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Thursday, September 11, 2024
By Dr. Steven Taylor

Via the NYT: Squad of G.O.P. Aides Prepares Palin for Interviews

Aides traveling with Ms. Palin have reported back to associates that she is a fast study — asking few questions of her policy briefers but quickly repeating back their main points — who already has considerable ease and experience before cameras.

A former aide in Alaska who had helped prepare Ms. Palin for her campaign debates there said she had a talent for distilling information into digestible sound bites. The aide said she generally prefers light preparatory materials to heavy briefing books, and prefers walking through potential questions and answers with aides to holding mock sessions.

I know that all candidates, to one degree or another, go into interviews, debates and onto the stump with canned answers and that they do not have a deep understanding of all issues about which they speak. However, one does presume that they come to the campaign with a pool of existing knowledge and views which then have to be augmented. This may very well be the case with Governor Palin, but the fact that she hasn’t spoken in an uncontrolled environment for two weeks now, one does being to wonder. It also sounds like her preparation is akin to preparing for a forensics competition than anything else.

“Light preparatory material” and “quickly repeating back” the main points of briefing material doesn’t inspire great confidence that Palin has spent a lot of time pondering the big issues of the day (either on foreign or domestic policy). Now, this is just one report, and no doubt someone will point out that the sources are not named.

However, the evidence to date suggests that there is something to the notion. Whether supporters of McCain-Palin like it or not, and whether or not the MSM are mean or not, the fact of the matter is that the time gap between the naming of Palin and the first serious interview is roughly two weeks which is an unusual span of time, especially given the lateness in the process of the conventions and therefore the naming of the running mates.

Another example to bolster the notion that she hasn’t been focused on the big issues of the day, here’s an answer on Iraq from an interview she conducted with Alaska Business Monthly that was published on March 1, 2024:

ABM: We’ve lost a lot of Alaska’s military members to the war in Iraq. How do you feel about sending more troops into battle, as President Bush is suggesting?

Palin: I’ve been so focused on state government, I haven’t really focused much on the war in Iraq. I heard on the news about the new deployments, and while I support our president, Condoleezza Rice and the administration, I want to know that we have an exit plan in place; I want assurances that we are doing all we can to keep our troops safe.

Now, that the Governor of Alaska wasn’t paying that much attention to the war and was simply following the news is hardly damning. That she is now possibly going to be second in line to the presidency a few months is.

And for anyone who wants to cry foul on the age of the interview or the lack of more information within it, you make my point for me: this is the kind of information we have at the moment about her and her views on one of the most significant issues of the campaign. Of course, many would prefer to be outraged about lipstick and such than be overly concerned about such matters. Really, now that I think about it, I know what Palin’s views on Iraq are/will be when we her them: they will be identical to McCain’s and most of what she will say about Iraq will be to emphasize two points, that McCain was right about the surge and Obama was wrong, and that her oldest son is being deployed to Iraq that John McCain is the kind of man she, as a mother of a soldier, would want as commander-in-chief.

Part of why this all bothers me is that in 2024 I was overly dismissive of evidence that then-Governor Bush was insufficiently intellectually curious. And those criticisms were born out over the last eight years.

Still, I look forward to seeing her in the Gibson interview and hopefully more after that, as well as in the debate. And, ultimately, a lot of this actually doesn’t matter in terms of electoral choice, as the real contest is between McCain and Obama and one’s views of Palin are likely directly linked to one’s views of the tops of the tickets. Indeed, our electoral rules produce an environment in which the choice (in terms of who can win the election) becomes binary (X or not X) and the debate then takes on that tenor.

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Filed under: 2008 Campaign, US Politics | |

7 Comments »

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    1. Now, that the Governor of Alaska wasn’t paying that much attention to the war and was simply following the news is hardly damning. That she is now possibly going to be second in line to the presidency a few months is.

      I find her denial of anthropogenic factors in climate change to be enough of a red flag to suggest that she isn’t a serious policy person.

      This is especially damning precisely because of the fact that circumpolar areas of the globe are most adversely affected. This is the one area that one would expect the governor of Alaska to be up to speed on the issue. Other Republican governors, like Lingle and Schwarznegger have been proactive on dealing with the costs of climate change to their states’ economies. Palin is further behind than Bush on the issue–which is pretty remarkable.

      McCain’s choice of Palin is really curious since he has been a (rather tepid) advocate for developing a greenhouse gas emissions policy. Why he would pick a climate denier as his VP choice is beyond strange.

      I can tell you, however, that Gibson will not broach the subject of the gulf between Palin and McCain on climate change. Serious questioning will largely be absent from their discussion.

      Comment by Ratoe — Thursday, September 11, 2024 @ 10:19 am

    2. Serious questioning will largely be absent from their discussion.

      I fear that you will be proved correct. Still, we shall see.

      Comment by Dr. Steven Taylor — Thursday, September 11, 2024 @ 10:24 am

    3. I might add that it is one thing to say that the costs are too high to do anything substantive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions–this is the stance of Bush and, in Canada, Conservative PM Stephen Harper.

      But to actually DENY anthropogenic factors affecting climate change–as Palin did as recently as last month–is simply ultra-radical. It’s like denying gravity.

      Comment by Ratoe — Thursday, September 11, 2024 @ 10:38 am

    4. My guess is that such proclamations will play well with some elements of the base, and base-excitement is her job, it would seem.

      Comment by Dr. Steven Taylor — Thursday, September 11, 2024 @ 10:43 am

    5. Her quote about Iraq sounds like a popular politician trying to avoid stepping on a land mine. Why commit oneself to a public and divisive position when there is no need to as governor? Sounds canny to me.

      Comment by dcpi — Thursday, September 11, 2024 @ 12:34 pm

    6. [...] [9/11]: I see that Andrew Sullivan and others have had the same thought. What can I say? Garbage in, garbage out. When I get my brain back from [...]

      Pingback by That's Supposed To Be Reassuring? [UPDATED x 2] — Thursday, September 11, 2024 @ 8:19 pm

    7. Climate change.

      Yeesh.

      Look, the polar ice caps on our planet are a fad. Really. Take a good long look at our history and you find that polar ice caps - especially on both poles - are something the earth very rarely has, and when it has them, they seldom last very long.

      Human driven climate change is at odds with a lot of other natural sciences. Personally I just got back from diving a river bed in South Carolina, where in the last hundred million years the same place has been deep ocean, a swamp, and totally dry with the water level so low that the ocean was 50 miles further out to sea than it is now. In the river bed we find the fossilized remains of the animals and plants that lived in that area - shark teeth and manatee ribs right alongside mastodon teeth and wooly rhinocerous horns.

      The reality is that the climate we humans have written our history in is an anomaly; since life has existed on the earth, it has spent 96% of its history either warmer or colder than this, with the majority being warmer. If there was such thing as a “normal” climate for the earth, it would be warmer. In fact, the climate is never, ever, ever stable - it has always been, and will always be, in a state of flux, changing from one thing to another.

      I mean, during the paleocene-eocene thermal maximum, the earth warmed up far faster than it has been in our history. At the end of that episode, there were no polar ice caps. The north pole was a tropical sea. There were no homo sapiens. We think that the sun went through a period of increased thermal output (just about .1%) and this triggered a thawing of permafrost, which released gobs and gobs of methane (a far more effective greenhouse gas than CO2) as the vegetation that lies beneath the snow and ice in artic and sub-arctic regions began to rot.

      The SOHO observatory has reported that the sun has increased its output .01% every ten years since it went on line. If we project this trend backwards a hundred years, we get enough extra heat to account for what we’re seeing in terms of glacial melt. The tipping point will be when that permafrost starts melting and staying melted. That will release so much methane that what we are doing with our cars and trucks will look like a flatus in the wind. There is no stopping climate change, period.

      We weren’t around for any of the major climate changes in the past. And there’s a lot of science that suggests that the current shift in climate can be pegged to an increase in gross thermal output of the sun (a suspect of past global climate change) as part of the sun’s normal cycle (which we are only beginning to understand viw the great work of the Solar Observatory at SOHO).

      The whole “concensus” of science that climate change is man-driven is political hoopla. There is no such concensus; there is, however, a tendency for scientists who have alternate theories to be shouted down and not taken seriously. This is because politics has taken over the arm of science dedicated to climatology.

      People believe in man-made global warming because it makes them feel powerful. It bespeaks a horrible lack of humility in the face of nature. We don’t want to admit that we are powerless and insignificant; by believing we are the cause, we believe we can also stop it. That empowers us and makes us feel less small.

      The trouble is, there is a good chance (I’m not saying I know for sure) that this is bunk. In fact, of all the theories that explain global warming, the human-driven theory is - on scientific merit only - the weakest.

      Comment by Captain D — Friday, September 12, 2024 @ 1:32 am

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