Palinguistics go viral

Quick, who's speaking?

   ...Are the tax cuts paid for?

Listen, what you're trying to do is get into this Washington game and their funny accounting over there.  You cannot get the economy going again by raising taxes on those people who we expect to create jobs in America and to get the economy going again. If we want to solve the budget problem, we've got to have a healthy economy and we have to get our arms around the runaway spending that's going on in Washington, D.C.

Sarah Palin, right? No -- John Boehner, refusing to admit that making the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest permanent will increase the deficit.  David Gregory asked him five times to acknowledge that the tax cuts are "not paid for." He wouldn't do it.

Tina Fey advanced her career by imitating Palin.  Why not the Republican leadership? 

Yes, Weigel, Palin really needs to learn something

Dave Weigel's cynicism about the media's engagement with politicians and the electorate's engagement with media is so extreme that it converts to an odd sort of credulity. Imagining "the media that's actually going to cover the 2012 elections," Weigel predicts:

This media is not going to care about her policies. If policies come up during debates, and she gives the same answers she gives on Fox now, and Mitt Romney pounces on her, the story will not be that the GOP's frontrunner gave a pallid answer. The story will be that Mitt Romney pounced. What does this do to his image? What does Mike Huckabee have to say about it?


And so on. It's hard to imagine Palin competing at the policy level the press claims she needs to get to, but easy to imagine her competing at the level they actually play on. Quick, cast your mind back to the countless 2007/2008 Democratic debates. Do you remember Hillary's mastery of policy? No. You remember her fumbling an answer on drivers' licenses for illegal immigrants, you remember Obama telling her she was "likable enough," and perhaps you remember Dennis Kucinich talking about aliens.

Okay: perhaps people's chief takeaways from the 50-odd Presidential debates of the 2008 campaign were not smart policy pronouncements -- such as Obama's assertion in his first debate with McCain, regarding the war in Iraq, "We have weakened our capacity to project power around the world because we have viewed everything through this single lens."  But that doesn't mean that viewers assess the candidates merely as celebrities. What do people remember about Palin's performance on policy questions in her national media appearances in 2008?  Incoherent babble about seeing Russia from Alaska and what happens when Putin rears his head and flies in American airspace.  Her obvious cluelessness when Charles Gibson asked for her thoughts about the Bush Doctrine. Her faux-Reagan, target-free "there you go again, Joe" in her debate with Biden.

Herszenhorn misrepresents the fading public option

In his assessment of the still fluid-and-fuzzy Senate health care compromise, I believe that the estimable David Herszenhorn misrepresents the rationale for the public option (though perhaps capturing the rhetoric and emotion of many supporters):

Supporters of the public option want it to remove the profit motive as an obstacle to medical care, and also to menace the private insurance companies that they generally view as greedy and mean. At times, some lawmakers seemed to favor the public plan simply because private insurers hate the idea.

The point of the public option is not to punish or necessarily weaken the private insurance industry. A strong public option would aim its firepower at providers more than at insurers. That is, by tying repayment rates to Medicare rates, it would bring a wider swath of this country's patchwork of health care payments under the aegis of the Federal government.  In other words, it would move the U.S. health care market one step closer to monopsony, the sine qua non of universal health care in every country that offers it -- a market in which the government sets the prices (and coverage rules) for all health care services. That ultimately should improve the pricing power of private insurers competing against a public option; for all the industry's cries about "cost-shifting," the net result of increased government pressure on pricing is likelier to be more pricing power for all buyers.

Paging Tina Fey

Those feeling a little wistful about not having George W. Bush around to rough up the English language, take heart: looks like we'll always have Sarah Palin. Here's Sarah, campaigning for Saxby Chambliss today in Perry, Georgia:

We want to make sure we have at least 41 Republicans in the United States Senate to make sure that we shape bad legislation, or kill bad legislation.

Where would we be without enough Republicans to shape bad legislation?

Or kill...Sarah for Senate! She can shoot legislation from a helicopter.

White flag of surrender on SNL?

Fallows thinks that McCain threw in the towel on Saturday Night Live last night:

For a candidate who thinks he's ahead, and might actually become president, inevitably there's a tone of new seriousness right at the end: What we've been working for years is within our grasp, let's not screw this up, and let's be sobered by how different the world is going to look in a few days.

So if McCain really thought he had a chance of catching up, he wouldn't have wasted time on an audience that might repair his reputation among liberals and journalists but does him no good with the crucial swing votes. And if he thought he were secretly ahead, he wouldn't comport himself this way. He would be more like the stiff character we saw in the debates.

Outside of the political skits, I think SNL is pretty wretched. But if Obama does win, Tina Fey & co. will have helped decide this election. In Newsweek's recent poll, 34 percent of independents said that the Palin pick makes them less likely to support McCain. In the Washington Post-ABC News poll, 58% of Americans said that Palin was unqualified to be President. Palin made that impression; Tina Fey baked it in.

Palin sinks under Obama's light touch

The polling evidence is overwhelming that Sarah Palin is dragging McCain down. And the reason is simple. While Democratic news junkies may be convinced that she's a Putinesque thug (see the Troopergate report), a quasi-fascist demagogue (whipping up mobs to violent fantasy) and a Christianist kook (accepting a laying on of hands from an avowed anti-semite to protect her from witchcraft), most Americans view her simply as likeable but unqualified. According to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll:

The shift in Palin's ratings come with a pronounced spike in the percentage of voters who see her as lacking the experience it takes to be a good president. Voters were about evenly divided on that question a month and a half ago, but toward the end of September a clear majority said she was not qualified. In the new poll, 58 percent said she is insufficiently experienced.

According to Newsweek's latest:

Nearly a third of voters, 31 percent, say that McCain's choice of Palin makes them less likely to vote for him, while 19 percent say the Palin pick makes them more likely to choose McCain (49 percent say it makes no difference). Perhaps most concerning for the McCain campaign is that 34 percent of independents say the Palin pick makes them less likely to support McCain, compared to 45 percent of Democrats and 9 percent of Republicans.

The Palin problem seems to stem mostly from a concern among voters that she is not yet ready to serve as president should something happen to McCain. A solid majority of voters, 55 percent, now say they think Palin is not qualified to serve as president, while 40 percent say she is qualified. Nonetheless, her personal connection with the American electorate remains strong; 70 percent of voters find her personally likeable, while only 24 percent do not.

If Obama were McCain, he would have hammered Palin's unreadiness home--along with her sinister demagogic rhetoric--in speeches and ads. But the Obama campaign, and Obama himself, pretty much kept hands off. Obama's only criticism of Palin that I can recall was in the third debate, embedded in his quasi-defense of John Lewis' attack on the McCain campaign's incendiary attacks. He didn't speak her name:

I mean, look, if we want to talk about Congressman Lewis, who is an American hero, he, unprompted by my campaign, without my campaign's awareness, made a statement that he was troubled with what he was hearing at some of the rallies that your running mate was holding, in which all the Republican reports indicated were shouting, when my name came up, things like "terrorist" and "kill him," and that you're running mate didn't mention, didn't stop, didn't say "Hold on a second, that's kind of out of line."

Obama & co. let Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric and most of all Tina Fey do the necessary. They let the process work. Anyone who's ever been unprepared for any test who saw the Couric clips knew that Palin was completely out of her depth. The Obama campaign simply left that image unfiltered.

Silent Sarah submits to SNL skewering

Sarah Palin acquiesced to her own humiliation on Saturday Night Live last night. In two skits, the central trope was her refusal to say anything. She played right along and allowed the show's creators to write all over her. Not only did no one on the show have any substantive verbal interaction with the potential-president-in-purdah. No one really even looked at her.

In the opening skit, Tina Fey conducted a Palin press conference with her signature goofiness. The consistent theme is to mimic (and only slightly exaggerate) the you-can-see-Russia logic characteristic of the McCain campaign's Palin scripts. In this case, the line was, the American people are angry, and in the debate McCain was angry, so McCain won the debate, q.e.d.

Of course, Sarah walked in on Tina. You'd expect that the candidate would highlight the absurdity of the caricature with an ostentatious display of brilliance. You'd think that the McCain people would have insisted on something like that skit in which Hillary Clinton (I think on the Daily Show), walked a technician through a fix of an equipment failure. Instead, she simply chased Fey off the stage and announced that she would take no questions.

In the same skit, the real Palin watched Fey on-screen with Lorne Michaels. Alec Baldwin walked up and, mistaking Palin for Fey, told Michaels, You can't let Tina go out there with that woman. She goes against everything we stand for. I mean, good lord, Lorne. They call her...what's that thing they call her?" Palin responded "Caribou Barbie."Baldwin briefly glancing a Palin and realizing his mistake, said, "Forgive me, but I must say this, you are way hotter in person." He stared straight ahead as he said that. There was no real interaction, no contrition, no "I was wrong" recognition of her humanity. It was a sexual dismissal, a reinforcement rather than repudiation of the Caribou Barbie image.

The second skit was more of the same. Joining the anchors on Weekend Update, Palin announced that she would not do the planned routine because "It might be a bad idea for the campaign." Instead, she sat silently bobbing and gesticulating while Amy Phoeler launched a derisive rap highlighting McCain's creepy smile, Russia porch sightings, Todd's snowmobiling, Palin's Ayers and prospective Wright attacks, and Alaska's otherness generally -- loudly punctuated by repeated rifle fire as (and after) Phoeler felled a moose mascot with a rifle finger. It was harmless enough in itself -- except for the peculiar spectacle of the would-be-veep herself, silent again, letting the lampooners speak for her -- rocking in her seat, waving her arms as the rappers sang, "all the mavericks in the house, raise your hands," and saying nothing. Nothing!-- except a farewell "you betcha" and "good night." How could the McCain camp, which has controlled every venue in which Palin speaks since the Katie Couric disaster, have allowed this appearance without at least partly scripting it?

The SNL crew doubled the decibel level of Palin's silence -- and made moosemeat of the McCain-Palin campaign.