I said a few days ago that the clincher for me in the Obama-McCain contest was John McCain's decision to pick as his running mate someone as eminently unqualified to be Vice President of the United States as Sarah Palin, but what I hadn't imagined at the time was that the correctness of my assertion would be proven so rapidly, thanks to Palin's disastrous performance in her interview with Katie Couric.
Then there's this:
Sarah Palin's performance is not just bad but outright cringeworthy, atrocious enough to evoke feelings of sympathy as one watches her squirm trying to respond to questions to which she wouldn't know the answers even if they were actually handed to her. Palin's incoherent, nonsensical responses establish beyond doubt for any but the most blinkered partisans just how out of her depth she is, to the extent that even as committed a Republican as Kathleen Parker has urged her to quit; nor is Parker alone amongst the pundit class in her suggestions for Palin to step down, as now Fareed Zakaria has joined the chorus.
Of course, no one really expects Palin to do the decent thing and quit the V.P. slot, seeing as letting her quit (as opposed to just sequestering her from the press) would derail McCain's campaign by drawing an even bigger question mark on his judgment, while at the same time provoking a mass revolt in the ranks of the religious-right, but this very fact gets at the greatest hypocrisy of John McCain's stunningly poor choice of running mate: the Republican Party likes to claim to be the party of "merit" and stern opponent of affirmative action, and yet Sarah Palin is the very embodiment of the unqualified affirmative action hire which the GOP has long made one of the staples of its dog-whistle politics. That vocal defenders can be found for a person who knows less about economics and foreign affairs than anyone with a B.A. from one of the despised "effete, elitist, East Coast" schools just shows how tightly in the grip of meaningless identity politics so many right-wingers are today.
PS: Add James Fallows to the list of voices dismissive of Palin's readiness for national public office. On the other hand, read the responses to this Ann Althouse post if you want to know what it's like to live in a bizarre alternative universe in which up is down, black is white and Palin is wiser than Clausewitz, Machiavelli and Metternich combined - these fools couldn't be more in denial if they were cowering in a Berlin bunker and ranting about "wonder weapons" guaranteed to bring a "final victory" ...
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