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Sarah Palin sure does seem to like the turn of phrase “I didn’t span in the face of…” or “We can’t span when confronted with…”

From the interview transcript:

On the subject of experience (emphasis added):

GIBSON: Governor, let me start by asking you a question that I asked John McCain about you, and it is really the central question. Can you look the country in the eye and say “I have the experience and I have the ability to be not just vice president, but perhaps president of the United States of America?”

PALIN: I do, Charlie, and on January 20, when John McCain and I are sworn in, if we are so privileged to be elected to serve this country, will be ready. I’m ready.

GIBSON: And you didn’t say to yourself, “Am I experienced enough? Am I ready? Do I know enough about international affairs? Do I — will I feel comfortable enough on the national stage to do this?”

PALIN: I didn’t hesitate, no.

GIBSON: Didn’t that take some hubris?

PALIN: I — I answered him yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink.

So I didn’t blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.

From later in the interview, discussing intervention in Pakistan (the Obama question, emphasis added):

GIBSON: But, Governor, I’m asking you: We have the right, in your mind, to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government.

PALIN: In order to stop Islamic extremists, those terrorists who would seek to destroy America and our allies, we must do whatever it takes and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.

I propose that every time we mention Sarah Palin in blog posts, we deploy the lamented and underused span tag to highlight her strength in the face of adversity, her determination not to waver in the face of opposition, her fantastic pink internal energy that gives her the guts to say NO. Thus:

Sarah Palin is a liar.

UPDATE: George Saunders in the New Yorker is much funnier than I am.

Roger Ebert tells this little story in his article taking down Sarah Palin:

And how can a politician her age have never have gone to Europe? My dad had died, my mom was working as a book-keeper and I had a job at the local newspaper when, at 19, I scraped together $240 for a charter flight to Europe. I had Arthur Frommer’s $5 a Day under my arm, started in London, even rented a Vespa and drove in the traffic of Rome. A few years later, I was able to send my mom, along with the $15 a Day book.

This looks to me like a generational thing — Ebert is old enough to have benefited from the years in the early 70s when the dollar was still increbibly strong against European currencies. I have a friend who travelled to the South of France several summers in a row, at a time when he was making about $5,000 gross income per hear. I have always really envied that, because by the time I was that age (just out of college), the era of the strong dollar and cheap travel to Europe was simply over. Palin is two years younger than I, and she wouldn’t have had that opportunity, either.

Today on Thom Hartmann’s program on Air American, Lee Rayburn (guest hosting) featured a lot of information about McCain campaign efforts at voter caging in Wisconsin and elsewhere. This is yet another example of the McCain campaign’s dishonorable actions, because all of these mailings are specifically designed to mislead voters into making mistakes that could cause their votes to be thrown out. Absent these mailers from the McCain campaigns, 99.9% of the mistakes that might come from them would have no chance of happening.

Add this to the list of dishonorable actions from McCain in regard to his campaign (chiefly, his insistence on repeatedly lying about his running mate’s record, and about his opponents — one bald-faced lie after another). He and his running mate are serial liars and have abandoned any semblance of truth and honor in the conduct of their campaign.

Neither is worthy to be elected president.

Well, everybody in the progressive/Democratic side of the blogosphere and media is freaking out over all the polls that have swung massively for McCain in the last few days. These swings actually are significant, since the crosstabs in most of them really do reflect major changes.

But I really think everyone should really chill, and for two reasons:

1. The assumption that people choose on likability/issues first and then determine the candidate they favor is backwards. That is, most people assume that now that McCain is getting more votes, it’s because people have changed their minds and now favor his position and like him better. But the way it really works is people choose the candidate first (for nebulous reasons, some having to do with issues, some with personality and optics) and then harmonize their answers on “favor on health care” and “favor on change” to match their top-of-the-ticket choice. In other words, these things are not independent at all. And the swing is just a matter of enthusiasm and lack of familiarity. People really want to like McCain and a choice like Palin (which is wearing awfully thin for me — if I see that smarmy, arrogant, self-satisfied “lipstick” sound bite one more time I think I’ll scream) just makes them want to like him more. For now, they are warm and rosy about him. But when we get to the debates, the rubber will meet the road and we’ll find out how completely different the two candidates really are in regard to where they want to take the country (I’ve no doubts about Obama’s ability to put across his policies and control the framing of McCain’s platform, despite all the hand-wringing about Obama not being so strong in debates).
2. I much prefer my candidate being behind at this point in the race. It’s better to have to scrap and come from behind than it is to get self-satisfied and cautious. Obama is going to have to come out as a fighter, as someone who is passionate. Passion is what he’s lacked, and the polls are going to force him to make the commitment that will the win hearts and minds of those who still have doubts about him.

So, I’m not so very worried. There’s plenty of time for Palin to self-destruct. There’s plenty of time for it to become obvious how unserious the Republicans are in their campaign, with their constant spouting of lies betraying their basic contempt for the American electorate. As long as Obama’s surrogates keep hammering home the message that McCain really cannot possibly be an agent of change (or, of any kind of change that people would want), and keep harping on the fact that it’s Republicans who have screwed everything up, then I think things will turn out OK.

If they don’t, I think it will be the fault of the traditional media for simply not doing their job and pointing out what an awful candidate McCain and Palin are in terms of their lack of interest in truthfulness. I sure wish they’d give them the Al Gore treatment, except this time it would be well-deserved.

Last of all, we have to keep in mind the principle that drives Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com, i.e., that the polls whose questions run “If the election were held today…” are simply false. The election is not today, and what people say about their choice now (when forced to choose) does not necessarily determine to any large degree what choice they will make in November. In other words, we just don’t know what will happen because the polls actually don’t mean what they are always presented to mean. And, besides, the top-line national polls simply don’t mean a damned thing, given that the popular vote doesn’t determine the winner. The Electoral College math has tightened, yes, but it’s still Obama’s game to lose.

All in all, we simply don’t know enough to panic yet. And I still feel more comfortable with Obama tied or behind at this point.

The hilarious situation with the building that was placed on the screen behind McCain in the early part of his speech is really bubbling along.

Even if you assume that somebody thought it was Walter Reed Hospital, how was anybody supposed to know that? That is, it seems to me that the first job of an image behind a speaker is either to fade into the background in some generic kind of way (like the Dems did it) or to provide some kind of symbolism that reinforces either the image of the speaker (e.g., the waving flag that came up after the Walter Reed Middle School in McCain’s speech) or that somehow underscores the words the speaker is uttering while the image is onscreen. I can’t see how even a picture of the actual Walter Reed Hospital would have served any of those purposes, but didn’t anyone notice that the picture they did use looked like a rich person’s mansion? Didn’t anybody on the convention’s production media crew realize the image would make a lot of people think about McCain’s ten houses (“Gee, I wonder which of McCain’s ten houses that is”)?

How incredibly stupid are these people? And exactly when did Republican’s lose their stagecraft mojo? Or is this just a McCain campaign weakness?

The new story about how the Republican’s used video of fake soldiers Tuesday night reminds me how many times during Palin’s speech last night it occurred to me how incredibly lame the video images were. They were distracting, too.

The Democrats used their slightly animated generic convention graphics behind all their speakers, images that didn’t in any way attract attention away from the speaker.

Have the Republicans lost their touch in regard to stagecraft?

Well, we now have a definitive solution to my speculations on how many years of legislative experience are equivalent to a year of executive experience. It was provided by the delegates at the RNC last night, chanting “Zero! Zero! Zero!”

Thus, in my equation representing Palin’s experience vs. Obama’s:

10X > 11Y

The ratio here has to be less than 1.1, and, certainly, 0 is less than 1.1.

Thus, when you apply that across the board to the candidates of both parties, you get this:

This causes a bit of a problem for the Republicans, though, as they’ve made the argument that the Democratic ticket has the less-experienced man at the top of the ticket. But given the fact of Zero! Zero! Zero! it’s pretty clear that by the Republicans’ own logic, their ticket is upside-down, too — Sarah Palin should be the nominee and John McCain should be the VP.

Or course, an argument like this has no legs at all — as one blogger put it today, the Republicans have a form of ADD that means that whatever they said 60 seconds ago, no matter how vehemently they argued it, is now inoperative. All that matters is what they are saying now, and suggesting they are inconsistent is just nitpicking.

Or so the argument that the traditional media will dutifully lap up from the Republican operatives will run.

Reflecting on the RNC festivities so far, it seems clear that the Republicans really don’t care about trying to attract the moderate voters and the undecided. Virtually none of what we’ve seen in their convention so far has had any appeal for those who are not already wholly committed to the Republican agenda.

The left, including me, marvelled at the Republicans’ motivate-the-base strategy back in 2004, thinking it couldn’t possibly work (since the red meat that fires up the Republican base is going to alienate many of the middleground voters, as well as angering the opposition and enhancing the opposition’s motivation), but it did work. I can’t see how it can work in 2008 given the huge shifts in party ID since 2004 — the Republicans’ base is substantially smaller than it was in 2004, and thus they need the “moderate” voters more than ever.

I have never understood the way the Republicans use 2nd-order symbols at their convention to mock the opposition — those symbols always seemed to me to be confusing to those not in on the stories behind them, and infuriating to those who knew what they represented. The chief example of this in 2004 was the purple band aids (which for the party faithful was a reference to the scurrilous Swift Boat charges that John Kerry had not actually earned his purple hearts). The new example is the chant of “Zero! Zero! Zero!” How can that do anything but alienate those who don’t live in the weird universe in which 11 years of legislative experience in a large state and the US Senate count for nothing against 8 years running a small town and 19 months running the 47th largest state in the Union?

I really thought that the Palin choice was designed not just to energize the base, but also to attract the moderates (especially women) — a gender-based choice (as this obviously was) makes no sense otherwise when the nominee is so manifestly green on the national stage. But they aren’t following through on the appeal to the middle at all — they seem completely uninterested in seriously courting anyone but the already-converted.

I can’t see how they can gain any bounce out of this convention at all. And I can’t see how it will do anything other than make for a really nasty campaign season.

The first two segments of last night’s Daily Show (before Newt Gingrich came on for his heavily-scripted appearance) have to be the best Jon Stewart has ever done. The completely over-the-top Larry Craig restroom segment went further than just about anything I’ve ever seen on Stewart’s show, and was just gut-busting hilarious from beginning to end. And then the Foghorn Leghorn/Droopy Dog segment, taking a long-time meme of the lefty blogosphere and illustrating it, was, again, just falling-on-the-floor laugh-out-loud hysterically funny. And to top it off with the flip-flops of Rove and O’Reilly and Palin was just too perfect. I’d read the transcripts of all those flip-flops, but somehow, seeing them in full was just rich beyond belief.

My roommate gets probably 99% of his political news from watching Stewart and Colbert. The fact is, this makes him better informed than the vast majority of the American people. Frankly, ridicule is the only reaction I can see that is logical when you look at the behavior of the Republicans Stewart is ridiculing.

I’ve not read today’s reaction to Palin’s speech last night, but I did read some of the live blogging of it. I originally heard the end of it on Air America, and then watched ABC’s full hour of convention coverage (with spillover into the 11:00 news). So what follows is just my thoughts after sleeping on it.

Looked at from the standpoint of the “undecided” voter, my overall impression of her was fairly good. She is attractive, she spoke skillfully and she had obvious good humor. The speech was well-crafted, with several clever political turns of phrase, as well as a few instances of darned good rhetoric. In comparison to the Giuliani red meat speech that came before her, she looked moderate and reasonable (I screamed at the TV only four or five times during Palin’s speech, vs. dozens of times for the disgusting Giuliani).

But those Republicans sure do like to tell lies, don’t they? Palin’s main one was that she insists on trotting out the Bridge to Nowhere (she campaigned on building it, i.e., she was for it before she was against it) as proxy for being anti-earmark/pork-barrel (while her actual record shows that she was a national champion of acquiring earmarks and other forms of pork barrel spending for her municipality and state), her anti-corruption stance (entirely politically motivated, and doesn’t apply to her personally) and her putative anti-oil company stance (they hated her because she was raising the taxes they would have to pay on windfall profits, not because she was standing up to them on any issues that would matter to the general population — all she cared about was increasing the size of the state’s oil welfare checks to the state’s citizens, currently over $1,500 per year per citizen).

Unfortunately, my reaction isn’t even close to representative. I’m politically knowledgable — I’ve been following every ounce of news and all the revelations since the Palin VP announcement. But your general voter in the TV audience isn’t going to know those things (like the Fox-news-watching delegates in the hall, who ate it up). Thus, we are at the mercy of the traditional media to point out the enormous number of lies and misrepresentations in the speech. I don’t know if McCain’s Palin choice has insulted the media enough that they are now going to stop giving McCain the special treatment he’s always received from them or not.

But I certainly do hope they put Country First in their reporting on Palin and McCain.

I’m not holding my breath.

As to the speech itself, it was written by one of the same people who has managed to make George W. Bush look like a competent speaker. It was very well-written, and she did make the most of the rhetorical high points, seems to me. But we know perfectly well that very little (if any) of it was written by her. The text may reflect her worldview and politics and personality, but it wasn’t constructed by her personally (can you say “new-clear”?).

This is the kind of thing that just doesn’t matter to most people, but it raises for me is whether or not the candidate can speak on her feet in unstructured environments. McCain himself is pretty good at it. Obama and Biden are both very good at it. It remains to be seen whether Palin is or not. I expect she probably is in a league at least with McCain (though without the mean-old-man tone that he does so well, though a lipstick-smeared pitbull might not be so different from McCain after all). The key question is whether she can stay on message, given how out of touch with her own party’s positions on national issues she’s shown herself to be in the past (e.g., the surge and withdrawal).

She’s very bright (I wish the commentators would stop using the phrase “she’s a smart cookie,” unless of course, they would also use it to describe a clever male candidate), so she’s probably got the potential to be an excellent standard bearer for the Republican party. But you can’t cram for a Presidential election. Look how poorly experienced campaigners like Richardson did in the debates — you couldn’t ask for someone who is more familiar with foreign policy issues, but he still managed repeatedlly to say things in the debates that were just inappropriate and wrong. Richardson is no slouch on the public speaking front (though not in a league with Palin, I’d think — at least, based on last night’s example before an incredibly pumped-up friendly audience, which makes every speaker look better), but he couldn’t square the circle of deep knowledge of the issues and an ability to convey those ideas in words and gesture.

How much chance of mastering the subject matter does a gifted novice like Palin have in such a short period of time (the debate with Biden is Oct. 2nd), especially when she has to be out on the stump campaigning on a daily basis? She has shown a complete lack of interest or appreciation of foreign policy issues in her past, and the section of her speech last hight that impinged on that territory (the geographic tour of the oil-producing nations) seemed to me to be the weakest part of the speech. Indeed, I couldn’t help but contrast it with my memory of George W. Bush’s performance in one of the debates with Al Gore in 2000 when he got to speak at some length on the subject of education. Unlike the other subjects, it was clear from the light in his eyes and the coherence and commitment of his remarks that this was something he knew about intimately, something he had thoughts of his own about (presumably because education reform was the major initiative of his time as Governor of Texas). It was like a bright light had been turned on in a darkened room, and it came across as completely genuine. It was the only suggestion in any of the debates that W. actually could formulate thoughts from his experience and knowledge and construct persuasive arguments on the fly. Everything else seemed to be completely by rote, straight out of the briefing books.

In Palin’s speech, the oil independence section brought that to mind precisely because it was the point in her speech where it seemed to me that the light went out in her eyes — she was just mouthing phrases from the teleprompter. And that was where the thin-ness of her experience and interests led me to suspect that despite all the political and rhetorical skill that she displays, she won’t be able to be credible on the key issues that the Republicans themselves have placed at the center of their campaign: national defense and foreign policy.

Obama, on the other hand, has been serving on the Foreign Relations committee in the Senate and has obviously spent the last several years gaining experience and knowledge in these areas. This is why he looks completely credible when talking about these issues, because he has the experience and knowledge to give the rhetoric teeth. And Biden? A slam dunk on these issues, as this has been his portfolio for decades.

I doubt that matters with the general electorate though — it certainly didn’t with W. But perhaps the traditional media will step up to the plate and do their job as actual journalists to provide their best objective judgments. Maybe she won’t be yet another beneficiary of the media’s long-term Republican affirmative action program, i.e., the soft bigotry of low expectations.

But, once again, I’m not holding my breath.