Wonkette (via) noted that yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin. Yes, it’s true that Palin has already been discussed to death, here and elsewhere, but I think that the media reaction to her has not been sufficiently analyzed. Just as reactions to Iraq were very telling in retrospect, reactions to Palin (pre-implosion) were very telling.
It’s easy to mock the Rich Lowries of the right for whacking off to her, but…honestly, did it surprise any of you? It’s strictly dog bites man stuff.
VSPs are a different story. The reaction was not uniform, to be sure, (for example, Kathleen Parker nailed Palin immediately in NRO of all places), but there were some real doozies: Charles Lane’s “Sandra Day O’Palin” and David Broder’s “the lady is good” stand out. What other truly asinine VSP reactions to Palin do you all remember?
Alexandra
Perhaps not asinine, but there was 48 hour freakout over at DKos. Remember it well.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
I don’t know any very serious people.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
I think I was the first person to call her Governor Milf.
c u n d gulag
Well, I know he’s not anywhere near a VSP – barely even a “P” – but I remember seeing a video of Sean “Unibrow” KKKlannity when he was interviewing “The Whore of Babblin’on” for the first time, and you could see he was ‘star-bursting’ so much, that I was sure they’d have to call in a janitor in a HazMat suit to wipe-down the camera lens and the poor camera person.
Hell, make that the WHOLE damn set.
Jane2
The media is remarkably devoid of analysis of most political actions/policies, and this pick was no different. I recall that most of them dutifully lined up to report how mavericky she was and what a great choice McCain made.
beltane
@Alexandra: Only 48 hours of freakout? You are probably right, but those 48 hours seemed endless in retrospect.
Napoleon
@Alexandra:
Really?!!!! (I was on vacation that week and driving throught Pittsburgh when she was announced). After listening about and to her for 10 minutes I thanked God for making it her. She seemed so self evidently a moron and clown to me and I could not believe 60% of the US would see her the same way.
Villago Delenda Est
The best reaction, honest and telling, was Peggy Noonan saying into an open mike that McCain just gave the election to Obama.
A true gaffe.
Betty Cracker
I’m not at all a serious person, but until I heard Palin actually open her piehole and speak, I was worried about the pick. Only because I didn’t know anything about her. On paper, she sounded good. But once she opened her yap and began to spew word salad, I liked our chances again.
Anonymous At Work
“Nooners” had a particularly lovely column extolling Palin’s virtues and talents. She was caught in a live mike snafu that same day deploring the selection, saying that Palin was unqualified and only selected as an affirmative action/appeal to women thing.
cleek
sorry, the space in my brain that was once used to store information on Sarah Palin has been repurposed. it’s a Cinn-a-bon now.
jamick6000
oof I read that Broder column. Not sure why, but it reminded me of the Morning Joe/Meet the Press -style of Syria analysis (basically we have to bomb Syria or else America’s credibility will suffer blah blah blah). It just seems like it comes from some alternate universe populated by silicon-based life forms.
Doug Milhous J
@Alexandra:
That means she interrupted the usual perma-freakout somehow?
The Dangerman
Thank Heavens for McCain’s support of The
SurgeSplooge.Alexandra
@beltane:
Just a sample. Heh.
elmo
@cleek:
LOL
Roger Moore
Sorry, but the dumbest reaction is treating her like she’s relevant long after her 15 minutes of fame are up. If everyone ignores her for long enough, she’ll finally go away.
MattF
@Anonymous At Work: And I remember feeling flummoxed by the notion that Palin would attract women voters. The only rational explanation for that idea that I could think of was that McCain’s advisors didn’t know any actual, in-the-flesh, women.
Napoleon
@Betty Cracker:
Amen – Everything, and I mean everything about the way she speaks is just a one ton anchor connected to her chances to any national office she or anyone she is running with. The goofy accent and cadence, the fact she seems like she is a moron with her choice of language, the off putting excessive self-regard. Everything. It still is mind boggling that most people did not see her for the political Hindenburg that she is.
Tenzil Kem
@Betty Cracker: The day of, all I knew about her was that she’d beaten an incumbent Republican in the primary in 2006 and had something of a reputation as a reformer. I thought that was potentially something that would be appealing to voters, and didn’t mind seeing a woman on a national ticket for the second time. Then there was the weekend rollout of more and more terrible stories about her and it became pretty clear that she was a bad choice.
Chat Noir
Not the media’s reaction but…
–David Plouffe, “The Audacity to Win” (page 314)
Alexandra
Asinine perhaps goes to Slinkerwink: “We Underestimate Palin At Our Own Peril!”
Good times.
Bruce Lawton
@Betty Cracker: My thoughts exactly. I knew then that sanity would prevail in the Presidential election anyway. My hope she would drag down other Gopers but the opposite happened.
catclub
@Chat Noir: Certainly NOT the media reaction!
He had real numbers telling him what she was doing to the Obama contributors – in real time, I bet.
catclub
@Bruce Lawton: “drag down other Gopers but the opposite happened. ” really? 2008 was close to a landslide for the democrats. She did not drag the GOPers up.
beltane
@Alexandra: So much hand-wringing I’m surprised any of those people still have hands. We would also be negligent in failing to remember Andrew Sullivan’s contribution to the freakout. His Hayekian modesty failed him utterly.
Davis X. Machina
VSP, I do not know. But I saw “Dan Quayle, with tits” or a variation on it, in a half-dozen blog comment sections within 3 hours. And blogs alone seem to have seen her coming — she was on a bunch of internet-only short lists before the TV and mainstream print people caught wind of her.
Steeplejack
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
Thanks, I thought it was just me.
Roger Moore
@MattF:
FTFY. I’m sure that McCain’s advisers know plenty of women, but they don’t take them seriously enough to bother consulting them and listening carefully to their opinions. I’m guessing that their conversations are limited to “get me a sammich”, “lets fuck”, and “yes, honey, that looks great on you” rather than anything substantive.
Steeplejack
@Napoleon:
That’s excellent.
Bruce Lawton
@catclub: Didn’t lot of teaparty types get reelected because she fired up that 27%?
Zifnab
Katie Couric pitching softball questions to Palin through an entire interview. Then whoever the hell is incharge of the Walter Cronkite Award handing Couric an achievement for pitching those softball questions. :-p
Roger Moore
@Napoleon:
I thought it was Limbaugh who was the Hindenburg. He’s certainly got the flaming Nazi gasbag part down pat.
The Fat Kate Middleton
As I walked into school that morning, after hearing the news, I stopped to ask our newest hire in the English department what she thought of the choice, seeing as how Newbie’s home town was Wasilla, AK. Her response: “She. Is. Awesome.” After realizing really fast what had been foisted on the Republicans, I lost all desire to ever talk politics with Newbie.
P.S. Oddly enough, I watched “Game Change” for the first time last night.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
Trust me, ““Yes, honey, that looks great on you” is substantive, in terms of maintaining quality of life.
Splitting Image
I still think that the real story was how it affected people’s perception of John McCain. I don’t think it would have been stupid of him to mark her down as a possibility for demographic reasons, and even to short-list her if her initial vetting seemed okay, but the way things turned out, it became obvious that McCain did no research whatsoever and was blindsided by the baggage that came with her.
In a way, the fact that Palin’s 15 minutes are up while McCain is still a fixture in Washington and the TV news, and is even bloviating on Syria as we speak, is a much greater injustice than Palin being given 15 minutes at all.
Zifnab
@Roger Moore:
So I’m guessing you won’t want this “Palin for Senate ’14” bumper sticker?
geg6
@Villago Delenda Est:
Heh. Yeah. I was watching that and laughed my ass off. I admit to being a little nervous since I really knew nothing about the woman. But when I heard Peggy make her gaffe, I knew Caribou Barbie was nothing more than McCain shooting himself in the foot. And treated her as a joke ever after.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Villago Delenda Est: Who knew Baileys McJameson had that much on the ball? No evidence of it either before or since. I remember after she wrote a column apologizing for her “barnyard epithet” (with that saccharine cotton candy tone that a lot of people apparently find something other than repellent) as if that were what made her comments news-worthy.
@MattF: my understanding is they first considered Jodi Rell, Lisa Murkowski and Kay Bailey Hutchison were all insufficiently pure to the pro-lifers.
mdblanche
@Napoleon: They did but it took longer than 10 minutes for most people to figure it out. I must say I am still amazed at how omnipresent she was for the first half of September 2008. It took an even bigger train wreck to get people to focus on anything else.
@Davis X. Machina: The Obama campaign didn’t have her on their predicted shortlists. Then again, they made the mistake of actually vetting her.
Roger Moore
@Zifnab:
I don’t know. I want her to go away because she’s annoying, but I’m cynical enough to want her to hang around for as long as possible, an albatross around the Republican Party’s neck. I think Begich has a better chance of winning the election if he’s running against a ninny like her, or even better, against her and another Republican candidate, one of them trying to repeat Murkowski’s trick of winning as a write-in candidate.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
… and even moreso how it didn’t. As you say, it’s amazing that this intellectually shallow and mercurial old warmonger is still treated as a foreign policy sage. His tantrum about the “surge” during the Hagel hearings is arguably a better case against him, but nothing can dent the truly awesome Daddy issues of the Village. See also, Tim Russert, both a victim and beneficiary of those issues.
Poopyman
@Roger Moore:
I don’t want her to go away. I want that stinking albatross to hang around the GOP’s neck until the rotten meat falls from the bone.
shortstop
@Betty Cracker: This. Looked bad initially — because I knew how much Real America would love a gun-toting, gubmint spending-slashing, Christian racist with great gams — until she spoke. And then I breathed comfortably.
boatboy_srq
@Anonymous At Work: I begin to believe that Noonan isn’t a True Believer, but rather a cynical hack who writes what the 27% will
believepurchase – and then laughs all the way to the bank.Doesn’t make me think any better of her – just changes the perception of why she does what she does.
Davis X. Machina
@shortstop:
Luckily Real America isn’t quite large enough to deliver America America to final ruin and perdition… yet.
shortstop
@Roger Moore: I would like her to stick around and continue to drag the GOP down, while simultaneously staying off my TV set, my internets, my print publications, my radio and anywhere else I might ever have to hear her supernaturally grating voice ever again. Sadly, I do not think my two wishes can be merged.
malraux
@Roger Moore: She did go away. She’s just grifting now, in whatever way she can. There’s no chance of her actually running again, too much work. But you can bet that she’ll gladly open up an exploratory committee to collect donations and funnel money to her and family. I just hope she was foresightful enough to treat her meteoric rise and fall in earnings as a one time thing, rather than a constant gravy train.
The Ancient Randonneur
I don’t read all the magazines and newspapers so I can’t answer your question. But, I do remember thinking that it was good news for John McCain.
mericafukyea
Yea but what does Merica think?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Not the media, but I remember an awful lot of “Yay! They finally chose someone who has actually shopped in a grocery store and knows the price of diapers!” coming out of R women here in the meat world.
Never mind that she probably didn’t remember what she paid for those diapers by the time she got to the car.
And all the GILF Alaska plates the men were using as their computer wallpaper. Gag.
ranchandsyrup
Doughbob Loadpants, nepotism beneficiary uncorked a doozy using a hackneyed “double team” basketball analogy (cause Sarah Barracuda was a point guard, dontchaknow?)
http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-goldberg9-2008sep09,0,7788140.column
boatboy_srq
@Napoleon: It strikes me that this – the style of speaking that only makes sense in one’s Own Little Xtian Community/Family – is what gets Xtians in trouble, which is why Every Nation Oppresses Xtians is one of their political mantras. They think it’s because of Teh Xtian – and we know it’s because of Teh Stupid.
shortstop
@Davis X. Machina: True. But then you also have to factor in the substantialish not-paying-attention crowd: “I don’t know anything about her, because I’m not really into politics, but I’d love to have a woman as president!” Still probably not enough, though. Anyway, it all turned out just fine.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@Steeplejack: Prolly best to not even try to compliment women. I once told Mrs. Fuckhead that I loved all the extra weight she put on after having the kids because now it was like fucking somebody else. Women can’t take a compliment, turns out.
R. Johnston
In March 2008 there was someone hyping Palin as a potential veep pick on a bbs I used to participate on. He went looking online for a picture of Palin–pictures were scarce at the time–to post, and accidentally posted a picture of Tina Fey instead. I pointed this out and he made a correction, but it put me in a position to, as my initial reaction to the pick, wonder how much money it was going to make for Tina Fey.
Roger Moore
@malraux:
I don’t. I hope she blew all that money on
hookers and blowfuck-me pumps and meth and will be living on the street the moment her grift is over. But then again, I’m a vindictive bastard.boatboy_srq
@shortstop: We need her? Jan Brewer; Sharron Angle; what’s-her-name-I-Am-Not-A-Witch from Delaware; Phyllis Shlafly; Nikki Haley; Katherine Harris: Virginia Foxx; Michele Bachmann; the list is endless, and Teh Wingnut just keeps on appearing. Palin actually worried me a bit since at first she made less nonsense than some of the others.
Show me a Teahadist who can actually fool people long-term on a national scale: THEN I’ll worry that the GOTea can survive more torpedoes than the Yamato. Until then we can let her have Fauxnews and Conservapedia (it’s all they use of TeeVee and Teh Intertubz, after all).
Bubblegum Tate
@Alexandra:
“Obama: Keep Palin pregnant, barefoot, jobless”
That’s fucking amazing.
mdblanche
@Davis X. Machina: Isn’t Real America shrinking? Isn’t that why they’re having to resort to tricks like gerrymandering and voter suppression to keep America America’s growth in check?
@malraux: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm81LSKJC2k
eemom
If I weren’t too lazy, I’d dig up Jane Hamsher’s classic “It’s Palin” masterpiece of moronicity again, just to see if it might lure TBogg out of retirement to revive our old flame war.
shortstop
@malraux: Aw, you just know they’re probably close to spending every dime they’ve ever made. In 10 years Sarah will be speaking at VFW halls in towns of 8,000 just to make a few bucks. The centerpiece of her spiel: hot complaints about the United States of Taxerica stealing her riches. Todd will be on SS disability for some “North Slope accident” and complain to anyone who will listen about the raw deal he’s gotten. Bristol will still be telling people she’s a community college student, but will have a suspiciously complete familiarity with the entire daytime TV lineup. In a moment of rebellion, the next daughter down will come out as a lesbian, then shortly afterward claim that Jesus helped her exit the “lifestyle.” Recognizing her responsibility to the family legacy, the youngest daughter will decline to be the first one to graduate from high school.
David Hunt
@boatboy_srq:
I remember seeing some of her convention speech and hearing my dad’s glowing reaction (I don’t think he’s voted for anyone but a Republican since he started voting with Eisenhower), so I remember thinking that the speech was irrelevant except as a first impression because it was almost entirely a generic speech written for whoever they ended up picking with a few tweeks put in to make it seem more personal. I knew the real test would come when she had to deal with something in a format other than pre-written speech. She didn’t disappoint.
I’ve occasionally wondered if that speech was written with Joe Lieberman in mind…
Alexandra
Here’s the Balloon Juice announcement thread.
What ever happened to Church Lady?
eemom
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
k, I lol’d.
You know, the more the rest of this blog sucks, the funnier you get. I say we nominate you for FPer.
boatboy_srq
@Splitting Image: I hadn’t consciously thought of it in those terms before, but ABSOLUTELY CORRECT that McNasty’s 15 minutes were up sometime immediately after
VietnamMaverickthe ’08 campaign and yet he’s still there and still a VSP, while hers started so much more recently and experienced such an immediate, sudden halt.SiubhanDuinne
@boatboy_srq: Christine O’Donnell.
I’m sorry I remember that.
Keith P.
My favorite part of the Palin selection was the weird arm-rubbing McCain did to poor Levi Johnston. Funny stuff
Doug Milhous J
@eemom:
It was more PUMA than Palin-fluffing.
Doug Milhous J
@Alexandra:
She went too far and I had to ban her.
catclub
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: “because now it was like fucking somebody else.”
Yeah, telling her it is like a hot threesome should work a treat.
jl
@Alexandra:
I think at one point Kos called Palin a moderate GOP governor. Don’t remember if that was before or just after she was nominated. I guess parts of her early record as governor might maybe perhaps justify that, a little. Some of her early stunts that were truer to her nature were from her Wasilla days. And Wasilla is very Palin-friendly country ideologically, and she probably felt she could be more herself there (edit: as mayor).
My AK connections said she was totally unqualified to be in national politics and would be in way over her head. They were right.
? Martin
@shortstop: They’ll be back on TLC following Duck Dynasty and as a lead-in to Honey Boo Boo.
Just One More Canuck
@Doug Milhous J: Say what now? Someone got banned, and yet T&H still graces our screens?
jl
@catclub: After a complement like that, maybe JSF should leave off that last part he added to his moniker.
Long Tooth
I had it figured it about right in 2008. I thought Palin would boost McCain in the polls for a couple of weeks, during which time the voters would draw their bead on her talents(?) and write her off as unqualified. I did not anticipate how easily exposed she would prove to be.
If there was a moment in which McCain lost the election, it may have been when Palin was unable or unwilling to name a single newspaper or periodical she read on a regular basis. To this day, I believe she was unable, and think most other people do as well.
? Martin
@Just One More Canuck: Always helps to be (metaphorically) fucking the boss.
Trollhattan
@boatboy_srq:
This is why I refuse to get all worked up about Ted he’s-not-dumb-he’s just-playing-dumb Cruz. Every time he opens that yap and I’m subjected to the dentist’s-drill voice I stop worrying about anybody’s ability to package him for a national campaign. Gettin’ elected in Texas is a whole other thing (certain deciderers ignored for the sake of my sanity).
Alexandra
@Doug Milhous J:
Oh. Must have missed that spiralling descent into a ball of flames. Never mind. Was about that time, or maybe a couple of months before, when I started regularly reading Balloon Juice. So about five years for me, too. Also.
p.s. Hunky-Dory is still one of my fave albums. Edit: except that’s from Ziggy Stardust. Doh.
muddy
@malraux:
I had someone call a few weeks ago asking for “100 to 200 dollars” to sign a petition to put her on the ballot. I had fun with her saying increasingly bizarre things that I knew my hero Sarah stood for, waiting to see if they would ever draw a line. I bored of it after 15 minutes of sheer lunacy – “Obama wants to let those dirty urban felons vote to get welfare, and how am I supposed to get a scooter when government is all up in my Medicare and I don’t have a subway like those urban people.” etc.
Don’t know if it was from SP or was another grifter in her name, but feel sure the response of never drawing a line would be the same.
Bubblegum Tate
Oh, one thing I will never forget vis a vis Palin is my favorite wingnut’s reaction to all the pointing and laughing her selection elicited:
“Honestly, liberals, you have got to let your hatred go. Sarah Palin is simply an exceptional woman and a fine American who has been summoned to field-dress liberalism’s carcass.”
Field-dress. You know, because moose and hunting and Real ‘Murricans.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@eemom:
If Balloon Juice was serious about taking it to the next level, they’d give me a daily advice column, a weekend sports feature and a once weekly humorist slot. But whatever. Another C list blog will snatch me up eventually.
gogol's wife
@cleek:
LOL. Why is that the exact way I feel? I used to be able to pontificate about her endlessly.
Alexandra
@Long Tooth:
My hunch is the collapse of Lehman’s just after McCain called the economy ‘fundamentally sound’, then the erratic campaign suspension. He was doomed at that point.
gogol's wife
@Just One More Canuck:
Church Lady was like reading Jane Austen compared to T&H.
Judge Crater
You know, I think the ascension of Sarah Palin marked the beginning of the end of the Republican party as a serious political entity. It really was the tipping point. There were no party elders or establishment figures left to say no. McCain, reckless his entire adult life, made his deal with the devil and wound up in the dust bin of history.
The GOP really doesn’t exist any more. The VSP’s inability to grasp the corrosive nature of her presence on the national scene is typical. The pernicious tide, of which she is a part, still rises: it will be up to the VSP’s necks before they notice.
eemom
@Doug Milhous J:
Oh, totally — and that was exactly the beauty of it. Cuz throughout the 2008 primary and campaign, Hamsher put on this ridiculous facade of being “neutral”……whilst her PUMA-dom was so screamingly obvious as to render our very own AL’s a model of subtlety by comparison.
FlipYrWhig
The Sarah Palin package was supposed to be all about mom-ish common sense. Remember all that stuff about selling the governor’s plane on eBay and comparable bullshit? If they had gotten her to shut her mouth on everything else and do nothing but that, she’d still be America’s sweetheart today, like the Kelly Ripa of politics. But instead she revealed this other streak, snarling troll, and soon enough that just completely took over.
Long Tooth
@Alexandra: I forgot about that greatest hit. It jogs the memory of Bush having included the two candidates in that emergency meeting of his economic advisors, when McCain sat quiet as a clam as Obama chatted up a storm.
FlipYrWhig
@Alexandra: Agreed. If the crisis had started sooner, the whole endgame of the campaign would have been about how best to address the crisis, and the two candidates would have had competing plans, and each would have received a full airing. And maybe then the stimulus would have been an easier fight to fight. Well, OK, maybe not, but it’s worth considering. I feel like the Gore/Bush election was so much about “what do we do with the surplus”? and that the Obama/McCain election was barely at all about what to do to jumpstart the economy.
Just One More Canuck
@? Martin: Thanks, now I have to go see if I can drink that visual away
@gogol’s wife: Be fair. I think T&H shows about the same intelligence as Mr. Collins in P&P
Trollhattan
@Alexandra:
Zounds, that thread is a stroll down memory hell–quite a few had her nailed (heh) from the get-go, especially the Alaskans, but her fans are what makes it so golden, none better than this coda from “corwin:
Possibly the mostest wrongest about everything comment I’ve ever read here. Ex post facto golf clap for you, sir/madam.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Long Tooth: Wasn’t that a conference McCain actually called for, in the apparent belief that his innate awesomeness would radiate out and some easy “reasonable” solution would be found? IIRC by the end of it Cheney was openly mocking him.
Doug Milhous J
@eemom:
I hope all the PUMAs are happy come January 2017.
Trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
IIRC he “suspended” his campaign to go have some meeting in D.C. about fixerating the crashing economy. Which as we now know totally worked, with everything all better by January, just in time for Obama to crash the economy.
What I don’t recall is whether Obama crashed the economy before or after he failed to stop Katrina?
Hal
Christopher Hitchen’s had one of the best descriptions of Palin:
And the Buffalo Beast:
KXB
I had relatives that were nervous when Palin was announced, and their nervousness was reinforced by her speech at the RNC. I was a bit more relaxed. Not because I was Nate Silver looking at all all the different polls. But for a more basic reason. To quote Chris Rock, “Women hate women.” While there are some women who identify with her, there was a sizable number of women voters who would look at her and have a flashback to high school. Palin was the pretty one for whom men went out of their way to give opportunities to. There were plenty of serious Republican female politicians that McCain could have chosen, but he went for the pretty airhead. I was/am not a fan of Hillary Clinton, but at least she is knowledgable about the issues. Palin was taught to memorize a script, and stick to it. Not a way to win over women voters.
RobNYNY1957
Remember when she was being praised as a military commanders since as governor of Alaska she was nominally in charge of the National Reserve there? I had friends who believed it, though it took just a few minutes to find the press reports quoting the actual commander saying that he had never met her or spoken to her.
LanceThruster
I remember when it was explained that Dan Quayle got the nomination because of Robert Redford and the movie “The Candidate.”
danielx
There was someone whom I can’t remember who referred to La Palin as “a quick study”.
Very quick. But beside the one I can’t recall, there was one I do remember. Distinctly.
Who else could it be but….my man Bloody Bill Kristol, who of course is never wrong. And if he’s not a Very Serious Person, who is?
The most ardent promoter, however, was Kristol, and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska’s political circles. According to Simpson, Senator Stevens told her that “Kristol was really pushing Palin” in Washington before McCain picked her.
Indeed, as early as June 29th, two months before McCain chose her, Kristol predicted on “Fox News Sunday” that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket.” He described her as “fantastic,” saying that she could go one-on-one against Obama in basketball, and possibly siphon off Hillary Clinton’s supporters. He pointed out that she was a “mother of five” and a reformer. “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin,” he said. The moderator, Chris Wallace, finally had to ask Kristol, “Can we please get off Sarah Palin?”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@danielx: IIRC, Kristol’s daddy said before he passed that it was his son’s inner fourteen year old boy that fell for Sarah Palin
Kevin
@Bruce Lawton:
“@catclub: Didn’t lot of teaparty types get reelected because she fired up that 27%? ”
Sorry, I know I’m an ignoramus; but didn’t the Tea Party come into existence because of Obama and therefore couldn’t be reelected since they didn’t exist in your previous election? I don’t recall Tea Partiers emerging from under their rocks until then.
Hal
One other thing about Palin’s candidacy I’ve always found odd is that she was campaigning against Obama, not Biden. McCain himself was ineffectual in appealing to demographics Obama could appeal to, so he thought Palin could. VP Candidates are almost hood ornament like in campaigns, but Palin became the center piece of McCain’s campaign.
Suffern ACE
@Alexandra: the odd debate where he announced that he didn’t care if we were in Iraq for another 100 years if that’s what it took. Yeah. That kind of resolve against overwhelming public opinion that wanted an exit kind of sunk him.
Just like it will sink Dems now that they want to meddle.
danielx
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Clearly he knew his unholy spawn all too well.
ShadeTail
I just read that linked Kathleen Parker piece, and at no point in that writing did she “nail” Sarah Palin. She talked about Palin’s style, but not a single word about Palin’s (lack of) substance. She offered examples of Palin’s recursive and wordy bluster, but didn’t even touch on how dangerous Palin’s lack of understanding about real issues would have made her as either VP or Pres. If that’s really a good example of a VSP “nailing it”, then the VSP-verse is in even bigger trouble than we thought.
Patricia Kayden
To be honest, I read Andrew Sullivan everyday back during the 2008 election, and he hated her right off the bat. He turned out to be right about her — liar, dumb, egomaniac, etc., although he focused too much on the circumstances surrounding the birth of Trig.
I actually thought she was a great choice for McCain when she was initially introduced. In fact, I thought McCain would win over the women voters who preferred Hilary Clinton to Obama. Had she been intelligent, perhaps she would have tipped the election in McCain’s favor, but between her stupid responses to simple interview questions and her trailer trash-like family, she wasn’t a good VP choice after all.
Patricia Kayden
I’m reading where several commenters have said that as soon as she opened her mouth, they stopped worrying about Palin, but here is her first speech after being introduced as the VP candidate. I thought she was okay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x3soflm7XI
Must be something wrong with me because it wasn’t until she messed up the softball questions during two interviews, that I began to suspect that she wasn’t too bright.
LanceThruster
@danielx:
That could be taken in any number of ways.
Seanly
I thought right off the bat that she was a cynical & a (poorly) calculated choice. However, I am reflexively against any Republican politician. I can’t say that I didn’t like her from the start, but after watching more of her I realized what an idiot & mean-spirited person she is. We watched her debut speech and my wife thought she was okay (though still an R). My wife came around to my position probably within a week.
Villago Delenda Est
@Patricia Kayden:
I thought there was some sort of disconnect when she proclaimed her husband was a proud union member, and the RNC live audience didn’t know how to react to that.
Then there’s the entire ‘here’s my pregnant teen daughter and her boyfriend who we assume is the father” thing…
Original Lee
@Chat Noir: Original Spouse contributed to the Obama campaign three times that day. The first time was after he glanced at me and my sister-in-law standing next to each other while watching Palin’s speech. Apparently our expressions were noteworthy.
low-tech cyclist
George Will, 9/18/2008: “Palin is as bracing as an Arctic breeze and delightfully elicits the condescension of liberals whose enthusiasm for everyday middle-class Americans cannot survive an encounter with one.”
AnotherBruce
Five years……My brain hurts a lot.
Chuck Butcher
As a first impression of Palin, Broder’s 2010 junk kinda misses the boat. I thought the acceptance speech showed her with some chance of firing up that base and getting to some of the more rightish independents. Then she kept talking. I never thought her Mayor and Gov meant a damn thing, being from the West and understanding the reality of numbers of citizens. After she kept talking I understood a couple things: there would be a right revolt – “Teabaggers” and that this country was a hell of a lot worse off than I’d figured and I’d figured pretty damn bad; because I watched the size of her “constituency” and their reactions to her nasty speeches.
Now it’s 2013 and 50 yrs after March on Washington the obvious has been deleted from the nation’s view, the white only signs and direct voter suppression – and yet? I won’t get started but put me down as seriously underwhelmed by the progress brought on by 50 years.