Say It Ain't So

Palin tries to out-cutesy a traumatized nation.

by David Faris

Last night Sarah Palin successfully spoke the English language in her debate with Joe Biden, surpassing the 1st-grader standard she set with her Katie Couric interviews.

This is not to say that Palin performed ably. If this had been a job interview, head hunters would be searching for suitable alternatives. Palin sounds like George Costanza trying to pass himself off as an architect or a marine biologist — it's almost like she's never served in government or even thought about the issues she's being asked about.

In a question about the causes of climate change, Palin answered, "But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don't want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?" She hit everything on a checklist of Palinisms — garbled syntax, misdirection, and a maddening inability to actually answer the question posed to her.

Throughout the debate she seemed weirdly chipper with her deliveries of things like "Darn right!" and "Drill baby drill!" and was obviously trying too hard to be adorable, channeling both Ronald Reagan and an apocryphal Black Sox fan when she began a response with "Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again." Her responses were also consistently and depressingly mangled by Comp 101 clutter like "With regard to" and "In order to." It's now clear why she went to five schools in six years.

So while her debate performance against Biden may not have been the total disaster we'd all been hoping for, it reinforced the catastrophic choice by the McCain campaign to have Palin play hide-and-go-f&*k-yourself with the media for the past month. We haven't seen a public figure behave so petulantly with the press since Hall-of-Fame lefty Steve Carlton. Palin must have agreed with Lefty when he said, "And the irony is that they wrote better without access to my quotes."

Unfortunately, her refusal to speak with the media gave the only interviews she agreed to a High Noon quality, when if she had just been doing it every day, she could have overcome the missteps. Now people can't decide which was funnier — her actual interviews or the Tina Fey send-ups on Saturday Night Live.

The implosion of the McCain campaign since Black Monday actually has more to do with Palin than people think. Her favorability ratings have crashed like a Wachovia stock portfolio and have taken the top of the ticket down with her. It's true that Obama's surge seems correlated with the Wall Street meltdown and longstanding Democratic advantages on the economy. But can you imagine how much more coherent McCain would sound if he had an economic expert like Mitt Romney as running mate, instead of a faux-folksy neophyte who has spent most of her campaign time cramming for the debate like a speed-fueled undergrad pulling an all-nighter?

Palin's jaw-dropping ignorance, leaked in the drip-drip interviews with Katie Couric, came at precisely the wrong moment for McCain. Banks are collapsing, trillions of dollars in wealth are disappearing overnight, the jobless rate is skyrocketing, and at this moment of maximum national peril we are offered Sarah Palin?

Unable to name a single newspaper or magazine she reads, a single Supreme Court ruling with which she disagrees, or a single regulatory accomplishment of her running mate, Palin has come across as even dumber and more ignorant than she probably is — no small feat. Perhaps most frighteningly, her answer to Katie Couric's question about the status of privacy in the Constitution betrayed a startling misunderstanding of the U.S. government.

The negative press coverage of the Amazing Palin Gaffe-atron only made her running mate's bizarre post-convention behavior more head-scratching. McCain has seemed more like the presidential equivalent of White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, the type of guy who denounces his pitchers the day before the biggest game of their lives. Suspending and then unsuspending his campaign, paradropping into D.C. to blow up the bailout negotiations, and lashing out at the media — all of these things led people to question whether they want to be rooting for, as Palin repeatedly put it, "a team of mavericks."

The contrast between McCain and Obama has never been clearer. Even people who disagree with Obama about every major policy issue have to admit that the dude is unflappable. In the current climate people are unquestionably drawn to a candidate who seems to have his stuff together and who, whatever his shortcomings in experience, appears to at least know what he's talking about.

No thanks to Palin, McCain's chances in this election are getting slimmer by the day. His only chance may be to show up at the next two debates looking and sounding more like the guy who was once America's most popular Senator, rather than the angry, clueless stuntman who wouldn't even look Obama in the eye during the first debate. His pissed-off old man act is not wearing well with voters who yearn for stability and competency in the White House after eight years of moronic misrule, just as Palin's cutesy charm is not going to cut it for people who just watched their retirement savings disappear down the rabbit hole.

Partisans will respond to last night's debate in predictable ways, but my guess is that Sarah Palin did not change the fundamental dynamics of this race. It doesn't help to stop the bleeding when you're already dead.

David Faris is a frequent Slant contributor. To respond to his slant, or write one of your own, submit your 650-word opinion piece to Brian Howard.