Author: Aidan Lewis
Approximately one week after the vice presidential debate, I am still trying to decide what was most wrong with Governor Sarah Palin’s performance. Folksy, backwoods colloquialisms riddled her rhetoric. She smiled like a mannequin through discussions of genocide and wasted no time associating worried parents at a soccer game with the state of the economy. She iterated and reiterated the fact that she was part of “a team of mavericks.”
She really overstepped her bounds, though, when she brought up actual legislation. While flippant, meaningless rhetoric can be infuriating, it is less condemnable than distorted facts. Palin said that she had “called for divestment” of “millions of dollars” from companies in Sudan “to make sure we weren’t doing anything that would be seen as condoning the activities there in Darfur.” However, she failed to state when she called for these divestments. The implication was that she made an appeal as soon as she “found out.” Actually, her administration argued against the initial bill supporting divestment, on the grounds that it was unhelpful and would compound administrative costs. According to Rep. Les Gara, Palin only supported the notion long after the proposal had died in the Legislature.
This is nothing surprising, however; it is merely another example of an inflated Palin claim. Other recent assertions run in the same vein—her declaration that proximity to Russia gives her diplomacy experience, or that being mayor of a town of 5,000 equipped her for presidency, or that Alaska’s geographical size makes it one of the most demanding states to govern. In the past five or six weeks Palin has had to scrape the bottom of a very shallow barrel for something resembling credentials. The resultant ideas are appallingly laughable; any negotiations near the Siberian coast would have to involve polar bears, not Putin.
Palin’s claims about experience might be amusing, but the moments that expose her lack of knowledge are simply terrifying. Her interview with Katie Couric revealed, among other things, that she cannot name a single Supreme Court ruling other than Roe v. Wade or a single magazine she subscribes to. On a good day, Palin’s elaborations on policy and understanding are vague, inconclusive, and evasive; on a bad day, they are completely irrelevant and incomprehensible. The portion of her interview with Charles Gibson on Iran and weapons of mass destruction reminded me, with painful parallelism, of the 2007 Miss Teen USA’s response to a question about geography.
Granted, Biden is not a perfect vice presidential candidate. He manipulated several details during the vice presidential debate, and his tendency to refer to himself in the third person came off as grandiose and a little tacky. His record of political action may be impressive, but it is not flawless. Still, no matter what small faults or weaknesses Biden might carry, he cannot possibly compare with Palin’s ineptitude. McCain chose her to counterbalance the image of an old, slightly unconventional Republican male, and for a few weeks, the contrast worked. She seemed fresh, original, and unpretentious, but now her charisma is quickly diminishing. Her self-portrayal as an uncomplicated, unsophisticated hockey mom was too effective: now she appears more of an Average Jane than the average Average Jane.
As the media exposes more and more of Palin’s incompetence, I’m impressed by how surreal the entire situation is. The fact that someone with so little expertise can rise to such a demanding post is horrifying. Matt Damon said it perfectly in a CBS interview about Palin: “It’s like a really bad Disney movie.”
Aidan Lewis is a first-year ECLS major. He can be reached at alewis@oxy.edu.
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