I’m just now watching the ABC special on Sarah Palin that aired last night. Two things jump out at me, neither one from the Palin interview.
1) The introductory piece by Kate Snow features a snippet of Palin at the convention saying she’s not part of the old boy network. Then Snow shows her using the same line at six different events since the convention, as if to say, she’s just repeating herself. Snow is perfectly well aware that every candidate for high office uses the same applause lines at every event, and usually just delivers the same speech over and over with a few tiny emendations. That’s what a “stump speech” is. It is — I hate to use the whiny word, but it is a mot juste — unfair, and spectacularly so, of ABC to act as though what Palin has done here is worthy of note when it is what all politicians do all the time. Most ordinary people don’t know this because they have better things to do with their time than know it. But Kate Snow and ABC know it.
2) As a demonstration that Palin scrambles all kinds of political expectations, the panel discussion that followed the interview with Republican Torie Clarke and Democrat DeeDee Myers features Clarke saying she was too scripted and inauthentic and Myers saying no, not at all, she was very attractive. Clarke was far more skeptical, Myers far more accepting.
