Month: September 2008

Todd Palin’s former business partner files an emergency motion to have his divorce papers sealed. Oh God.

A staggering figure and a sign of what a storm we are now in. I’m not surprised the Palin speech was watched by more than the Obama speech. My own insight into this is my own traffic. This single page got a million pageviews on Wednesday and a million yesterday. I’ve had jumps and dips in traffic before, but I’ve never really gone above around 300,000 a day. I’m now three times that and holding. This story is now in the stratosphere. And the McCain peeps think that they can keep her indefinitely from the press corps? And that this story isn’t going to go on and on and on, drowning out anything McCain says or does?

Ann and Nancy Wilson want the McCain campaign to stop using their song, Barracuda, as Sarah Palin’s theme. I mean: think what it does to the brand.

As I understand Jonah Goldberg’s view of elitism, it is that there are two kinds of elitism, good and bad. The good is a society where genuine talent and expertise and education are valued, and regarded as virtues in a public official. Conservatives – until they turned into religious populists – believed it was a good thing that our leaders have advanced education, for example. This is a good elite, and we need it. The bad sort of elite is when the educated class starts looking down their noses at the wisdom and common sense of ordinary people, insulate themselves from where they came from and their families and have contempt for the mores of many less educated Americans.

Let me say upfront, that I agree with this. But how can Jonah believe this and honestly say that the selection of Sarah Palin is not an attack on the idea of a good elite? Her own education is a remarkable thing:

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin attended five colleges in six years before graduating from the University of Idaho in 1987.

She began college at Hawaii Pacific University, a private, nonsectarian school in Honolulu. She attended only as a freshman during the fall of 1982, school spokeswoman Crystale Lopez said. Then known as Sarah Louise Heath, she was in the business administration program as a full-time student, Lopez said. "We’re trying to track down someone who knew her," Lopez added. From Hawaii Pacific, Palin transferred to North Idaho College, a two-year school in Coeur d’Alene, about 30 miles east of Spokane. She attended the college as a general studies major for two semesters, in spring 1983 and fall 1983, spokeswoman Stacy Hudson said.

From North Idaho College, Palin transferred 70 miles south to the University of Idaho, the state’s flagship institution. She majored in journalism with an emphasis in broadcast news. She attended Idaho, whose mascot is the Vandals, from fall 1984 to spring 1985. She then returned to Alaska to attend Matanuska-Susitna College in Palmer in fall 1985. Then she returned to Idaho, for spring 1986, fall 1986 and spring 1987, when she graduated.

Despite her journalism degree, she does not appear to have worked for the college newspaper or campus television station, school officials said. She worked briefly as a sportscaster for KTUU in Anchorage after she graduated college.

If she applied for an internship at National Review, they would turn her down.

This is unbelievable:

Jay Carney:

According to Nicole Wallace of the McCain campaign, the American people don’t care whether Sarah Palin can answer specific questions about foreign and domestic policy. According to Wallace — in an appearance I did with her this morning on Joe Scarborough’s show — the American people will learn all they need to know (and all they deserve to know) from Palin’s scripted speeches and choreographed appearances on the campaign trail and in campaign ads.

They are headed over a very steep cliff – and they’re accelerating. That’s what these people do. They cannot acknowledge an error, even when it’s staring them in the face. So they up the ante. They have to whip up the most almighty cultural war to find a way through this. Will the press perform its constitutional duty? Or be cowed by the Rove bullies?

A reader writes:

Good God!  I watched that video of Palin at her church through twice.  The Assemblies of God are Pentecostals, of course, the real "holy rollers"–ecstatic experience of the Godhead in your own body, rolling in the aisles, talking in tongues. When I got some exposure to them, they were extremely conservative and strict (no dancing, no lipstick, no short skirts) but Palin is evidence of how they’ve mainstreamed themselves.

I wonder if the average reader would hear the references she makes and understand them?  Master’s commissions–this is a program they run to evangelize non-believers, in Alaska especially native Americans. Notice that our foreign and defense policy is simply God-given – not to be weighed, studied, deliberated, only to be implemented as we’re taught by our betters.  And notice that her political program – build a sports complex, a pipeline, change a tax bill, all likewise simply becomes a matter of religion.

For twenty years the most hardcore Christianists have been held in the background. Now one of them is the vice presidential nominee next to a man who’s 72 and a repeated cancer survivor.  This is mortifying.  How could John McCain do this to our country!

By accident? Second half of the Wasilla appearance after the jump.

Yglesias cites Andrew Gelman’s Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State while arguing about the culture wars:

Overall, low income back strongly and consistently back Democratic candidates. Where you see culture war voting is among rich people.

Dave Barry:

Critics continue to ask how much McCain really knew about Palin before he selected her as his running mate, especially in light of that fact that he keeps referring to her, in speeches, as "Whatshername." But McCain’s staff insists that it conducted a thorough investigation of Palin, which included not only inspecting her driver’s license, but also, according to a campaign spokesperson, "reading almost her entire Wikipedia article."

He’s following Ross’s advice:

The Obama campaign has no silver bullet to use against the Palin. Instead, Obama has decided to largely avoid directly engaging her and will instead keep his focus largely on John McCain and on linking the Republican ticket to President George W. Bush. The Obama campaign will leave Palin to navigate the same cycle of celebrity that Obama has weathered, and the same peril that her nascent image will be defined by questions and contradictions from her Alaska past.

Very shrewd and smart. She will come undone by herself. But the press needs to do its job and not be intimidated by the nutcases in the rightwing echo-chamber.

A reader writes:

The Republican obsession with drilling seems so jarring because it’s a glaring example of either the modern GOP’s disconnect from reality, or its cynicism, or both. Either a lot of them believe (despite all available evidence to the contrary) that the energy crisis can be significantly ameliorated by offshore and ANWR drilling, simply because they’d like it to be so; or else they think that this is could be a nice wedge issue aimed at the pickup truck set (e.g., "Those guys care more about moose and polar bears than they do that you’re paying $4 a gallon for gas.). Or both. Either way, it’s clearly a symptom of a party that has no interest in engaging seriously with reality.