Just about every monkey with a keyboard is claiming that “Palin exceeded expectations”—not a particularly difficult task—and that Biden won. Ross Douthat over at The Atlantic is saying that “Palin did an awful lot for Palin” with the debate, but there isn’t much she can do for her running mate.
I beg to differ, not about Biden winning, because I also think he did, but about Palin doing a lot for Palin. I blogged last night after the debate about Palin’s non-response to Biden’s brief but moving reference to his first wife and baby daughter being killed in an auto accident. Seeing Palin go into her spiel without so much as acknowledging Biden’s moment of open grief told me almost everything I need to know about her: She is so reliant on scripts that she cannot pivot to respond to an unplanned event.
It was a very weird moment. She didn’t even acknowledge what Biden had said. Of all the things that have happened on the Republican ticket since the RNC, only last night’s debate has seriously chipped away, even to the point of entirely wrecking, my support for a ticket with Palin on it. A friend of mine told me, impatiently, “You’re a Southerner, you’re too hung up on etiquette, that kind of thing doesn’t matter to the rest of the country.” Wrong. That kind of thing matters to people all over the world, and if anybody needs to be concerned about etiquette, it should be the president and vice president of the United States.
What should she have said? How about “Joe,”—since she’d gone to the trouble to ask him at the very beginning of the debate, when they introduced themselves to each other if she could call him Joe and had then saved it up only to use in the cliché “Say it ain’t so, Joe…”—how about this, “Joe, I read the story of what happened to your family, and I respect and admire your ability to love and care for your sons after such a devastating event.” Why not? She said she respected him for lots of other things. Most people would have naturally said something. Or how about just a simple and sincere, “Joe, what happened was terrible. I don’t know what to say, except that I’m sorry that any family would go through that.” Instead, she wheeled into her prepared speech with a smile.
Palin’s failure to respond to something for which she was not prepped concerns me as much as her failure to do the socially appropriate thing. Many things that face the president and vice president are things for which they are not prepped, like foreign reporters asking what they think about the death of so-and-so. What would she say? Would she ignore the question because she wasn’t prepped for it?
But that was only the second most disappointing thing about the debate, the most disappointing thing about it was also the most alarming. Some pundits today say there were no jaw-droppers (aside from Palin’s quaint manner of speaking, for which Fox’s Brit Hume apparently felt he had to make some sort of apology or explanation: “People in the Midwest and West will no doubt recognized the cadence of her speech,” he said, sounding for all the world like someone apologizing for the Rev. Wright’s sermon). I disagree. If your jaw didn’t hit the floor when Palin said that she would seek to expand the powers of the vice presidency using Dick Cheney’s model, then you must have been wearing your Hannibal Lecter muzzle for the evening.
That, gentle reader, was a deal-breaker. That was a “get you coat and let’s go” moment. She plans to expand the powers of the vice presidency on a ticket where John McCain has more than graciously allowed an admitted neophyte to perch? For many, many voters it has been hard enough to deal with the possibility of Palin stepping into the Oval Office in the event that something untoward happens to McCain. To suggest that she’s going to appropriate some of his power while he’s still alive and kicking is insulting not just to McCain, but to the many independents like myself (some might say moderate conservatives) who have accepted her along for the ride, and in my case even defended her, for the sake of having more women in office and for the sake of a man who’s time is overdue, John McCain. As Biden said, Cheney’s interpretation of the role of the VP was always bizarre at best.
To top it off, Palin winked at the camera and said she intended to “push” McCain toward her side of the drilling-in-ANWR argument. No ma’am. No. No. No. No one who loves John McCain is even remotely interested in seeing him pushed by anyone, particularly on a topic that so many of us agree on. There are more areas in which to drill on the North Slope/Prudhoe Bay. We don’t need to drill in ANWR. The only reason Palin keeps harping on it is to score political points with a punitive faction of the GOP who like provoking moderates and Democrats.
I don’t doubt that Palin has done a lot of good things for Alaska. I don’t even doubt her foreign policy skills, nascent though they may be (I think she has a bit of ground to stand on considering that her state has to deal with international boundary laws more than any other). I like the way that she demanded that oil companies pay their own way in Alaska and that they share their wealth with the people of that state. I like the fact that she’s a mom. I like the fact that she doesn’t have advanced degrees and that she’s not part of the Georgetown cocktail party set. I have written extensively about how unfair the media has been to her—and it most certainly has been. But my support was always for McCain. I could tolerate almost any VP pick because I knew the VP’s powers were limited. I have liked McCain since the 1980s. I sat at a table at Rockbottom in Buckhead in May 2007 with a Washington pundit and local politico Phil Kent and when our mutual acquaintance from DC asked “So who are you going for in November?” I said “McCain already has my vote.” The pundit scoffed loudly, “He’s out! He’s broke!” To which I responded, “I think the religious right has overplayed its hand. The power of social conservatives has waned tremendously since 2000. People are sick of the hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy is inevitable.” Then, a little more than a month ago, McCain went and picked a social conservative. And that was okay, I said, because McCain would easily counterbalance her and I was thrilled that his pick was a woman with a track record of reform. She later said some things that worried me, but nonetheless, I reasoned, it was John McCain’s ticket, not hers. Now, I’m not so sure.
McCain has given himself over to his handlers with all the submissiveness of a lamb and out of this unholy alliance has come the “maverick brand.” They say it constantly to the point of seeming ridiculous, but it’s a brand that can’t work anyway if the person who’s supposed to be in the support position for the “maverick” is in fact “pushing” the maverick. It’s happening because Rove has never had a clue about what there was to love about McCain. For a start, he was no ass-kisser and he had no stomach for the religious right. I’m tired of the scripting. I’m tired of the branding. I miss the John I used to know.
Palin’s words about expanding the vice presidency might not have gotten much of a response today, but I guarantee you that I am not the only person who noted them with a nasty chill. To me, they sounded like a death knell. And so, out of the politeness with which I was inculcated by my own maverick, blue-collar parents, I will acknowledge the loss of the real McCain at the hands of a vice presidential pick who doesn’t have enough social grace to know her place. I am so sorry that this has happened.