Category: Election 2008

One of Palin's opponents from 2006 has advice for Joe Biden. Admiral Ackbar has even better advice:

Heading into this evening's debate (which, with the potential of entertainment at hand, I will watch rather than transcript) the McCain campaign is so confident in the rhetorical abilities of Sarah Palin that they are in overdrive to explain the outcome in advance. Take your pick:

1. Gwen Ifill is biased. I don't recall them complaining when CBS's Bob Schieffer – who openly admitted that his personal friendship with George W. Bush made it hard to cover him objectively – moderated a Bush-Kerry debate in 2004. Nor do I recall Kerry whining about it like a little bitch.

2. Joe Biden is patronizing and sexist. Just look at how arrogantly he lords his answers over Palin, strutting about like he is a king just because he "knows things" and has "facts" and can "answer the questions."

3. Of course Biden will do better, he's older and more experienced. This is called lowering the expectations. Palin, contrary to the storyline, has televised debating experience.

4. The format favors Biden. Note how the McCain camp desperately tried to get the mandatory answers down from 2 minutes to 90 seconds – perfect for a candidate who has nothing to say, disadvantageous for one who has a real answer.

5. The pity factor. The GOP has hardly minded the widespread (non-True Believer) perception of Palin as almost child-like in her simplicity. They're hoping to make Biden gun shy about hammering her lest he appear on national TV as a man beating up an infant. Bush played the "simple" image to the hilt in 2000 and 2004.

The debate will consist of Palin going after Biden like a hungry dog after a pork chop, all in an effort to goad him into a "mean" response. Despite the tremendous lengths to which the McCain camp has gone to manage the format of the debate – preventing exchanges between the candidates, limiting response times, attempting to limit the number of foreign policy questions – if I had to call Vegas an bet my life savings ($32.71) I would gamble that Palin is still going to blow it. She's going to be flat-out unable to answer a question, she'll give a vacant "I didn't study for this exam" response full of re-phrased portions of the question, or she'll botch one or more very basic facts. I don't think that McCain is stupid enough to declare victory, but the expectations are so far below sea level that if Palin avoids drooling on herself or shitting her pantsuit live on TV the message will be that she "far exceeded expectations."

This strategy comes straight from 1988. It didn't work then, either.

(NPF coming later, I promise)

So Mike and I were chatting today about some unfounded speculation on McCain's motives in attempting to postpone this week's debate. Lacking evidence to support this, here is my guess.

The McCain campaign is desperate – absolutely desperate – to buy time for next week's Vice-Presidential debate. McCain isn't afraid to debate tonight, but he and his team are in full crisis mode over Palin. You may have seen her recently getting destroyed by Katie Couric. Let me clarify: getting intellectually dismantled by Katie Couric is not a good sign. Treat yourself to exchanges like:

COURIC: You've cited Alaska's proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?

PALIN: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land boundary that we have with Canada. It- it's funny that a comment like that was- kind of made to cari- I don't know, you know? Reporters-

I bet it was the editing that made her look bad! Maybe the lighting.

They chose Palin with very little forethought because she fit the bill (female, young, pro-life) and they assumed that whatever skills she lacked as a candidate could be fixed. All employers do this – hire 'em and train 'em as you go. But now it is hitting them: she is far, far worse than they expected. Everything they're doing screams "buyer's remorse." The refusal to allow her near the media (except cameras! cameramen are ok!), the heavy scripting, the "attack the media" tactics….they realize what they have and they're panicking. As I stated when she was nominated, she's managed to excite some people who were already voting for McCain anyway; with any other voters she is a serious liability. She's no longer new, exciting, or a novelty. And like any other rush job, it only looks good from a distance. Up close things get ugly in a hurry.

I do not know a nicer way to say this, and the campaign is in full freak-out mode as it sinks in: the woman is almost comically stupid. She's probably a nice person and all that, good at hick politics in the boonies, but every time she opens her mouth she humiliates the campaign. They realize this. And they are desperately trying to buy time. If she can't handle a five-minute interview with Katie Couric, what are the odds of her debating Joe Biden for an hour and not saying something monumentally dumb?

Again we return to the Quayle precedent. Michael Dukakis did one thing right in his campaign. Yes, only one. The sole success he had, the sole instance of gaining momentum in a race he never led, was this commercial:

DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN. It was one of a trio of memorable ads from 1988, including Willie Horton and the devastatingly effective "Dukakis in Tank" ad. Dan Quayle very nearly cost George Bush an election he should have won overwhelmingly. In the end, though, the overall shittiness of Dukakis made the election about him and not his opponent. And now, 20 years later, the McCain camp is waking up with a morning-after hangover and asking "What have we done?"

I'll tell you what you've done: you nominated Dan Quayle with tits. Like the elder Bush, McCain is going to pay the price. Unlike the elder Bush, he doesn't have a big lead to work with.

Regarding next Thursday's Vice-Presidential debate:

At the insistence of the McCain campaign, the Oct. 2 debate between the Republican nominee for vice president, Gov.

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Sarah Palin, and her Democratic rival, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., will have shorter question-and-answer segments than those for the presidential nominees, the advisers said. There will also be much less opportunity for free-wheeling, direct exchanges between the running mates. McCain advisers said they had been concerned that a loose format could leave Ms. Palin, a relatively inexperienced debater, at a disadvantage and largely on the defensive.

Let me translate: "McCain advisers are concerned that a loose format could leave Ms. Palin, a retard, at a disadvantage by being forced to respond to questions for which she does not have pre-scripted and rehearsed answers."

Carve it into stone tablets right now: the right-wing angle for the debate, before it even happens, is going to be "Biden was mean to Palin" and "Biden must be sexist, look at how disgusted he looked at having to debate a woman." The press releases will be out before the debate even ends.

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Among the political figures to whom Sarah Palin has been compared, Spiro T. Agnew is conspicuously absent. This is unsurprising from the GOP's perspective, as he resigned in disgrace because of the basest forms of corruption during his pre-VP political career (it's a common misconception that he went down with Watergate, but he was a felon without Nixon's help). On the other hand, his absence from the narrative is suprising given that Palin's nomination is a spitting image of Agnew's out-of-nowhere appearance on the national scene four decades ago. The two politicians are eerily similar and the scenario surrounding their nomination is downright identical: choose a neophyte who isn't qualified to run a kindergarten class and then turn the election into a pitched moral battle pitting Good Reg'lar Folk against that condescending liberal media.

Karl Rove has accurately opined that the Obama campaign forgets that its opponent is McCain, not Palin. That said, McCain needs to remember that he is running against Obama. Without that reminder, one would walk away from this race with the impression that he is running against the media. Scoring points off the tsunami of criticism directed at Palin is the campaign's newest strategy. But they didn't invent it.

This technique was pioneered by none other than Spiros Anagnostopoulos, spiritual godfather of the Liberal Media narrative (see Tom Lehmann's "The eyes of Spiro are upon you" from The Baffler). He was the suprise choice as Nixon's running mate after just 18 months as the Governor of Maryland. Before that his political experience consisted of four years as a shockingly corrupt mayor. Sound familiar yet? Like Palin, the Nixon campaign used its nominee as little more than a prop to inflame populist sentiments about "liberal elites" of whom the media are the living, omnipotent embodiment.

"I'm so Greek, it hurts."

The cultural myth of the liberal media was in its infancy in the 1960s and its proponents loved how Agnew was greeted with incredulity, sarcasm, and open hostility. How, the media wondered, can this corrupt hack with zero experience be a heartbeat away from the White House? Relying on every tired trick from Huey Long-style anti-intellectual populism, the GOP used this hostility to its advantage. It gave Agnew a believable martyr complex and plenty of appeal among empathetic voters. Attacking Agnew for his ignorance and inexperience was an attack on the Average Man. The conservative Southern voters Nixon so badly wanted had no trouble identifying with Spiro: "We too hate those know-it-alls, those east coast elites, those college professors who tell us we're wrong when we lynch negroes and mandate creationism."

Sarah Palin's interview with Charlie Gibson is the McCain campaign's effort to reanimate Spiro's corpse. In the interview, Palin was unable to answer a question about the Bush Doctrine because…well, she doesn't know what it is. With five years' teaching experience at a Big Ten school, my experience is that the average college sophomore can explain it. That someone who expects to be the VP cannot is front-page news, right? No, the story from that interview was not "PALIN UNABLE TO ANSWER HIGH SCHOOL-CALIBER FOREIGN POLICY QUESTION." The story is the media itself: "LOOK HOW MEAN CHARLIE GIBSON WAS TO OUR QUEEN." Palin must have looked bad because the media made her look bad, not because she doesn't know her ass from a tea kettle. That is Spiro's legacy: the story is not that a woman who wants to be one step from Commander in Chief is thunderingly stupid and has an infantile grasp of basic foreign policy concepts (no wonder all those reporters on her plane aren't allowed to talk to her). The story is that Charlie Gibson sneered at her. Of course the voters McCain-Palin is targeting can empathize – they too are ignorant of facts and details, they too have received that sneer. Thus a vote for McCain is a bold act of rebellion, an ego-boosting "fuck you" to the fancy book-learnin' crowd. No "damage control" is necessary – the whole point is for Americans who don't know shit to bond with one of their own.

Agnew is watching this from his recliner in hell and smiling. He channels Tom Joad, reminding all of his fellow Republicans: Wherever the media embarrass a talentless right-wing hack, I'll be there. Wherever two or more gather in my name, searching for ways to divert attention from lousy candidates, I'll be there. Wherever "regular folk" flip on Fox News in search of a candidate who reminds them of themselves – biased, ignorant, provincial in the extreme, and full of opinions unsupported by facts but which feel true – I'll be there.