Sarah Palin is neither a pundit nor a pitbull; she is potentially the next leader of an entire nation. I think she has trouble keeping this in mind.
On her interview with Katie Couric, she remarked,
“The Sarah Palin in those interviews was a little bit annoyed,” she said. “It’s like, man, no matter what you say, you are going to get clobbered. If you choose to answer a question, you are going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to try to pivot and go to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that too.”
She resents Couric for asking about her own positions on issues instead of allowing another occasion to regurgitate the canned wisdom she’s been rehearsing for the last 5 weeks, like this election is her big recital. Couric’s interview demanded a little candidness, but that’s exactly where Palin fails most extraordinarily. Her job is not to dismantle the Obama/Biden ticket with ‘down-home truisms,’ but to give the public an idea of exactly what kind of leaders she and McCain plan to be–that’s what we deserve.
Like we saw in her remarkably irrelevant and circuitous responses to Biden in last night’s debate, she is deaf to the issues at hand, and chose instead to offer her own tangential monologues in response to deeply important questions. Her personal agenda trumped all, and never was it more clear how grossly inauthentic she really is until she talked straight through a moment which really demanded universal pause; Joe Biden’s reflections on single parenthood and the loss in his family were stunning and sincere–and for the record, almost any occasion where a candidate pulls in the “humanist” angle makes me gag. But Palin couldn’t hear it. She didn’t hear him because she didn’t have the space with all that “drill, baby, drilling” of manufactured talking points saturating her brain.
Instead, she was wound up like some tin toy at Christmastime. It didn’t appear to even register how mechanical she had just exposed herself to be.
