After reading Christopher Buckley’s piece on why he is now an Obama man, I had to read Kathleen Parker’s piece on Sarah Palin, which he referred to. It has been a whirlwind the past five or six weeks since Sarah Palin was named to the ticket and from that first moment the fusillade from the mainstream media began.
It’s hard to tell where lies the true Sarah Palin. Throw in Tina Fey’s extraordinarily dead on caricature (Palin Watches Tina Fey) and you have to work double time to see if you are watching a comedy sketch or an interview. The interviews were clearly not her best moment, and I can’t say if the McCain camp, by sequestering her and force feeding her briefing material about McCain’s positions turned Palin into pâté.
However, I can’t get past the fact that as Alaskan governor she has a stratospheric approval rating of 60+% and in 2007 it was in the 90s. Compare this to the current Democratic Congress whose approval rating has been in the teens to low 20s, during the same time frame. Are the people of Alaska uniformly obtuse?
She also took on corruption in her own party and won. For a relatively new politician that is courageous to say the least, even if she wasn’t successful, but she was. What tough stands has Obama taken against his party? Heard any criticisms of Barney Frank or Christopher Dodd from Senator Obama lately?
So Sarah Palin may not be able to dodge a question as smoothly as Barack Obama, or maybe she was just trying to square her personal opinion with what was most in tune with the McCain campaign, and was playing defense rather than offense, while the cameras rolled.
Just before the Vice Presidential debate, McCain’s two top aides took over prepping Palin and the cry from the conservative base was to just let Sarah be Sarah, and when they did she seemed to do extraordinarily well in the debate.
Did the interviews go badly? Yes. Now was that because she was out of her league, or because she was trying to serve too many masters and not just be herself? In this campaign McCain seems to be overly cautious while Palin seems eager to bring it on. Let her.
