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ORIGINAL: FreddieD

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ORIGINAL: rgsoundguy
Polls don't show anything about a candidates knowledge, just means that candidate is getting the message out that people want to here. By the way, that poll shows 37% as a tie, which really means that it's still essentially a tie.

You may not value the polls but be honest, would it make any difference if it was the other way around?

FreddieD

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but I think the public trust Obama over McCain. Call me crazy.

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ORIGINAL: zamdad

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but I think the public trust Obama over McCain. Call me crazy.

Okay, you're crazy.

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ORIGINAL: zamdad
Okay, you're crazy.

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ORIGINAL: FreddieD

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ORIGINAL: zamdad
Okay, you're crazy.

Rather be crazy than wrong.

FreddieD

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ORIGINAL: zamdad
You can be both.

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ORIGINAL: FreddieD

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ORIGINAL: zamdad
You can be both.

But I'm not.

FreddieD

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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I don't think they know why is the McCain campaign afraid to let her talk to the press.

I think I have a hunch.

But we already established she has talked to the press.

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ORIGINAL: rgsoundguy

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ORIGINAL: TaoPoohBear

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ORIGINAL: SovereignIsHe

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ORIGINAL: wing2000

...so was Putin flying a bomber toward Anchorage? :0

Much the same way Hitler and Tojo were going to invade America...

Japanese never intended to take over America

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They had nowhere near the population that was needed to invade the mainland of the US or even Hawaii

Hitler.....who knows? He couldn't make it past England.

Unless of course, you were joking?

Actually, a history professor I had in college used to bring in these articles from local newspapers printed during WWII. I remember 2 articles. One was about a German U-Boat that became very bold and entered the Chesapeake Bay. Several US battle ships parked themselves in the VA Beach vicinity and it was trapped. The entire crew suffocated because it would not resurface and be spotted by the Ships. There was another story about a German torpedo disrupting some summer fun on an Atlantic City beach. So they did get pretty close to the US, but a Navy isn't going to conquer a country, and yes the German ground forces could not get out of their own continent.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

One more interesting bit on Palin's interviews thus far. Here is a side by side comparison with Gibson's interview with Obama and Palin (from The Anchoress)

Obama interview:

How does it feel to break a glass ceiling?
How does it feel to “win”?
How does your family feel about your “winning” breaking a glass ceiling?
Who will be your VP?
Should you choose Hillary Clinton as VP?
Will you accept public finance?
What issues is your campaign about?
Will you visit Iraq?
Will you debate McCain at a town hall?
What did you think of your competitor’s [Clinton] speech?

Palin interview:

Do you have enough qualifications for the job you’re seeking? Specifically have you visited foreign countries and met foreign leaders?
Aren’t you conceited to be seeking this high level job?
Questions about foreign policy
-territorial integrity of Georgia
-allowing Georgia and Ukraine to be members of NATO
-NATO treaty
-Iranian nuclear threat
-what to do if Israel attacks Iran
-Al Qaeda motivations
-the Bush Doctrine
-attacking terrorists harbored by Pakistan
Is America fighting a holy war? [misquoted Palin]


I find it laughable that Palin is being portrayed as 'hiding' from the press when the few interviews she has had are so obviously more substantive, and I would say challenging, than anything Obama has faced thus far - and he is the Presidential candidate. Obama is nothing but fluff.

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I know! It's a real tragedy for the GOP, and it's pretty apparent that they want to minimize her exposure as a result.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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I know! It's a real tragedy for the GOP, and it's pretty apparent that they want to minimize her exposure as a result.

As a member of the GOP, (and considering the crowds she has attracted) I have to say I don't at all consider it 'tragic'; in fact I am glad McCain was willing to consider real change as opposed to those candidates for which it is only a patronizing mantra.

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Ross mentioned Palin’s old CNBC and C-SPAN interviews as evidence of what she was capable of when she is discussing subjects she is more familiar with, but what becomes painfully clear on reviewing these is that she has an established set of rote remarks on Alaska, energy production and “hungry domestic markets” that she honed over many years and yet she has nonetheless produced confusing or nonsensical answers in connection with her presumed area of expertise in just the last few weeks. If you watch her interview with Bartiromo, you hear all the same things that you’ve heard over the last few weeks including the apparently incorrect 20% figure she keeps throwing around, and you begin to realize that if you pressed her much on any of these points she would resort to the same bizarre filibustering that she did in the Couric interview. Her apparent fluency and ease in the CNBC interview in particular were the products of her being allowed to speak uninterruptedly about something extremely specific to Alaska along with the relative unfamiliarity of her interviewer with Alaska. The questions were not challenging, and there were no follow-ups demanding elaboration or specificity.

When faced with a challenging question, Palin seems to have a habit of taking the most severe position possible, as if to demonstrate her gravitas by saying that we might have to go to war with Russia or there could be another Depression. Whether or not she believes this or understands why this would be so, she handles challenging questions by overcompensating and saying more than she needs to say in order to make her point. This goes beyond a lack of experience handling members of the national media. Instead of seeing a challenging question as an attempt to elucidate something that is obscure, she treats it as if it were a trick, and she thinks that by her own sort of “straight talk” on war and depression she has avoided falling for the trick. Follow-ups and specific questions are where she gets tripped up worst of all. As her old rival Halcro seems to have noted correctly about her debate performances in Alaska, she has a habit of falling back on generalities and “happy talk.” Her interview with Couric was a glaring example of exactly that, but taken to a gruesome extreme as the cheerfulness and generalities seem to have overloaded all circuits and caused a system crash.

It isn’t just that she is more comfortable discussing energy issues, but that she used to be able to talk about Alaska without many other people being able to gainsay her, and even on issues relating to Alaska she was not what you would call a detail-oriented person. As the factcheck.org report suggests, even the details that she does cite may not be reliable. She is essentially the anti-Romney; she is the antithesis of a technocrat. If he thinks “getting into the weeds” is important, she wants to race right by them. That is part of the reason why a lot of people love her, and why most people detest Romney. This is not because she could not familiarize herself with these details; she just seems to have no inclination to do that. As she said, “I look out over the audience, and I wonder: Is that really important?” Her answer to that concerning most of these issues seems to be, as she might say, “Nope.”

If there is another thing that we’re learning from her record it is that she doesn’t respond at all well to criticism, and she has made such a habit of shielding herself from it or ignoring that I suspect she has not learned how to deflect or refute it, which compels her to keep repeating whatever tried and true lines she thinks might be remotely relevant to the question. It cannot help when she is put on network television after being shielded from any and all contact with the media and asked about subjects she hasn’t practiced talking about very much, and it cannot help her that she probably was told early on that she knew nothing and she became aware that her handlers believed that she knew nothing. Still, it seems clear to me that her flubbed interviews were not accidental, but were bound to happen when a politician elevated mainly through the “gut-level connection” had to say something coherent about the pressing issues of the day. Palin’s political style is the logical extreme of the Bushian folksiness-trumps-expertise and McCainesque “authenticity”-trumps-policy approaches. She is a natural product of mass democracy’s ongoing pursuit of charismatic mediocrity, in which voters not only seek someone with whom they can identify but also actively discourage politicians’ cultivation of expertise. Expertise grates against their egalitarianism, and so they try to avoid it in their political leaders.

Ironically, McCain’s efforts last night to portray himself as an expert on foreign policy, combined with his irascibile put-downs of Obama, probably did more to sabotage his cause than anything else. Like a lot of Palin defenders after the Gibson interview who complained that they, too, couldn’t have explained what the Bush Doctrine was, many of the undecided voters watching the debate probably took umbrage at McCain lecturing on this or that policy that they may not have understood very well, either. In this way, the candidate so often described as “aloof” and professorial managed to establish that “gut-level connection” with viewers in a way McCain never did, because he expressed empathy and paid at least some lip service to the average voter’s concerns.

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ORIGINAL: zamdad
Are you sure? Seems like you won't know for certain until the day after election day. If McCain wins then you'll be both crazy and wrong.

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Eh, I don't think you actually believe that, but whatever.

My favorite conservative weighs in on her:

http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2008/09/27/a-world-of-hurt-there/

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ORIGINAL: bzirk
The media would not be so hard on Palin if she were a lawyer.

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That is a straw man argument. It is statements like "I can see Russia from my house." that makes her appear ridiculous.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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Eh, I don't think you actually believe that, but whatever.

My favorite conservative weighs in on her:

http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2008/09/27/a-world-of-hurt-there/

How come leftists only like conservatives that they think agree with them, and that few real conservatives have heard of?

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I like Larison because he and my favorite libertarian Will Wilkinson have a comically venomous relationship. I'm marginally familiar with The American Conservative, but paleocon stuff in general doesn't really interest me. I also like Larison because he's imminently readable and at least carries the appearance of being remarkably true true to his convictions, no matter how much I may disagree with them, so he's a reliable gauge of how people who otherwise tend to be incredibly disingenuous actually think. These incredibly disingenuous people tend, I think, to not like people like that, so it wouldn't surprise me if Larison frequently goes unread by them.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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I like Larison because he and my favorite libertarian Will Wilkinson have a comically venomous relationship. I'm marginally familiar with The American Conservative, but paleocon stuff in general doesn't really interest me. I also like Larison because he's imminently readable and at least carries the appearance of being remarkably true true to his convictions, no matter how much I may disagree with them, so he's a reliable gauge of how people who otherwise tend to be incredibly disingenuous actually think. These incredibly disingenuous people tend, I think, to not like people like that, so it wouldn't surprise me if Larison frequently goes unread by them.

Well, I suppose it beats the usual leftist tripe that passes for erudite political analysis these days.

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I think Larison actually reads up on the opposition, too. I'm not sure that his incredibly disingenuous detractors could claim the same, which is another point in his favor.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
And when did she say this?

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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I think Larison actually reads up on the opposition, too. I'm not sure that his incredibly disingenuous detractors could claim the same, which is another point in his favor.

I read the NYTs as well.

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I apologize as that was Tina Fey's quote summarizing her excuse for foreign experience as this vidoe shows, Palin On Foreign Policy where she claims proximity of foreign countries qualifies as foreign experience. Just as ridiculous.