Below The Beltway

National Review columnist Kathleen Parker is among a small, but growing, number of conservatives expressing doubts about Sarah Palin:

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. Here’s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity:

“Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.”

When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama’s numbers, Palin blustered wordily: “I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it?”

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true.

Parker goes on to suggest that Palin should withdrawn for the good of her country, her party, and John McCain, but that’s entirely unrealistic at this point.

Sarah Palin can’t realitstically withdrawn any more than Joe Biden can — and, no, I don’t believe those rumors about Biden bowing out and Hillary coming in as Obama’s running mate sometime next month.

To do so at this point would effectively mean not only the end of her own political career, but it would torpedo McCain’s campaign by suggesting that the first real choice he made as a Presidential candidate, the selection of a running mate, was fundamentally flawed. There isn’t any way that McCain could recover from something like that with barely a month left until Election Day.

No, Palin won’t withdraw, but I suspect that, other than debate next week, we’ll see very few of the one-on-one type interviews that she did so poorly in with Gibson and Couric (I don’t include the Hannity lovefest in that because, well, it’s not really journalism). Who knows, she may actually do well in Thursday’s debate, or maybe Joe Biden will commit one of his world famous verbal gaffes, or come across as a bully against the relatively likely Palin. When all is said and done, though, it’s still fairly clear that Sarah Palin is not ready for prime time and John McCain is stuck with her; how the voters react to that fact is something we won’t know until Election Day.

Update: Another NRO columnist, Rich Lowry, is also deeply disturbed:

I’ve been swamped with other stuff, but just for the record: I thought Palin was dreadful. She obviously didn’t have the reaction to the Charlie Gibson interview that I had hoped. She had better be better prepared for next week or she risks damaging her political brand forevermore.

The other side of the coin, of course, is that Palin will go into the debate with such low expectations of success, and high expectations of doom, that even a fair performance would be spun as a victory.