Telly Davidson contemplates the political implications of Palin's reality show (which I have dutifully DVRed but am having a hard time forcing myself to watch):
The show is an hour long weekly informercial for just how friendly, accessible, and common-sense intelligent Sarah Palin is (or seems to be when she’s in her natural habitat.) Several liberal pundits rightly said that at least from an image/political POV, George W. Bush won his main debate with Al Gore back in 2000, because Bush over-performed from his low expectations (perhaps we “misunderestimated” him), while Gore, the climate-change genius who ‘invented’ the internet, very noticeably under-performed from his.
Even someone as cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs as Sharron Angle was largely perceived to have “won” her debate with Harry Reid — because while Reid and the larger media narrative portrayed her as a glassy-eyed nutbar, she seemed like a reasonable, competent businesswoman in her actual one-one-one versus Senator Reid. If that had been all we knew of her, she might well have won. (With Angle’s beyond-Willie-Horton commercials and embarrassing digging-grave-deeper attempts at damage control with blacks and Latinos, she did herself in without any help.)
The Dish 