Taped from the Journamalists' Self-Made Gehenna: One reason we are in so much trouble now is that our TV and newspaper "journalists" have spent and continue to spend so much of their time and energy grasping at straws and finding excuses to normalize that which not should be normalized. Sarah Palin never should have been a vice presidential nominee--somewhat less, in fact, than Dan Quayle, or Spiro Agnew, or indeed Richard Nixon (very smart and very hard-working, but already by 1952 clearly a psycho). Yet here is David Brooks:
David Brooks (2008): [The Palin Rebound][]:
There are some moments when members of a political movement come together as one, sharing the same thoughts...
...feeling the same emotions, breathing the same shallow breaths. One of those occasions occurred Thursday night when Republicans around the country crouched nervously behind their sofas, glimpsed out tentatively at their flat screens and gripped their beverages tightly as Sarah Palin walked onto the debate stage at Washington University in St. Louis. There she was, resplendent in black, striding out like a power-walker, and greeting Joe Biden like an assertive salesman, first-naming him right off the bat....
With a bemused smile and a never-ending flow of words, she laid out her place on the ticket--as the fearless neighbor for the heartland bemused by the idiocies of Washington. Her perpetual smile served as foil to Biden’s senatorial seriousness. Where was this woman during her interview with Katie Couric?... The presidency and the vice presidency once was the preserve of white men in suits.... If, in 1984, Geraldine Ferraro had spoken in the relentlessly folksy tones that Palin used, she would have been hounded out of politics as fundamentally unserious. But that was before casual Fridays, boxers or briefs and T-shirt-clad Silicon Valley executives. Today, Palin can hit those colloquial notes again and again, and it is not automatically disqualifying. On Thursday night, Palin took her inexperience and made a mansion out of it. From her first “Nice to meet you. May I call you Joe?” she made it abundantly, unstoppably and relentlessly clear that she was not of Washington, did not admire Washington and knew little about Washington. She ran not only against Washington, but the whole East Coast, just to be safe.... In the casual parts of the country, I suspect, it went down fine....
She held up her end of an energetic debate that gave voters a direct look at two competing philosophies. She established debating parity with Joe Biden. And in a country that is furious with Washington, she presented herself as a radical alternative. By the end of the debate, most Republicans were not crouching behind the couch, but standing on it. The race has not been transformed, but few could have expected as vibrant and tactically clever a performance as the one Sarah Palin turned in Thursday night.
