I say this because I’ve seen some commentators (and most of the loonies at NRO’s The Corner) suggest that Gov. Palin actually won the thing.  Sure, she didn’t fall completely on her backside, but, Dear God, by any measure of debating she was awful.  Imagine if you were in a high school (high school!) debate class and you told the moderator that you weren’t going to answer the question in the way that they wanted, that you were just going to talk about something else.  You’d be pilloried for it!  You’d definitely lose the debate!  Your teachers would be embarrassed.  I was embarrassed just sitting there watching it.  Because Gwen Ifill failed to ask pointed followups like Couric and Gibson did (”Care to respond?” is not a pointed follow-up), Palin just read PR garbage off her cue cards.  Like a high-school debater.  That’s not substance; it’s called being a parrot.  Pathetic.

Fred Kaplan gets it at least: stringing together coherent sentences is not a qualification.  We have set the bar that low.

I urge everyone out there, even you Kazan-haters, to go to your nearest video store or reconfigure that Netflix queue and pick up A Face In The Crowd, a terse, creepy movie about a folksy politician, (*cough* Palin *cough* Bush *cough*) played convincingly by Andy Griffith, whose appealing banality eventually gives way to evil.  Very prescient stuff, and not to make a Nazi comparison here, but it’s like Hannah Arendt all over again.

Posted by Lucas Jensen on 03 Oct 2008 at 05:33 am