really goddamned smart. It’s not the end all and be all of succeeding in the office - Jimmy Carter was smart and was a lousy President - but it’s a prerequisite.
Palin appears to be doing her level best to establish herself as the least intellectually gifted person to grace a major Presidential ticket in the history of the United States.
The problem is not Palin’s experience, it’s that she doesn’t seem to know what the hell she’s talking about. Nobody watching the Couric interview thought, “Huh, she lacks experience.” People came away thinking, “Huh, she’s got less brains than the Scarecrow.”
Do you understand that we’re not talking about experience now? We’re talking about understanding. We’re talking about coherent thought. I don’t give a shit about experience. I want someone who has thought about issues - who knows what s/he is talking about when s/he is talking about it. There is no planet on which Palin meets this standard and no planet on which Obama fails to.
I might be fine with Palin (other than her policies) if she were not as inward looking, as provincial as she is. But she is. She knows and understands nothing of economics at a national level, nothing of foreign affairs - she’s not capable of excercising good judgment on a national level because she lacks the knowledge (not the experience, but the knowledge) to base that judgment on.
Yes, that’s a fault that can be cured over time. But she’s been being tutored by the best in the business for a month now, and this is the best she’s able to do? Obama knows this stuff inside out, upside down and sideways. He’s been studying it every way from Sunday for years.
Certainly experience is one way to add something to the mix that convinces a voting public that a candidate has the stuff. Like Kennedy and Lincoln before him, Obama has had to find other ways to convince people. Obviously he has found his other ways.
Palin scored big initially with a killer convention speech. If she followed that up with a performance on the trail that demonstrated her judgment, her wisdom, and her knowledge, then the Palin bump may have been a lasting one. But instead the situation has been that more people see of her the less they think of her. Maybe she will shine during the debate. Stranger things have happened. I have every expectation that she has been coached on a variety of good zingers to pull out for particular and predictable straight lines and we know she can deliver a rehearsed line quite well. It may sell nicely and then she may no longer be the anchor that she is now.
But as of now, based on what we’ve seen and what we know, McCain’s choice of her cements the assessment of McCain as a man of questionable judgment at best, willing to gamble the country’s future on another roll of the dice.
Spot on in all respects. If I felt ambitious I’d dig up some video contrasting Romney stating liberal-pandering positions when running for governor versus his conservative-pandering palaver when he started lunging for the presidency.
That was a great post – is there any chance you still have the list?
This isn’t worth of a whole new thread, so I’ll ask here:
Has anyone watched all three of her interviews? Do her answers (including cadence, body language, cohesion, etc.) vary in each? Does she seem to improve as she goes on? Did she seem any different on the Hannity interview?
ETA: Did I just accurately write “all three of her interviews”? She’s been nominated for how long now and “all three of her interviews” is correct? McCain couldn’t have anticipated this – with her apparent popularity witht eh base and charisma, she should be plastered everywhere, or at least in a host of places. But three? Or am I wrong?
I’ve seen this Teddy Roosevelt comparison before, and I would like to point out that even in 1900, the State of New York had a population of over 7 million persons.
(http://www.census.gov/population/cencounts/ny190090.txt)
That clearly dwarfs Alaska’s present population of less than 700,000.
To suggest that their experience as Governor of a state is similar is really flawed, IMO.
I ask for Palin’s experience, and you bring up TR? You’ve got nothing, obviously. You are right about why he got nominated - Mark Hanna didn’t want him doing any damage. BTW, in his qualifications you forgot war hero and best selling author, of “Alone in Cuba”*. And as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he did major work on improving the fleet - he wasn’t a pencil pusher.
If there were press conferences in those days, you think the Republicans would have kept TR away? If Palin is so brilliant and qualified and with it, why are her handlers so scared of letting her speak for herself. Oh, right. Even the mildest questions befuddle her.
Oh, that poor girl. She must have just totally lost her head. I followed some more links and saw her re-answer the question on the Today show, and while she’s never going to set the world on fire (to put it mildly), she’s a quite a bit brighter than that.
I wonder if that’s what’s happening to Palin. Could it be nerves? If so, she’s hiding it well, except that she’s completely incoherent.
THere seems to be one with Charlie Rose floating around, but I have no idea how old it may be.
ETA: Ah, it’s about a year old. She was so much more coherent and fluent when she wasn’t being crammed with talking points and kept to the party line by the Rovians on McCain’s campaign. Still completely ignorant of foreign affairs, but at least coherent.
Only when it came to discussing Alaska politics specifically. On the broader questions, she was just as uninformed. At one point Charlie Rose asked her, “Do you know what the Bush Administration’s energy policy is?”, to which she replied, “Well, we hear about it through the media, yes. . . . . . . . . .” Governor Napolitano had to jump in and rescue her to make her not look so utterly foolish, by saying “You’re presuming there is one hahaha”.
Palin doesn’t actually pay attention to the national media. She never did, she doesn’t now. It’s utterly pathetic.
I think this part is underrated. The sort of engagement a serious candidate has with the issues goes way beyond a few weeks of cramming. I’m not going to claim that, say, Fred Thompson has a deep, deep understanding of the issues based on his candidacy–it was too damned short to reveal much. But pretty much everyone else who was on a ballot did show something. They were in training for the presidency, being vetted daily by voters and by each other.
I think there’s a lot wrong with our electoral system, but it definitely tests people.
