After her debate with Joe Biden, Sarah Palin was interviewed by Fox News Channel’s Carl Cameron and given a second chance to answer the questions that she completely flubbed during the Katie Couric interviews and in the process Palin blamed Couric for her own inability to provide coherent responses to some very simple questions:
OK, I’ll tell you honestly,” Palin said, “the Sarah Palin in those interviews is a little bit annoyed because it’s like, man, no matter what you say, you’re going to get clobbered. If you choose to answer a question, you are going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to try and pivot and go on to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that, too.”
Palin added, “In those Katie Couric interviews I did feel that there were a lot of things that she was missing in terms of an opportunity to ask what a vice presidential candidate stands for — what the values are represented in our ticket. I wanted to talk about Barack Obama increasing taxes, which would lead to killing jobs, wanted to talk about his proposal to increase government spending by another trillion dollars. Some of his comments that he has made about the war that I think may, in my world, disqualifies someone from consideration as the next commander in chief. … I wanted to talk about things like that. So, I guess I have to apologize about being a little annoyed, but that is also an indication of being outside that Washington elite, outside of the media elite, also, and just wanted to talk to Americans without the filter and let them know what we stand for.”
In other words, how dare that nasty Katie Couric actually expect me to answer questions instead of just letting me ramble on about hockey moms, lipstick, and, oh yeah, how John McCain is a “maverick.”
Conservatives will no doubt rally around Palin with comments like these, but that’s only because they’ve completely forgotten what the role of the press is supposed to be. Reporters don’t exist to merely dutifully take down what politicians like Palin say and repeat it verbatim. They exist to force politicians to answer questions that they wouldn’t otherwise have to answer. The idea, personified by Palin’s comment, that politicians should be able to “go over the media’s head” and limit their communication with the public to a couple of meaningless stump speeches serves not to help the public but to reinforce the idea that politicians are an elite class who should be above having to answer to mere journalists.
That’s neither democratic nor conservative, but, you know, conservatives long ago abandoned the principles they claim to believe in so I guess this minor inconsistency doesn’t matter.
Palin went on to answer the questions she had previously flubbed, such as the question about what media sources she reads on a regular basis:
“I read the same things that other people across the country read, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and The Economist and some of these publications that we’ve recently even been interviewed through up there in Alaska. Because of everything that we’re doing with oil and gas, a lot of the investment publications, especially, are interviewing us, asking us how we are being so successful up there in contributing to our nation’s step towards energy independence…
“My response to her, I guess it was kind of flippant. But, I was sort of taken aback, like, the suggestion was, ‘You’re way up there in a far away place in Alaska, do you know that there are publications in the rest of the world that are read by many?’ And I was taken aback by that because, I don’t know, the suggestion just was a little bit of perhaps we’re not in tune with the rest of the world.”
In other words, it’s Katie Couric’s fault I couldn’t form a coherent sentence.
And the Supreme Court:
Cameron then asked another Couric question that Palin didn’t answer: about Supreme Court decisions that she disagrees with other than Roe v Wade. “As a conservative, there are some in the Republican Party who would expect a vice presidential nominee to understand judicial conservatives and to have something that they might object to,” Cameron said.
“And that’s fair, right, and on that one, true, I shouldn’t have been so flippant and just sort of brushed aside that,” Palin said, “because it was an important question and I should have answered it, and yeah, I can cite a lot of cases that I absolutely disagree with the Supreme Court on.”
She elaborated: “A recent one, Kennedy v Louisiana, where the Supreme Court will tell a state that they can’t impose the death penalty even on the heinous crimes of repeat child rapists, that a state … its rights were taken away by the Supreme Court, and we would not be able to decide for ourselves whether the death penalty in a case like that could be implemented or not. That one, I’m certainly not a supporter of that decision.”
Palin mentioned the Kelo case, also with the eminent domain — “that affects me as governor. It affected me as a mayor, also. Property rights are so precious in this nation and for the Supreme Court to have sided with government instead of the people, the property owners on that — that was frustrating.
Am I the only one thinking that this was the result of a line or two fed from a handler ? If Kennedy and Kelo were such important decisions to her, why couldn’t she tell Couric that ?
Patterico puts it best when it comes to Palin’s do-over interview:
I’m looking for more genuineness and honesty. Instead I’m getting answers that I don’t believe
The intent of the Cameron interview, obviously, was to show that Sarah Palin wasn’t the dumb-as-a-post person she came across as during the Couric interviews. I think we all knew that was the case, because you don’t get to become Governor of a state if you’re a total idiot.
What the interview proved to me, though, is that there really isn’t anything new about Sarah Palin. She’s just another politician repeating the lines her handlers have given her, the fact that she couldn’t do it right the first time just makes me doubt her ability to think on her feet and her qualities as a leader — and that just reinforces my opinion that she would have no business assuming the Presidency should the need ever arise.
Reporters don’t exist to merely dutifully take down what politicians like Palin say and repeat it verbatim. They exist to force politicians to answer questions that they wouldn’t otherwise have to answer.
She was already asked before what she reads and about Supreme Court cases. These weren’t tough, probing questions asked to expose the truth upon which the fate of the Republic rests.
[...] politicians are an elite class who should be above having to answer to mere journalists.” – Doug over at Below The Beltway on Palin’s laughably bad anti-media [...]
Why then all the whining when a Democrat faces tough questions on actual issues? I don’t care what she’ll read in Washington, I’m concerned with how she’ll lead. Couric wasted time with questions about what she likes to read.
No matter how she would have answered that, there would have been blowback “you mean she doesn’t read…” “She’s an ideologue, she even admitted to reading…”
You make it sound like Obama and Biden haven’t been fed lines by their handlers? Give me a break. Obama can hardly keep it together without a teleprompter, its “uhhh, ummm, errr…”
Biden lied during the debate – with notes and having been fed lines from the handlers.
Your entire post proves the point that no matter what she says or doesn’t say, there’s a reason it doesn’t matter. Is your only gripe about her answer on the Kennedy and Kelo cases that she was fed the answer?
“Palin mentioned the Kelo case, also with the eminent domain — “that affects me as governor. It affected me as a mayor, also.”
Kelo was 2005. she was out of mayoral office in 2002.
point out that this is a blatant lie. she did not deal with this as mayor, as such, it is almost certain that it was given to her by a handler, which casts doubt on both cases.
weak.