Unedited Transcript of Palin Interview

At Mark Levin's.

Here's an email I wrote to someone on the night of the first interview:

One thing that independents like most about mccain -- including me, too, actually -- is his line that as a fighter, he has seen the horrors of war and knows how terrible it is. And that he will therefore not go lightly into it.

Palin came across-- I'm telling you -- as rather blithe about these risks. That is NOT what the country wants. SHit, that's not even what I want, and I'm more pro-war than most.

Answers like this must be couched in terms of her recognizing how horrible war is, and how terrible a new cold war would be, etc., and she has no desire to go down that path, AND, as a child of a soon-to-be soldier she shares the worries of many american mothers, BUT...

She needs that preamble, dude. She cannot blithely speak of war with Russia. People will not take that as authentic or strong, but as glib about something one cannot be glib about.

...

But seriously, she can't speak of war so lightly.

Well, the thing is, if you read the transcript, she actually did say all of that stuff. They just cut it out.

I guess the lesson that has to be learned is Always pack the caveat into any forward-leaning statement so they can't cut it out and make you sound like a warmonger.

Part of the reason I give Palin a break on a lot of this is that she has juggle a lot of balls simultaneously:

1) She has to learn all this stuff quickly. Quick, how much do you really know about federal health care policy? I bet not a lot. Well, Palin has to master all this stuff in a short period of time.

2) She can't even express her own opinion on this stuff. Sometimes she can. But most often she has to view a question through two filters: What she herself believes and what the McCain position is (which is the position she ultimately must either adopt or at least defend).

3) She has to then be guarded about committing McCain to some position.

4) She has to watch out for the gotchas and soundbites that can be edited to make her sound bad.

That's a lot to think about every time a question is asked.

The Anchoress has a truly awesome comparison of the softball Gibson tossed to Barack Obama vs. the hardballs thrown at Palin.

That kind of tells you what you need to know -- Gibson didn't even trust Obama enough to handle difficult questions. He knew he'd wilt, so he skipped them.

More good stuff at Hot Air.

Question: Preamble first. The knock on the Democrats, especially the Peace Lily Obama, is that they're not tough enough on national security.

The knock on Republicans, especially Bomb-Bomb Iran McCain, is that he's too belligerent.

So the question: If Barack Obama answered on Iran (as he always does) that he will pursue all diplomatic means of preventing them from getting the bomb, and then added "But I will not take the military option off the table," would ABCNews or any other MSM outfit have edited out the latter statement, which "saves" his relentless peace-mongering by offering the nuance of an openness to the use of force in the right situation?

Of course not. They would never have chopped his answer up to play into stereotypes about Democratic weakness on national security.

So why is ABCNews so eager to cut the soft-power nuance out of Palin's answer on Russia?

posted by Ace at 03:02 PM

| Access Comments