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Y! MyWebEllen Belcher: What's liking Palin got to do with anything?
Sunday, October 05, 2008
The Sarah Palin you watched Thursday night in the vice-presidential debate was not the same Sarah Palin some of us saw at Wright State University on Aug. 29, when Sen. John McCain introduced her to the world outside of Alaska.
At least I don't remember her winking at that crowd. And though she was reading from a teleprompter, she was not nearly as scripted then as she was this week. Maybe I missed something, but I also didn't hear her dropping her g's at the end of words left and right.
If her handlers were trying to just let Sarah be Sarah this week, they prepped her to outdo even herself.
A good number of commentators were saying after the debate that she did just fine, she didn't embarrass herself or McCain. Good grief. Has that become the standard for the vice presidency, possibly the presidency: a candidate doesn't melt down in response to questioning in which she is limited to a 90-second response and the most she and her opponent together could spend on a subject is five minutes?
More than once I was wondering how short answers could feel so long.
When PBS' Gwen Ifill asked Palin and Sen. Joe Biden what their Achilles heel was, I could have sworn that Palin didn't know the term. She went off on a toot about her executive experience in Alaska and energy independence. Maybe she didn't hear the question, maybe she was getting tired. But that was a painful minute and a half.
Really, I swear. I tried to give her a chance. But there's no way you can listen to Palin and not conclude that what she knows about national and international affairs she's learned mostly by cramming. That doesn't make her stupid. When she was in Wasilla and Juneau, worrying about nuclear weapons wasn't her job.
But she did agree to go on the ticket, and once she put herself in the race, her understanding of the big issues of the day became fair game.
Maybe Palin does know a lot about energy, though she didn't show any command of that subject Thursday either. (I'll concede the problem could have been the tight format.)
But what she knows about Pakistan and Afghanistan and even predatory lending, she got from briefing books — not from the periodicals and books she wouldn't name when Katie Couric asked her what she reads.
And how about predatory lending: Does anyone who has followed that debacle think the problem is that people were buying $300,000 homes, when all they really could afford was a $100,000 place, as Palin suggested? Maybe that happened in California, where even a modest-sized home costs that much.
But in most places, the problem is not that homeowners wanted to move into homes that were beyond their means. It was that low-income people and neighborhoods were targeted by shady lenders, and existing homeowners were taken in by hucksters urging them to refinance their mortgages. They got in over their heads trying to leverage relatively small amounts of equity, never dreaming they could end up losing everything in the process.
By focusing on Palin, I don't mean to suggest that Biden is the perfect candidate or debater. I'm not wowed that his father called him "Champ," or that he has one friend who can't afford to fill his gas tank all the way up, or that his mother would say God bless John McCain. But, admit it: He didn't slather it on as thick as she did.
At least when Biden was talking about Bosnia, Kosovo and Darfur, you were pretty sure he knew a little about the subjects, and he didn't resolve a foreign-policy question by saying it's good to know that both McCain and Sen. Barack Obama love Israel.
Please.
It shouldn't need to be said,
but one thing to take away from Palin's candidacy is that, much as we like to dump on politicians, running for office, certainly high office, is not as easy as some think. So many of the people who all of us carp about, or love to hate, really do have gifts for mastering complex subjects, debating, synthesizing information, communicating and sparring. They're doing something most of us couldn't do — and we know it.
Most American voters are big people. More than having someone in the White House who is like them, they're totally comfortable with having someone in the White House who's smarter than they are.
Ellen Belcher
is editor of the
Dayton Daily Newseditorial pages. Her telephone number is 225-2286; her e-mail address is
ebelcher@DaytonDailyNews.com.
