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Thursday, October 2nd, Noon:
The word is out, everywhere, on all news stations, all news shows, spilling from pundit mouths, many of whom are Republican/conservatives: The bar is so low for Sarah Palin that all she has to do is show up to do well. Democrats have a slightly different take, naturally: The bar is high, for crissake! -- she's running for VP and for a heartbeat away from P.
We're talking spin, spin, spin, turn, turn, turn. All the seasons of the mind and of the electoral year of 2008. Psychologically we're seeing the application of ceiling and floor theory. If you expect someone to be dead and they turn out to be breathing, that's far more momentous than if you expected them to be alive and they were indeed spewing out CO2. Contrariwise, if you expect someone to take the evening with a huge, dominating performance and they simply do a very respectable job, winning but not totally dominating, there is disappointment and overly negative evaluations. So, politicians don't want to come in with high expectations; they want to low ball it and then triumphantly take the debate and look like a titan. Spin, spin, spin, turn, turn, turn, ‘tis the political gambit season.
Friday, October 3rd, Noon:
Remember the movie, A Face in the Crowd? Andy Griffith (he of the folksy TV mega-hits that are eternally on cable, The Andy Griffith Show and Matlock) plays Lonesome Rhodes, a guitar-playing, Kentucky-born, Tennessee Ernie Ford, aw shucks kinda performer who gets on TV, strikes Huey Long populist gold, becomes a political king maker, and seriously considers running for political office with his folksiness belying a demagogue who uses TV like a TV master chef wields a santoku knife. Last night Sarah Palin sliced and diced the questions thrown at her with Benny Hana panache, answering them, she said, as she wanted to rather than how Moderator, Gwen Ifill, of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer repute, and the rest of the planet might expect her to, namely like someone from John McCain's mythic Straight Talk Express.
For Sister Sarah, "as she wanted to" meant soccer mom-speak, riffing on Ronald Reagan's "there you go again,"and talking about herself, her family, her friends (a mixed crew who allegedly disagree with her sometimes such as, for example, about something to do with gay marriage. But, sadly, we're not sure how they disagree or if any are gay. All we know for sure is that Sarah says she can "tolerate" gay unions but not gay marriage). She plain-talked her goals, her accomplishments, and her kindredness with middle America-I am like you...only prettier, smarter, richer, a governor, a VP candidate and hoping to be president one day in the not too distant future if you stand by me as I will stand by you. So, I'm sorta like you. And you could just see her constituents across the TV audience canvas nodding and once more hoping one day to sit in Sarah's kitchen and chew the blubber.
Yes, Sarah spoke in clichés, and yes she didn't answer questions directly unless it suited her, and yes she ended the "show" holding her baby, stroking its body as mothers do to bond and calm them as she knew her fans across America felt bonded and calmed by the image that warms their mother-child archetype. All the while she was surrounded by family and friends and looking like a VP Mom, one whom every kid wished his or her mom looked like.
And yes, she made no gaffes worth mentioning... unless a gaffe is letting the listening audience know she admires Cheney's usurpation of power and intends to follow his lead. Unless a gaffe is showing similar admiration for an imperial presidency, for the unitary executive theory advocated by Cheney and embraced by Nixon and Bush, etched out in sentiments like "If the president does it that means it's not illegal." It's a unitary executive, she probably envisions, who will throw up a mess of signing statements so that congressional will and judicial subpoenas can be blithely undermined or simply ignored.
Is Sarah Palin Dick Cheney with lipstick?
But here's the point, a Biden phrase favorite: If image alone counts in this VP candidate debate-show-gotcha-match, Palin made a chair rug out of Joe Biden. Watching the camera and hearing the delivery style switch from Biden to Palin was like going from the muted gray scale to hue-saturated Technicolor, as Dorothy did when traveling from Kansas to Oz. It was also like going from facts to fun. There was no question that Palin was much more fun to watch and listen to than was Senator Joe Biden. And she could pronounce Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's name correctly. No mean feat. She uttered it several times just in case you missed her skill the first time. Could it have intentionally suggested a grasp of the issues that were considered missing in previous interviews? I don't recall Biden taking a stab at it; but we know he knows the issues and who is really in power in Iran. He said so and observed that Sarah didn't.
Indisputably Palin, as they say, "pops." She jumps off the TV screen, she works the camera, the camera eats her up, she owns the room, drains the oxygen. She winks, she smiles, she nibbles her lower lip, she eye-glistens. She may be the face in the crowd, but what a face. She was created for the television age. She is to the TV manor born.
It's not that Biden was a splayed fish in Palin's presence. It's that his TV therms were warm to Palin's hot. Biden would have looked and sounded much better in a debate with McCain, he of the malaisian "pallor." It's all a question of relative contrasts. Last night, what Biden said was substance to Palin's image. But since the McCain team demanded scant allowance for follow-up questions from Ifill or Biden, Palin's weaknesses on the issue of substance and working, fluid domestic and global knowledge was less in evidence than it was in interviews with Gibson and Couric. Rather, Palin's considerable strengths in delivering parroted paragraphs, stump speech talking points, and staying within her Alaskan brand of folksy comfort zones, were front and center and so very charming (unless you're a wolf lover).
Biden just doesn't have the DNA to match that ("come and walk the streets of my neighborhood" just didn't hack it in terms of folksy) so he often could do little but smile enigmatically as she made her points and managed her image. That candidate Palin, it was announced, will do no more one-on-one interviews shows that the McCain camp strategists are unwilling to let Sarah again stray from a script and risk sullying the charmed circle of non-specifics in which last night she once again two-stepped like a Dancing Star finalist.
Remember, TV audiences favored Kennedy over Nixon while radio audiences favored Nixon over Kennedy. Last night, what few Americans there were listening to the debate on the radio would have likely favored Biden. But unquestionably, the hundred million strong American TV audience reacting to the TV star that is Sarah Palin, the Mr. and Mrs. America for whom she is clearly the poster VP candidate, watched, smiled and felt confidant once again in the woman who is like them...sorta.
But if substance carried the day last night, then Biden may have come off the winner. Scratch that! Not maybe -- he did! But to whom? How far and deep does substance go into the cortical viscera of the American electorate? Palin or her advisers know it's one thing to reanimate your anxious base and truly amuse your audience but it's another thing to persuade the vaunted undecided (who are these people?) to decide. Some early polling suggests Undecideds were more impressed with Biden than Palin. Substance hearers speak! (Can we clone them?) Whether this was a trend or merely a rogue moment, a maverick sample, will become clearer as the games continue through November 3rd.
Watching her perform last night, one can surely understand how Governor Palin charms her Alaskan voters. She makes sense at a gut level; an uninspected gut level to be sure, but a gut level nonetheless. She fills in with metalanguage, with intonation, with camera savvy what she voids in specifics. And conservative America seems truly smitten with both guts and gut levels. Sarah is a child of the media age with glib gab and glamour. And she plays an instrument, just like A Face in the Crowd's Lonesome Rhodes
Lest we forget, Sarah's 80% Governor favorability rate means something. Maybe only a politician's elective opaqueness, but it means enough to stop and pay attention and not simply be smug about the Lady Governor, a ‘tude to which so many pundits on MSNBC regrettably seem to be disposed. Lonesome Rhodes was underestimated too. Will the lower 48 vibrate to the same Palin projections when they enter the voting booth next month? If they do then we'll likely have that Palin-McCain ticket she mentioned a few weeks ago drive that Straight Talk Express right into the Oval Office.
