Couric+Clinton= Palin Corrective

Katie Couric and Hillary Clinton remind us that intellect (and proper grammar) are alive and well U.S. politics. See for yourself in this post-debate exchange (which I bet has been allowed on youtube by CBS because they put the commercial IN the interview, but that’s another story).

P.S.– I’d take a nutcracker over an action figure of myself any day.

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Palin’s Press Refusals

“Jaw dropping” is Maria Shriver’s characterization of Sarah Palin’s refusal to meet with the press.

“I’ve never seen someone who’s become a national candidate, or even in the primaries (like this),” Shriver added in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, intimating that Palin’s camp would not consider an interview without preconditions for the Women’s Conference, an annual event for women in politics and the media hosted by Shriver. The conference has hosted both Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama.

Shriver, a veteran journalist before her terminator husband became governor of California, and niece to Jack Kennedy, also watched her father Sargent Shriver run for president and vice president.

“You just do press when you are in the middle of a campaign every day,” Shriver said in her Chronicle interview. “You try to get anyone to interview you on a daily basis.”

“It is the way to communicate with the American people,” Shriver said.

The article notes that aside from her interviews with Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson, Palin’s press exposure is limited to Fox News appearances.

Probably this sounds like old news. So Palin’s not meeting with the press—that was covered last month.

As Shriver points out, however, Palin’s continued refusal to make unscripted public appearances is mind boggling, if considered in the larger historical context of major modern political campaigns, of which there have been tens of thousands.

Yet it seems like we are only able to read Palin in the context of the last eight weeks, rapidly becoming inured to her blatant attempts to disguise her gross lack of qualifications to be vice president. Arguably, we were primed for this refusal to speak to the press by the secretive Bush administration, but they didn’t have too much trouble foisting their refusal on the public either, if I recall the events of eights years ago correctly.

This swift adjustment of the press and the public to tight-lipped political candidates frightens me at least as much as the possibility, thankfully increasingly distant, of Palin’s becoming vice president. It seems like one of a million examples of how the changes of the last eight years, disgusting and antithetical to democracy as most of them have been, have simply been absorbed as part of our cultural fabric in the United States.

We look the unacceptable in the face and move on to a new subject, another legacy for which we have the Bush administration to thank.

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Sarah Palin on the VP’s Job

Doing justice to last night’s debate is a long project, one I’m not sure we’ll need to take on, since it’s doubtful that the VPs will change the course of the election now.

My irritation this morning is more to do with the coverage of the debate than the debate itself. Sarah Palin’s just as woefully unqualified for the job of VP today as she was last week when she did her Katie Couric interviews. Yet the media gave her a pass, since she stood upright through the whole thing instead of falling to the ground in a puddle of her own pee. The substance of the debate went virtually unexamined on CNN and NPR this morning.

Only in a local talk show did I finally hear mentioned that Sarah Palin showed that she STILL doesn’t know what the VP does. She asserted that the VP has a role in the legislative branch (misunderstanding, it seems, the VP’s role as tie breaker in the senate). Palin also seemed to be under the impression that her role in the Senate would be something she would hammer out with John McCain. I was sure that there would be some great youtube tape I could include here, but alas, there is as yet no downloadable record of this most pivotal moment in the VP debate.

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Sarah Palin, You’ve Left Me Speechless

Katie Couric, nice work. Look at these journalists asking questions, and REASKING them when they aren’t answered. It’s like we have a free press, dontcha know.

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