One thing you can say about Sarah Palin is that she’s not going to take any crap from the media, willing to call anyone out without a day going by. Not even on Thanksgiving did she take a day off from media slapping. Palin’s North Korea slip, which I just didn’t see as anything noteworthy, inspired heavy breathing by many, including Palin herself, who thought it wise to strike back using an Obama slip to make her point.
My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that…
Of course, the paragraph above is based on a series of misstatements and verbal gaffes made by Barack Obama (I didn’t have enough time to do one for Joe Biden). YouTube links are provided just in case you doubt the accuracy of these all too human slips-of-the-tongue. If you can’t remember hearing about them, that’s because for the most part the media didn’t consider them newsworthy. I have no complaint about that. Everybody makes the occasional verbal gaffe – even news anchors.
The only problem with Palin’s overly defensive crouch is that her “occasional” verbal gaffes began her national rise. From Katie Couric to Charlie Gibson, where she obviously couldn’t define the Bush doctrine, Palin’s awkward introduction after the Republican convention is seen as quite different from Obama’s eloquent entry, even amidst the usual candidate misstatements.
Is it because Obama reins from Harvard, just like George W. Bush? Sarah Palin having gone to many schools before she finished college, with a stop along the way to have children in the middle.
Is it more about class than anything else? Obama’s exalted position, as well as Bush’s lineage through political aristocracy, versus Palin’s simple struggle against the establishment.
For many of Palin’s die hard fans it is, as they see how Palin’s judged as a double standard from Obama, but also George W. Bush, who was certainly no brighter than Palin, but came with a political pedigree that led to a pass into the privileged presidential hopefuls club. These same people working hard to keep Sarah Palin from riding her fan wave to the nomination for the simple reason that the Republican intelligentsia thinks she’ll get creamed in the general election.
Sarah Palin had better learn to be more judicious with her defense, however, a strong performance a much better offense, because if she doesn’t get a thicker skin and just keep on moving she’ll be judged a serial complainer, someone who is constantly blaming someone else for her own slips, misstatements, gaffes, whatever you want to call it. She’s made her point time and again about the media. A confident person knows when it’s time to push back, laugh along with everyone else at your own mistakes, or simply ignore the critics.
Man up, Sarah.
If you want to play in the big leagues either suck it up or make fewer mistakes. Because you simply do not have the political track record of Hillary Rodham Clinton to be worthy of a perpetual pass.
Great stuff, Taylor. This goes right along with what I wrote about in my Barracuda diary.
Palin needs to woman up, person up, and grow up.
The media does hold women–and not just Mama Grizzlies, but ALL women–to a different standard. There is a heightened level of scrutiny and it is much more personal when it comes to women. But, Palin needs to figure out how she is going to keep talking about the media’s treatment of her everywhere she goes, without being “perceived as whining.” No one else can figure it out for her. We are all too busy being frozen in time and burning our bras. Oops.
I get your point Taylor and Wonks too but Palin has a secret weapon on that front. The weapon is the frenzied ugly response to her everyday on leftist blogs and every night on MSNBC.On some days it seems as unhinged as the far right. It only reinforces what her base thinks about the media and undermines factual reporting on her real weaknesses.
I have mentioned it before but the response to Bristol’s run on DWTS and the Palin base’s enthusiasm for Bristol,by the left has been embarrassing.
The amount of shear meanness spewed out at a young woman who did not neccessarily seek the limelight but was thrust into it reminds me in tone of the hatred spewed at Hillary. Not that the two are comparable but it reinforces what I learned during the primary,misogny is epidemic on the left. Which just makes me desire a whole different group to join forces with in the future.
Oh I still think the sexist and classist attacks on the Palins help Sarah shore up her fanbase and makes her more and more their Truwoman in the face of the mainstream media and the Obama Left. But, this is another one trick pony, just like the Obama machine using race as a cudgel to silence people in the Democratic primaries. Only Obama had the establishment behind him in ’08. Palin really has a strange combination going on–she speaks to and for her rightwinger grassroots and politically she takes on her own party’s establishment and the GOP elites are against her. But it seems like in terms of actual substance she’s actually doing the work of the establishment, dumbing down the conversation more and more, to the point where we’re not really having a discussion about anything. For days the national conversation has been whether Sarah Palin said the word North when she meant South or if she really meant South. It’s just nuts. This works to her advantage as much as it hurts her, but I think it’s a perishable advantage–at some point this house of cards will collapse and she’ll have no cattle, or should I say moose, to go with that big pioneer woman hat of hers.
Good points Wonk~ You always take the long view,I appreciate that.
Merde, Taylor.
We like Palin when she does the precisely because of the contrast she provides with the deeply feckless and incompetent Bush/Romney message machine. Movement conservatives remember the Second Bush Term. No attack, no lie from the Left went answered and went with any kind of substantive response from the White House.
Part of the reason Bush left with such sorry approval ratings is that he would not defend himself.
Palin and the other Reagan Wing people learned thus: Attack. Attack all day, attack all night. Never let an attack ginned up by the graverobbers over at Soros, Inc., go unanswered.
Attack, attack, attack. Never defend. That’s how you beat the Left.
The Bushies and the Establishment never, ever got this. That’s why they ended up losers. Ask Karl Rove.
Palin gets this in her bones. If she follows your advice, she will lose her a$$.
She won’t. She fights.
Bush did not fight back because he did not care what the opposition was thinking and saying and he was no longer running for anything whole different perspective.
Palin runs a risk by constantly attacking and especially when she tries to gin up those old cultural sterotypes that don’t really exist anymore.
I think it is also risky to be shooting down at the first lady. Michelle Obama has made it perfectly clear that she is not into politics. She expresses by words and deeds that motherhoood is her first priority.Other than that her focus has been children’s health and nutrition ( which I guess could fed the “nanny state narritive”)and our troops.Kinda hard to quibble with her non controversial choices.
Lake Lady–I agree with you. And I will add, there is a difference between “fighting a good fight” and merely just fighting and attacking because you can, which is what I believe Palin does. It’s not that she “fights” that bothers me so much as what she is fighting for and the way she goes about it.
You have to be kidding? Where were you for 8 years during the Bush Administration. Bush was always on the attack calling people traitors who criticized him etc. This was not Bush’s problem. Bush’s problem was that conservatism is a failure and his policies were bad. Rove ran the slimiest attack machine since Nixon but in the end it doesn’t matter when you are promoting bad policy solutions.
I was only referring to his last couple of years (Bushe’s)
Sarah Palin wants to be Ronald Reagan, unfortunately, she’s Barry Goldwater. That may be enough in this new age of disgust with the big two establishment parties, but let’s not forget reality.
Ronald Reagan was for Zero nuclear weapons. Sarah Palin doesn’t have a clue of this importance.
I’m a Clintonite, so I don’t need anyone to tell me about “attack, attack, attack.” But you need to know what weapon to launch. You don’t need a machine gun for every media episode.
Palin either understands our current culture or is a product of this culture. Blaming others for your own mistake or faults is a well established characteristic in this current culture. And really, our politics isn’t that far removed from this reality TV culture.
If there ever comes a Palin/Obama debate it might as well be held in Vegas, because people won’t be tuning in to analyze the candidates positions on the issues, they will be watching for the punches, waiting for the smackdown.
With that said, there is a fine line between fighting back and whining (Palin), just as there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance (Obama). And, it is up to the each individual to decide.
I agree. The fact is that politicians, particularly right-wing politicians, love to blame the so-called “liberal media” for all their problems. Even when something that is being reported on is simply a fact that puts them in an unflattering light, it’s a great distraction to shoot the messenger.
I continue to be amazed at how Sarah seems to offer little other than snarky little smack-downs. Can you imagine her as POTUS? When there is a major foreign policy issue what is she going to do, use sarcasm?
Her style of rhetoric is really popular with the meaner-spirited of the far right who feel threatened by liberalism and perhaps even the first black President- no, I am not saying every single tea partier is a racist but so much of what they are complaining about in such nasty terms, was taking place during the Bush years.
The question is, will this right-wing snark appeal to independent voters, even those that are fed up with Obama? I really don’t think so.
Also, in my view, Sarah Palin is a bit of a coward. While I think the mainstream media has earned the contempt it receives from both the right and the left, at the end of the day, people who hide from the media are simply too insecure with their own ability to answer basic questions. Sure, they play it off as being the media’s fault but lets be honest- Sharron Angle avoided the media because she couldn’t get two sentences out without making a total ass of herself. Similarly, I don’t think Sarah Palin could stand up to much actual scrutiny when it comes to basic things we expect politicians to know. Katie Couric asked her pretty basic questions but what did Sarah do? Turned around and made it all Katie’s fault.
If you can’t handle the pressure from the at-times idiotic MSM, how exactly are you going to handle other stresses that come with public life in the Oval Office? Or does she expect to spend 4-8 years hiding and just issuing proclamations from Facebook and Twitter.
At the end of the day, I think Palin, like Bush, shows no interest in policy and no serious interest in doing the hard work of learning about the world. She’s content to let others spoon feed her little snippets about Iran, the Fed etc. And I have zero respect for that and I would feel the same way if she were a Democrat and I agreed with her policies.
Look, a lot of these memes about Palin are left over from 2008. The notion that Palin is not a serious student of policy is something that the Obama people peddled during their time in Alaska. Palin is a politician, not a policy wonk.
There is a difference. POLITICIANS ARE LEADERS, they make decisions and choose between painful alternatives. Palin has the leadership gene in spades (as Bush did, by the way, as he showed when he decided to hold in Iraq in late 2006. Bush was merely an incompetent leader, but he did have leadership genes. A competent leader would have fired Donald Rumsfeld much earlier in the war.).
Liberals constantly make the mistake of presuming wonkism as a substitute for leadership. It isn’t. A Harvard professor couldn’t lead a rifle platoon to save his life, but I bet Palin could. John F. Kennedy showed leadership in the South Pacific during the PT-109 episode, but he never presumed himself to be the smartest guy in the room. That’s why he hired people like McGeorge Bundy and, unfortunately, Robert McNamara. But Kennedy could lead. That’s the point.
When Adlai Stevenson ran for President, one of his supporters remarked, “All the thinking people in the country are supporting you, Senator!” Stevenson replied, “Unfortunately, I need a majority.” This is the man who was attempting to unseat Dwight David Eisenhower, arguably the most capable postwar President and one who didn’t advertise his intelligence to everyone. There’s a reason Adlai lost his ass to Ike in 1956. Leadership can’t be taught. Palin has it in spades. Her opponents in the GOP don’t.
What Palin showed me in this episode is that she recognizes that the news media, despite its somewhat unpleasant attitude towards Obama now, is itching to write his “Comeback Kid” narrative. She is right to distrust the State Run Media and is absolutely right to counterattack effectively to avoid going the way of Bush and Rove.
Other Republicans are at sea about this, primarily because they operate under the illusion that the news media can be bought or coopted or can ever be made their friends. They will never be either friendly or fair to a Republican nominee, much less a conservative one. Palin knows this and this governs her attitude towards the press. This is a refreshing tonic for Movement Conservatives everywhere who watched the galactic incompetence of the Establishment Republicans as they pissed away everything that Ronald Reagan spent forty years in the fields toiling away for in a fruitless effort to be liked by people who hate them and everything they believe in.
Bush’s
section9~ Please define the term,”state run media”? I agree that the media has been co-opted and cannot be trusted in many ways but I don’t believe their captor is some mysterious “state”. They are corporitized and they generally just lay down to whoever is in power. They are just interested in their access to the principles.
Tim Russert admitted it under oath during the Scooter Libby trial. They took their talking points from the White House, at that time controlled by Republicans.
I think the MSM no matter what their personal politics are,are having a severe “class” problem with Palin not a political problem. They are all elites. The right wing writers are having just as much trouble with her as the left.
One other point I would make is that I don’t know what movement conservatives think of Frank Luntz,but in terms of influencing the media he has won the language and framing wars for the right.The MSM uses conservative language and conservative framing constantly as if is common wisdom.
So unles you are not talking about the MSM and are talking about a tiny handful of pundits who fight the tribal wars from the left on MSNBC,I don’t know who you are talking about.
Also would like to add, I found your two questions concerning education and class interesting. In general, not pertaining to Palin.
Currently, people’s trust and faith in certain institutions are low; be it, government, either political party, the media (though you don’t hear much about that, since the media is not going to make a big deal about it), certain sectors of the corporate world, etc.
Who’s in charge of these institutions? So the standard acceptable requirements; such as, education, experience in that particular field, or family/class might not apply.
For example, an individual that goes to Harvard, becomes a lawyer, district attorney, a attorney general. that exerperience might not be looked upon as an asset to a higher political office.
Good for Palin. Touche!
One piece of this whole thing: voters focused on attacking the “other side,” frequently using talking points provided from above, is a nice diversion that works for both Reps and Dems: “Look over there at that socialist, that redneck, that worse-than-we-are bunch who aren’t on your side.” For Electeds on both sides, it’s a rather successful distraction.
There is very definitely a need for analysis, critiques, substantive debate, holding Electeds and wannabe’s accountable.
Of course, Pols and Electeds in both corporate parties do their best to avoid such conversation, and go for generalized talking points and sound bites. It’s a part of the context, a piece of our political reality. But the distraction and diversion and manipulative purposes of the predictable and repetitive use of labels and finger-pointing and other common tactics need to be pointed out as often as possible.
I agree Joyce Arnold~ To me it is all starting to sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher blah…blah….blah.
I like that, LL, the Charlie Brown reference. And sometimes, I think “we the people” are cast in the Charlie Brown role, while the Electeds on right and left take turns playing Lucy with the football.
I’m not convinced that Palin knew it was a gaffe at the time. Are you?
Nope
Neither of you listened to other portions of the Beck interview. She didn’t have trouble in another portion of it.
You just give her ammunition when you make charges like this.
The focusing on gaffes does nothing but take the attention away from policy. What are Palin’s policy prescriptions? She doesn’t seem to have any as far as I can see.
Thank you. I totally agree. There was a commentary over on HuffPo (I’m too lazy to look for the link right now) that I agreed with. It made the point that yes, all politicians make gaffes but the problem with Palin’s gaffe, as opposed to say a Biden gaffe or a Clinton gaffe, is that no one doubts that Clinton or Biden know exactly what they are talking about irrespective of whether one agrees with them are not. Can the same be said about Palin. The commentary also points out that Palin is using her usual overly-simplistic formula with a deadly serious issue- North and South Korea possibly being on the brink of war. And yet she treats it as just another opportunity to snark and lash out at those with whom she agrees. It’s all well and good to talk about American toughness and saber rattling but it’s not a policy and it can actually be dangerous.
I also can’t help but notice how Palin’s fans make excuses for her- someone above talked about leadership vs. being a wonk. I would respectfully submit that it helps if leaders also know the ins and outs of policies. We are talking about the job of President of the United States, not about a job making widgets. Is it really too much to ask that our leaders have not only leadership qualities but also knowledge and understanding of the policies they propose? If not, then pretty much anyone with media savy and a LOT of money could be POTUS in name only while their smart political aides actually run the country.
The Tea Party has really made us all lower our expectations.
I think lowered expectations started with Bush.
True, but I didn’t think they could get much lower- I was wrong.
I agree that Sarah Palin is not good at foreign policy. But she comes from a middle-class background like myself and I have to respect where she came from and how she became a Councilwoman to Mayor to the first woman Governor to becoming one of the first women to be on a national ticket. When I look at Romney or Obama, they don’t seem to get working-class people. Yes I don’t agree with her views and she does make gaffes, but so do many others. I don’t no if she is presidental material, but at least seems more down to earth than then anyone of them in both party establishment. I don’t no about her being President, but I hope she runs for senate or congress because I am so sick of people looking down on people that has not had a better life or couldn’t go to Harvard or Yale. I did like Hillary because she never acted better than anyone compared to the ones that are in office right now. I don’t agree with Sarah Palin on social or some economic views, but I can’t take people attacking others because of class. Sarah Palin even went after Barbara Bush so she is not afraid to go after some in her own party. I say good for her and hope she takes them all on. I hope she is drives them all nuts, they deserve it and more !!!!
I think it was clearly a gaffe. She invites criticism with her sarcasm and half-truths. Her kids are on facebook overreacting to another kid and spew homophobic slurs and vile language then declare that the other people are just jealous because they will never make anything of themselves. Hillary’s daughter would never stoop that low because she never heard that kind of stuff at home. She is the instigator and chief in class warefare precisely so that she get the sympathies of the type of folks her kids say will “never make anythings of thier lives”. I don’t care if she’s from a similar station than me any more that I wanted to have a beer with George Bush. This women is trouble and I will give her no passes because she is a woman.