Analysis of ABC Interview Of Gov Palin Part III - Sexism, Troopergate,

This video contains some overlap with the video in Part II below. At the 4 minute mark, the overlap ends and Gibson begins questioning Gov Palin on sexism. At the 5 minute mark, it overlaps with the video in Part I. (YouTube is incredibly frustrating for differing versions of the interview). It picks up with the book banning and troopergate at 7 minutes.



Comments:

There is not too much too this part really. Gov. Palin slips Gibson's question on sexism, which was an open invitation to speak about the unhinged people in the media and on the left attacking her ostensibly for holding down a job while raising a family. To her credit, she does not play the victim.

Gibson's other questions allow Gov. Palin to respond to internet rumors that she banned books at the library and that she committed an ethics violation in regards to Troopergate. Both answers seem solid.

There is little to analyze in this video. Considering the entire interview, Palin performed well. She was weak where we knew she would be weak, though not fatally so. On social issues, I think she really helped herself by coming across as principled but reasonable. She came across personality wise as a very sincere and intelligent woman. I could see her as Vice President after the interview. How about you?

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Analysis Of The ABC Interview Of Gov. Palin Part II – Reform, Earmarks, Abortion, Guns,

Comments -

The second part of the ABC interview is an improvement over Part I. Gov. Palin is more at ease with questions and she comes across as conservative, reasonable and sincere. Again the questions were fair but, as in segment I, there were flaws. Charlie Gibson questioning could have been much clearer on his questions regarding earmarks.

Gibson's opening question was what sets Gov. Palin apart from the Bush regime in terms of "change" and "reform." Her list of what she would change are lower taxes, fiscal restraint, and improved oversight of federal and quasi-government agencies. Fiscal restrain is the big part. I wish she had talked about the need to reform entitlement programs as that is, as Gibson intimates, the major hurdle in restraining spending.

On the economy, the big question in this segment concerned earmarks and the Bridge to Nowhere. Gov. Palin is attempting to make more out her final killing of the Bridge to Nowhere than is justified – probably because it makes for a good sound byte. Yes, she did redirect the funding from the Bridge project. But she did not reject the funding or otherwise return it to the federal government. Pushing this too far will hurt her.

At the same time, Charlie Gibson was making far less out of Gov. Palin’s record for reducing earmark requests in her state. No, she has not killed all of them, but she has reduced request for them significantly and she is clearly on record as intending to reduce such requests for her state in the future. Further, Chalie Gibson’s question on earmarks shows a fundamental confusion on the issue. Gov. Palin’s answer indicates she fully understands it.

There are two different categories of earmarks, and though both are problematic, one is far more problematic than the other. The lesser of two evils is when individual legislators request spending for a specific project within their state or for a special interest that is then debated and voted upon by Congress. But there is another category of earmark abuse that is the preponderance of the problem. The vast majority of earmarks do not go through the process just described. They are never debated and voted upon by Congress. They do not see the light of day in effect. This from the Weekly Standard describes the problem:

President Bush seems to grasp the issue. A year ago he publicly complained that "over 90 percent of earmarks never make it to the floor of the House and Senate. They are dropped into committee reports that are not even part of the bill that arrives on my desk. You didn't vote them into law. I didn't sign them into law. Yet, they're treated as if they have the force of law."

To make the matter worse, these in the latter category are far too often vaguely worded, open ended funding requests. The latter category absolutely must be killed if we are ever to have a hope of getting control on spending and reducing corruption. The former category needs to severely restricted, though there needs to be a lot of thought given to how to do this without unduly restricting reasonable requests for funding. That is a systemic problem that needs to be debated and reformed at the highest level of government. That said, given the abuses of the system at this point, we need to ere for the foreseeable future on the restricting such requests to the minimum possible.

Over at the Next Right, they have a superb example of how the corrupt version of earmarking works. Their example is Dem. Senator Carl Levin who literally is refusing any debate in a matter that will allow $5.9 billion in earmarks pass into law in the Defense Appropriations Bill without every being debated or voted upon in Congress.

Gov. Palin gets this one. I hope the audience watching does also. The fact is Palin and McCain will, I fully expect, make a very good faith effort to impose fiscal restraint, reduce pork and clean up the earmark process. And while all three of those are related, they are also separate - something Gibson seems to muddle in his questioning.

On "social issues," I think Palin hit all the questions out of the ball park. She came across as conservative but reasonable and willing to be flexible. In that regard, she made an important point - she distinguished between her personal views and what she believed would be reasonable policy in light of those who disagree with her.

Gibson's first question concerned abortion. Palin's answer was music to my ears. As she said, she would like to see Roe v. Wade overturned and abortion made a state issue. She does not want abortion made illegal, but she wants to see a greater "culture of life."

Hers is hardly an extremist position on either count (though her personal opinion that abortion is wrong even in cases of rape and incest puts her is not centrist by any means.) Indeed, the position that she articulates on Roe was one shared by now Justice Ginsburgh, a staunch advocate of abortion rights, who also believed that Roe was wrongly decided. Abortion appears nowhere in the Constitution. It is a social issue that the federal government should have no role in authorizing or limiting. Given my own personal opinion that nothing has done more damage to our Supreme Court jurisprudence than Roe v. Wade, it is a position I believe fundamental to putting our nation back on track. Roe opened up the flood gates for judicial activism - and it is a floodgate that has not been stemmed for nearly half a century. You can find much more on the issue in a seperate post that I did - The Supreme Court, Originalism, Activism & America's Future.

On homosexuality, her answer ought to give the gay rights community a warm fuzzy feeling. She simply said that she will not judge people's lifestyle. Although she did not mention it, I recall that she also supported gay friendly legislation in Alaska. Gibson did not ask her about her stance on gay marriage.

On guns, Gibson prefaced his question by stating that 70% of Americans support a ban on assault rifles. I would love to know where he got that number - that sounds like pure bull. Nonetheless, Palin's answer here was I thought very strong. They cut some of her answer to this line of questioning that I have seen in another video where she makes the very valid point that gun laws take guns out of the hands of the law abiding, not the criminals.

And the PUMA's ought to appreciate Gibson raising the fact that Palin spoke so highly of Hillary long before she was on the radar for the VP slot. That certainly makes her praise of Hillary on the campaign trail seem genuine and not cynical. And you have to love her dig at Obama - that he should have chosen Hillary as his VP pick.

Overall, I would grade Gov. Palin’s performance a solid B in the economic segment, an A in the social segment. I wish she would have expounded more upon the Obama tax plan and I wish Charlie Gibson’s questioning on ear marks and pork had been much clearer.

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Analysis Of The ABC Interview of Gov. Sarah Palin

Part I of the interview:



Comments -

Overall this was neither a great nor a bad interview. Some see it as a hostile one. It was certainly exponentially tougher than anything the press has given to Obama. That said, but for the "prayer" questions, I thought Charlie Gibson was reasonably fair.

Gov. Palin answered several of the questions very well. I especially liked her answer on Israel's right to attack Iran in its own self defense and her answer to the questions on NATO. She accurately stated the NATO central tenent - that an attack on one is an attack on all - and that we should bring the Ukraine and Georgia into the NATO fold as a way to lessen the likelihood that those nascent democracies will suffer from Russian predation.

Her answer on the prayer question, that she, like Lincoln, prayed for no more than that we are on God's side, was incredibly good. That was made all the moreso true when you consider that it was done in the face of ABC using a doctored tape that cut and spliced her words to give a different meaning. I await ABC's explanation of that one. Hot Air has that entire story.

Some of her answers to the other questions were evasive and she had the deer in the headlights look when Gibson asked her about the "Bush doctrine." That is going to make all sorts of DNC ads. Palin clearly did not know what Gibson was talking about. She would have been much better off saying immediately "I am drawing a blank, remind me of the docrine," and then launching into her answer - which would have been better if it resembeled Andy McCarthy's at NRO. Not knowing every nuance is not weakness. Being afraid to admit that she does not know every nuance is. Gibson let her hang on that one and she herself turned a small got'cha into a larger one.

Given that she didn't know the Bush doctrine - which, in reality, is fairly basic - it is clear she is not a foreign policy wonk and that she is drinking it in right now at fire hose speed. Given her other answers, she is obviously a quick study. She hurts herself by attempting paint herself on this issue as stronger than she is, and the talk about Alaska bordering Russia as somehow imbuing her with a check in the foreign policy credential box comes across as very weak indeed. Trying to make more of that then is justified is very much akin to Obama relying so heavilly on his experience as a community organizer. It rings hollow and makes her look smaller.

Gov. Palin would be better served if she followed a formulaic response whereby, in answering foreign policy and national security questions, she first would give a short statement of the general principles that would guide her judgment in regards to the matter under question and then launch into the specifics. For example, "Charlie, my rule of thumb is that we must protect existing democracies and do our best to promote democracy throughtout the world. From that standpoint, . . . . blah, blah, Russia, Georgia, Israel, etc." It would clarify some of her rambling answers and it would also highlight her judgment.

Obama has at least some record on foreign policy - his Iraq votes, his vote against declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, etc. - from which the quality - or lack thereof - of his judgment can be gleaned. Palin starts out as a true tabula rasa with no prior record. To remedy that, we need to clearly hear from Gov. Palin the principles that will guide her judgment. She will earn brownie points if she can also clearly articulate in a sound byte how her judgment on a particular issue is different from the Obama/Biden camp. Biden has been so wrong so often on so many foreign policy issues, that should be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Gov. Palin's answer to the question of Pakistan was also very weak. There is a textbook answer to Gibson's question of whether we have the right to cross the border and attack into Pakistan without the approval of the Pakistani government. The honest answer would be - "Numbnuts, I am not going to announce as policy that we are going to cross Pakistan's border and piss off a nuclear armed country and nominal ally. If our soldiers get lost and inadvertently end up on the other side dressed in Paki clothing, well, mistakes happen."

The tactful answer would be "Charlie, we are in a war and the rule of thumb is that we only go to war if we intend to win the war. We must do so at the least cost in lives of our soldiers. We cannot stand idly by while al Qaeda and the Taliban launch cross border attacks against our coalition soldiers and Afghani civilians from uncontrolled parts of Pakistan. Equally, we do not want to do anything overtly that would threaten the stability of Pakistan - a country which is at present an ally in the war on terror and which is a nuclear armed nation of over ___ million people. Launching overt, large scale attacks across the border may have that effect and leave us worse off. Thus, as things stand today, prudence demands that we should operate within those boundaries. That is the extent of my answer on this one and I will say no more." And when Gibson asks follow up, she should just have repeated "I will say no more."

I will load the second part of the interview from YouTube when its posted. She discusses "anthropogenic" global warming and drilling in ANWR. She is much more comfortable in those discussion.

My overall impression. She passed the test, she did not ace it. She is very intelligent. She is a very quick study. She will be more than ready for the debates. She will be ready for Fox in another week, the Sunday talk shows in another two weeks. She needs to be - and to appear to be - honest in her responses, even if that means displaying that she does not know the tenents of the Bush doctrine - or the name of the foreign minister of South Gotchastan. We will take our anger out on the press for gotch'as. We will take our anger out on her for trying to fool us in answer to a gotch'a.

Update: Per Bill Kristol, WaPo is "Smearing Palin On Page 1." I concur with his analysis. WaPo is claiming that Palin tied the decision to go into Iraq with the assertion that there was a tie-in prewar between al Qaeda and Iraq. She never says that, either during the interview above nor in her speech to deploying troops.

HotAir gives the interview about the same grade as I do, though they speculate on whether some of the interview where Palin appeared weakest was distorted by editing.

Over at the Politico, partisans give her . . . partisan marks.

Instapundit has an extensive roundup, including some pretty critical takes on Gibson's performance. And see Memorandum.

Amazingly, the NYT did not give Gov. Palin high marks.

At The Next Right, some on the left are hyperventilating over Palin's responses on NATO. Obviously, they do not understand the basics of the Treaty.

Patrick O'Hannigan does not trust Charlie Gibson's objectivity.

But a week ago, Charles Krauthammer wrote that Palin could only help McCain if she pulled an "Obama." My how time flys. Now, a week later, Mr. Krauthammer that she in fact is pulling an Obama.

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