Governor Poor Me

My first impression of Sarah Palin was that she was very poised and gave an excellent first speech. When she spoke at the Republican Convention it looked like a new political star was rising. In front of a large crowd and a massive television audience, she spoke with coolness and precision. The problem was, as the campaign went on, it became increasingly obvious that she was good at giving speeches that good speech writers wrote for her. On her own she began to have problems.

The interview with Charles Gibson was bad. The news media was actually pretty kind about her performance in that. It was a poor performance but it was also a first time out. The Katie Couric interview was a cosmic disaster. In both instances the problem really wasn’t the questioners or even the questions. The problem was that Palin did not know the answers. She could not really answer the initial questions and when the follow up questions came, she was off to a universe that has been unexplored. Her response of choice became stringing together as many cliches as she could and hoping her cliches and charm would work. For some they did but for the majority of Americans, her performance was woeful.

Her debate with Joe Biden was interesting. At first she had him baffled. It wasn’t because of the brilliance of her answers, is was that she was ordering Chinese food in an Italian restaurant. Nothing she said matched the questions. She admittedly and deliberately did not answer the questions posed to her. I almost fell of my chair when the news media (on MSNBC) actually seemed to applaud her for this tactic and said it effectively kept Biden off guard at the beginning of the debate. Well, yes, he was off guard. If you have no clue as to what your opponent is answering, it tends to be a tad distracting. The vast majority of people watching the debate, however, were angered. The average person does get weary of politicians who never answer the questions.

She also called herself a feminist. I had a great experience while in was in seminary to have a summer job at the seminary working in the library. For six weeks that summer, I lived with over 60 nuns. These were amazing women and most of them were pretty staunch feminists. They did not hate men. They were not anti-male. What they did believe, however, was that if women wanted to achieve respect and success they had to be smart and use their intelligence to achieve things. They studied harder than I ever did and many of these women were incredibly intelligent, thoughtful, and extremely well versed in their topics of conversation.

I was thinking of them when Palin started winking and making cutesy remarks. She represented everything these women were opposed to. It wasn’t her positions, it was her thinking that a woman would achieve status and success by playing cutesy. And ignorant.

Now she is Governor Poor Me. She was a victim of the McCain Campaign and her handlers. She was a victim of Katie Couric and Tina Fey. She was, above all, a victim of the main stream media all of whom were very liberal and totally opposed to her. These were the same people who applauded her speeches, her debate performance, and even gave her credible remarks after the Gibson interview.
She was not a victim of the news media. She was not a victim of the media loving Obama. She was a victim of her amazing lack of knowledge. She was a victim of her own ambition of accepting the nomination for a position that she was woefully unqualified for. She is rapidly becoming a victim of her own whining about how evil the media is and her ‘poor me’ profile. She is a victim as much as a college student whines about the ‘unfair’ questions on the exams while her classmates are simply answering the questions. The questions were unfair because she did not know the answers.

There were four candidates, two for President and two for Vice President. John McCain, agree with him or not, knew what he was talking about. Barack Obama and Joe Biden, agree or disagree with them, knew what they were talking about. Sarah Palin stood like a deer in the headlights and blamed the mean car for coming down the road that she was crossing. She did not know the answers to basic questions. That is not the fault of anyone but herself.

Now she’s giving interviews whining about how unfair everyone was to her. She has implied that if she had been Obama’s running mate, the media would have ‘loved her.’ She missed the point.

Both McCain and Obama said that they were going to choose someone who could step right in. McCain, for whatever reason, did not do this. He chose a person who was woefully unprepared. Obama chose a person who could step right in. She would never have been Obama’s running mate, ever, because he wouldn’t have chosen her in a million years. The reason was simple. She didn’t know what she was talking about.

I would suggest that if she wants to be taken seriously, she quit the winking and begin reading. I do not believe that this is an unintelligent woman. This is a woman who lacks a basic education on so many issues. Instead of portraying herself as Governor Poor Me I would suggest she take her loss like an adult and recognize that she has a great deal of learning ahead of her.