Predictable: 60 Minutes Will Hit Sarah Palin Tonight

Centerpiece of the segment? An interview with Palin-basher Steve Schmidt.

EdwardR. writes:

Palin simply did not have enough time to prepare for running for the VP slot. Up until the last moment, McCain wanted to pick Lieberman and Palin was his last second choice. She got by her debate on charisma alone. If Palin had 3-4 months to seriously prepare, her interviews would have been SO much better and would have aced out the main argument against her, that she didnt have the intellect to be VP or POTUS.

I have always said that. I always ask the question, "Name me a vice presidential nominee who was not either a 1) sitting Senator (who knows federal issues because it's his day-to-day job or 2) someone who had just run for President (and lost) and therefore had gone through the Obama six-months-of-briefing-books process. Note that this process, too, allows a candidate to make a lot of mistakes early, when the cameras aren't rolling very much or at least no one's paying much attention. After several months of this errors are corrected, and the candidate seems like he knows what he's talking about.

Yeah -- but he didn't six months before.

I asked David Freddoso this question, and he actually had an answer: Dick Cheney. Fine, good answer, I have since modified the question. But obviously that still makes my basic point: Cheney was a fixture in DC for all of his life in one capacity or another.

There's a reason governors who haven't been running for president for a year are never nominated to be VP -- it's not their day-to-day job, and they have absolutely zero prep time to bone up on this stuff.

Strangely enough, while the media always covered for Obama's lapses, they never did let anyone know that Palin was the only pure governor (that is, no running for president) nominated for VP since, well, I don't know when.

Game Change: Palin disputes the account in the book:

Her spokeswoman, Meghan Stapleton, said in a statement: "The Governor's descriptions of these events are found in her book, 'Going Rogue.' Her descriptions are accurate. She was there. These reporters were not."

The statement was provided to CBS's "60 Minutes,” which includes material about the former Alaska governor in a segment about “Game Change.” Correspondent Anderson Cooper interviewed Steve Schmidt, top strategist on the McCain-Palin campaign, who said a campaign aide preparing her for the debate with Joe Biden “told us the debate was going to be a debacle of historic and epic proportions.”

“She was not focused ... not engaged,” Schmidt told Cooper. “She was not really participating in the prep.” Schmidt confronted Palin and, he said, “She said, ‘You know, I think that's right.’”

Even if that is true, it's also true (I think) that Palin was feeling by this point she was being badly served by her preppers, who fed her a lot of talking points that weren't really he. Further, she beat Joe Biden in that debate, so.... I don't know. Assuming she wasn't fully into the prep-stuff, she was right: A less rehearsed, more natural performance served her well.

posted by Ace at 12:50 PM

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