By now everyone who pays attention to politics (and even those who do not) knows that Sarah Palin has been lampooned (expertly and scarily enough, without much need for extra, scripted pieces of dialogue by Tina Fey of SNL) for her utter lack of coherency during her interview with Katie Couric.
In the lead up to the VP debate on Thursday night, most people will also have been aware that people were wondering which way Sarah would go – would she go up in flames, à la the Couric interview, or would she re-emerge as the confident, fiery, spunky lady who came out swinging at the Republican Convention. As we have all learned, she performed decently. She failed to answer questions, but she did at least manage to string together reasonably intelligible sentences (compared to her Couric interview, which failed to stand up even to sentence diagramming ).
To read David Brooks’ column on Palin’s performance however, is an exercise in glimpsing just how depressed the Republicans are. I’m not rooting for them to win, not by a very, very long shot, but to see just how down they are is rather disheartening in a way. Brooks is celebrating the mere fact that Palin did not crash and burn in spectacular fashion on Thursday night. If this is what the Republicans are viewing as a triumph for a woman who may well be president should her ticket win, we are in dire, dire straits. Never mind that she only seemed capable of repeating certain stock phrases and peppering her speech with you betcha’s and dontcha knows (which though plenty folksy do not, in my humble, elitist opinion, have a place in the more formal setting of a debate), they are celebrating that she managed to get out a coherent sentence. Forget that she has little to absolutely no command of the issues, that regardless of her status as a newcomer, she SHOULD have a command of some of the facts if she might be president, forget that she is completely and utterly out of her depth and has no business running for the second highest office in the land – she got out a coherent sentence! Huzzah!
If this is what gets Republicans re-inspired and standing on their couches instead of crouching behind them, my fears for the future of America just got a little more deep.
