Palin Owns USA Today after Gibson Interview
12 September 2008 10:00 am by Taylor Marsh
BY TAYLOR MARSH
 |
| The front page of USA Today |
Traveling for the next 10 days on business, I awoke this morning to find USA Today
outside my hotel room, as did tens of thousands of other business travellers
and other people staying in a certain brand of hotel room across this country.
She owns it today.
Tech centric people often don’t get to see the flesh and blood newspaper in
hand. It was amazing to read the huge headline on the front page, above the fold:
In
targeting big oil, Palin ‘governed from the center’
She didn’t
press conservative views on lawmakers
There are over 2,500 comments on it so far today.
Meanwhile, everyone is dissecting whether she understood the Bush Doctrine, with the right pushing back hard.
I don’t think there is much question she had a brain freeze on that one, as
I said last night in a review that flummoxed many. But in the end
she basically disagreed with it, bringing us back to the “clear and present
danger” threshold, which is not going to alarm many. The detail of how she processed Gibson’s question is, however, not how your average voter will read as he or she continues to struggle with finances and wonder how they’ll make it through the next month.
Mind you, in part one of the Gibson interview, I found Sarah Palin halting at best in the foreign policy department, especially on delivery, giving coached answers that only allowed a view so far into her thinking. Yglesias actually brings up a good point, but it’s directed at McCain, bringing the conversation back to reality. Because Palin’s not at the top of the ticket, anyone thinking she won’t continue to help John McCain, unless she flubs up significantly, is dreaming, which includes Slate’s Jack Shafer, one of my favorites, who gets it right, even if it’s not going to matter:
Of course Palin agrees with the Bush Doctrine, but she can’t come out and say so, having just admitted that she doesn’t know it by name. At every point in the Q&A, Gibson had the right follow-up questions to elicit more from Palin, including after he asked the Bush Doctrine cringe-maker. He asks her to give thumbs up or down to the U.S. military’s recent forays into Pakistan from Afghanistan. He asks her several ways. But she can’t answer the question, and she won’t dismiss it. Instead she slows the interview to a crawl again, dribbling and dribbling the ball but refusing to take the shot.
I characterized the interview after seeing excerpts as “mushball.” That was incorrect. It was actually “dodgeball,” with Palin doing just enough to get headlines and articles like she did today, which amounts to the left hates her, the right loves her. Palin’s ability to polarize leaves us deadlocked. Politics as usual.
So, after you read the front page of USA Today, if you choose to follow the story
inside, Palin takes the entire portion of 6A and 7A in the center.
The coverage paints a picture of Palin as vice president as one that is remarkably
unscary, unthreatening, with no hint whatsoever that she’s unprepared.
While the web world is on fire, USA Today seems decidedly unconcerned about
the Palin pick. It’s my view that’s how most Americans will judge her as well. It doesn’t give me any pleasure to say this, but as things stand today, those are the facts.
