Palin in comparison
Ok, let’s get one thing straight. Despite what many in the left seem to be saying today, Sarah Palin did NOT do well last night. She didn’t even do OK. What she did was perform above the unbelievably low expectation set for her.
So she did better than expected, but she also gave what was perhaps the worst performance in VP debate history. She came off as rambling and incoherent. She failed to answer the most basic of questions. In fact, she REFUSED to answer the most basic of questions. Instead she picked a random talking point and spat it out like a kid at a spelling bee who’s just gotten a word in a language they don’t speak. Even when she got it “right” there was no evidence that she comprehended what in the hell she was saying.
Maybe you think I’m wrong. Maybe you think she did enough winking and used enough folksy colloquialisms to give McCain/Palin a nice bump in the polls. If so, consider this: Congress will likely vote on the bailout/financial rescue bill some time this morning. Pass or fail, that will likely dominate the news cycle for the entire weekend. Then, on Monday, all eyes will be on the prep for the second Presidential debate happening Tuesday night. She had a very small window to change the course of the election and she missed it.
What Sarah Palin needed to do last night was turn the election around. She needed to mop the floor with Biden. She needed to make people think McCain is the only person who will keep your babies safe and the economy afloat. She needed to make Biden, and by extension Obama, look like out of touch buffoons who want to tax you out of house and home. She failed on every one of those fronts. If anything she managed to make her self look like something other than a liability for an hour and a half. That’s it. She did not change the narrative of the campaign. For that reason, she was a failure.
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I don’t know — see my update to your and Shaun’s comments. Dumbed-down is how Bush won; it’s how Reagan won. It’s not GOOD; to intelligent people it’s not a good thing. But I think at points she was effective. I still think that James Fallows post is right and the whole thing will turn out to be an irrelevant draw (which like you said means she failed in some ways) but at times she was effective. That’s all.
If she had said the n-word or laughed at Joe Biden’s dead wife that absolutely would have helped.
I did like the point where she said in regard to the fact that jill biden is a teacher, that “her reward is in heaven.” Also that time where she was like “Im not going to answer these questions.” ALSO. also. also.
Agreed. If she had used the n-word at least people would still be talking about this next week.
but we’re going to have Holocaust 2 — The Revenge unless we elect her to save the jews!
Shaun just made a very good point to me on IM. She didn’t vomit on TV. I hadn’t thought of that. I guess she really is ready to be a heartbeat away from killing us all.
see! the right thinks she’s reagan too –
http://www.newsmax.com/kessler/palin_reagan_candidate/2008/10/03/136990.html
the fact that people can seriously talk about this as a legitimate performance in a vice presidential debate makes me want to flee the country. i don’t even care about her politics anymore. i just don’t know why america thinks it’s ok to have stupid people run the country. it inspires in me an irrational fear of being hunted from a helicopter for being able to use complete sentences with proper syntax.
and ben — reagan didn’t play as stupid. he was a superior orator. and he certainly didn’t come off as unprepared. palin can make no such claims.
** Palin’s crusade for The Un-Enlightenment **
Sarah Non Sequitur skirts her ultra-right xian program.
Millions of fundies who want a theocratic America — an Ameristan, complete with puritanism and fanaticism — will forgive her handlers’ subterfuges. After all, she’s lying in a holy cause as a shill for dominionism.
We know exactly what Sarah Palin reads — it’s the Bible in its ultra-right ideological interpretation by the Dobson and Hagee crowd. That’s the only source for law and morals, domestic and foreign policy, war strategy and negotiating tactics.
Palin is Peter Pan, a never-grow-up tomboy. How else to characterize a mental and behavioral juvenile who opines that human beings and dinosaurs walked together in a world at most 6,000 years old. Abandon rationality and honesty if you would be one with her.
Fundies hate exactly what the US has become. Christian fideists, just like Islamic fideists, cannot tolerate an open society, a pluralist culture, or a secular state. They wax nostalgic for racism, for male dominated social control, for misogyny, for unquestioned acceptance of religious tyranny (not by those labels of course).
Palin has tried to conceal her own warped desire for bringing to life Margaret Atwood’s wretched dystopia stripped bare in her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.
Millions far saner than Sarah still do not know what’s in her mind . . . unenlightened beliefs clogged by (Super-size me Jesus!) junk-food faith.
Did anyone watch Ferraro’s reaction after the debate? She was all, “I thought Sarah did wonderful! She showed that she could stand up to that mean man! Oh but vote for that man.” Yeesh. She went on to say something like “I wanted my granddaughters to be able to look back at this and say, see women can hold their own.”
Well, Gerry, my grandchildren won’t have any time to look back at this if McCain-Palin wins, they’ll all be fighting in Iran.