VP debate: Packer dissects
So. The gun-toting, moose-hunting, lipstick-smearing hockey mOm, who's so keen to talk directly to the 'middle-class' American because she's the "real deal" and is "just like you, Joe Sixpack" didn't make any easily quoteable, obvious mistakes in the first and only VP debate, such as she has been doing continually every time she has been interviewed recently. Well done, Mrs Sixpack.
HOWEVER.
What she did do is summed up very nicely by Matthew Yglesias from thinkprogress.org on the BBC's website: "Palin was clearly operating with a game plan that involved simply refusing to answer certain questions in order to drift over to her pre-prepared text, and Ifill didn't ask any followups or challenge either candidate to address the questions she was asking."
Matthew's also touched on something else that the media has been ever so keen to point out - the moderator Gwen Ifill. Apparently, she is launching a book on inauguration day called Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama so is not the neutral you'd hope for such a role in the debate. But, far from leaning towards the Democratic side, presumably knowing that she'd be annihilated if seen to be attacking Saint Sarah, Gwen was conversely almost soft on her.
Without belabouring a previous point, what is truly scary is that Palin clearly knows nothing of the issues debated this evening except what has been fed to her and she learnt verbatim like a seven-year-old memorising their five-times-table; a fact which she readily admits with the comment "I've only been at this for what, five weeks?" (Following which, on the website nerve.com, someone left this post [which I personally think sounds best if you affect a Southern drawl while reading it in your head] "Thank you for admitting you have no clue what to do. You're just completely out of your league, honey. GO HOME.)
It's like when you were studying for an exam, you remember the one, where you learnt a lot of facts and could easily craft a really good essay answer to a number of questions on the past paper you'd been given to revise with; only to discover when you turn over you actual exam question booklet that (surprise) the questions this year are not the same, and your well-learned facts are not really relevant. But as you have nothing else revised, you press on undeterred and write down all that you did memorise, using the most tenuous of links back to the actual question, to at least prove you did some revision. Hell, Palin didn't even try to be tenuous!
In fact, you can even see her scanning her written-by-campaign-advisers chunks of text for a sufficiently dramatic line in response to Biden's plan for the troop withdrawal from Iraq.... "uhm,,, (pause for dramatic effect) your plan is a white flag of surrender in Iraq." Clearly no-one's let on to Caribou Barbie that it's not just Obama/Biden who are suggesting this approach, but both Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki and old Dubbya himself also support it.
What was most infuriating was that everyone afterwards was praising her for how well she handled herself and wasn't intimidated by Joe Biden; some even went so far as to say she actually 'won' the debate because she didn't make any of the 'gaffes' so frequent in the preceding week. People! Expectation was so low going into this, that she could hardly do worse than she had been doing; if winning means not saying things like part of my foreign policy experience includes the fact that I can see Russia from my house, then well done, Saint Sarah, you passed the test.
Much has been made of her folksiness, her "you betcha"s and her "shout out"s, quite frankly I don't have enough room on this blog to list all of the things that made me shudder like I'd just swallowed something foul-tasting. Instead, I'll leave you with two short video clips: one, which epitomises the patronising, "I'm talking to you, folks on Main St." voice; and two, that deals with the incessant winking, which was very, very disturbing.
