Whenever I follow such debates, I'm hoping that more and more informed people are joining in to add more facts to the matter. I don't know why. I've never been anything but disappointed.
For the record, I've watched some of the video clips, and they're exactly what you expect: there's nothing really wrong with her answers, but she's stumbling her way through and doesn't sound confident in anything she's saying.
If you're a Palin supporter watching the interview, you notice the excellent content and feel bad that she's not as smooth a politician yet as Obama or McCain. If you hate Palin, you find her struggles to be indicative of a general fault of her being completely unprepared and undeserving of a VP slot.
In my mind, the debate on Palin is generally over: her selection has inflamed a certain section of Democrats, which probably leads to a higher turnout on election day, and help galvanize the Right, who have been looking for some reason to get excited about this election. You're either willing to deal with her relative inexperience or you aren't. Nobody is left to be convinced.
I read the discussion and I couldn't tell what was going on. It looked like one or two people were commenting anonymously, relying on talking points, and trying to create an impression that there were multiple commenters. Do you, AVI, have access to the commenters' IP addresses? IOW, can you tell whether the comments were really made by multiple people?
There seem to be many talking-points repeaters and Republicans-for-Obama in the comments sections of right-leaning blogs these days. I wonder if the Obama campaign is behind this phenomenon, or are most of these commenters really who they say they are? I also wonder if a parallel phenomenon exists of disillusioned Democrats leaving pro-McCain comments on left-leaning blogs. I doubt it but I could be wrong.
The other thing I noticed is the "Republicans steal the election" mantra coming up. Someone brought that up in a conversation last week and at first I want to lash out and say "get over it, no one stole anything" and then I just sit back and chuckle because the Dems just don't accept that the present electoral process, set up over 200 years ago, decided these elections and no one stole anything. Bush wasn't the first president to get fewer popular votes than his opponent. It may happen again this year. I think the way presidential races have evolved makes that result even more likely now because any state that is not a "toss-up" gets little attention and the actual vote counts in those states become meaningless. And the Dems forget that their hero, Bill Clinton, was never favored by a majority of the voters, but he was elected nonetheless. Sorry, I'm beginning to ramble.
I think the false Republican-for-Obama and Democrat-for-McCain commenters are probably acting independently of the campaigns. As it's sometimes true, it's a pretty unoriginal lie, though I imagine the practitioners feel immensely clever. No need to coordinate things that people are going to do on their own anyway.
Michael, Depending on how the 1960 Alabama vote for pledged vs unpledged electors gets assigned, JFK arguably lost the popular vote to Nixon but won the electoral vote. Mention that the next discussion ... if you like watching heads explode.
You do the dissenters a disservice, it's not a popular vote-electoral college thing - though they bring that up, too. The "stole the election" issue comes from the Supreme Court decision deciding that the Florida recounting system was unconstitutional - which essentially declared Bush President.
That fact that the decidedly sketchy hand-recounting system taking place in overwhelmingly Democratic districts were, in fact, unconstitutional (if you consider "defrauding an election" to be unconstitutional) means nothing to their argument. They have some "daddy's got friends in the government" theory about the Supreme court voting him in.
On the plus side, of course, the whole debacle gave us six months of sort-of funny "hanging chad" jokes, followed by six months of not-at-all funny "hanging chad" jokes.
7 comments:
Whenever I follow such debates, I'm hoping that more and more informed people are joining in to add more facts to the matter. I don't know why. I've never been anything but disappointed.
For the record, I've watched some of the video clips, and they're exactly what you expect: there's nothing really wrong with her answers, but she's stumbling her way through and doesn't sound confident in anything she's saying.
If you're a Palin supporter watching the interview, you notice the excellent content and feel bad that she's not as smooth a politician yet as Obama or McCain. If you hate Palin, you find her struggles to be indicative of a general fault of her being completely unprepared and undeserving of a VP slot.
In my mind, the debate on Palin is generally over: her selection has inflamed a certain section of Democrats, which probably leads to a higher turnout on election day, and help galvanize the Right, who have been looking for some reason to get excited about this election. You're either willing to deal with her relative inexperience or you aren't. Nobody is left to be convinced.
I read the discussion and I couldn't tell what was going on. It looked like one or two people were commenting anonymously, relying on talking points, and trying to create an impression that there were multiple commenters. Do you, AVI, have access to the commenters' IP addresses? IOW, can you tell whether the comments were really made by multiple people?
There seem to be many talking-points repeaters and Republicans-for-Obama in the comments sections of right-leaning blogs these days. I wonder if the Obama campaign is behind this phenomenon, or are most of these commenters really who they say they are? I also wonder if a parallel phenomenon exists of disillusioned Democrats leaving pro-McCain comments on left-leaning blogs. I doubt it but I could be wrong.
The other thing I noticed is the "Republicans steal the election" mantra coming up. Someone brought that up in a conversation last week and at first I want to lash out and say "get over it, no one stole anything" and then I just sit back and chuckle because the Dems just don't accept that the present electoral process, set up over 200 years ago, decided these elections and no one stole anything. Bush wasn't the first president to get fewer popular votes than his opponent. It may happen again this year. I think the way presidential races have evolved makes that result even more likely now because any state that is not a "toss-up" gets little attention and the actual vote counts in those states become meaningless. And the Dems forget that their hero, Bill Clinton, was never favored by a majority of the voters, but he was elected nonetheless. Sorry, I'm beginning to ramble.
I think the false Republican-for-Obama and Democrat-for-McCain commenters are probably acting independently of the campaigns. As it's sometimes true, it's a pretty unoriginal lie, though I imagine the practitioners feel immensely clever. No need to coordinate things that people are going to do on their own anyway.
Michael,
Depending on how the 1960 Alabama vote for pledged vs unpledged electors gets assigned, JFK arguably lost the popular vote to Nixon but won the electoral vote. Mention that the next discussion ... if you like watching heads explode.
You do the dissenters a disservice, it's not a popular vote-electoral college thing - though they bring that up, too. The "stole the election" issue comes from the Supreme Court decision deciding that the Florida recounting system was unconstitutional - which essentially declared Bush President.
That fact that the decidedly sketchy hand-recounting system taking place in overwhelmingly Democratic districts were, in fact, unconstitutional (if you consider "defrauding an election" to be unconstitutional) means nothing to their argument. They have some "daddy's got friends in the government" theory about the Supreme court voting him in.
On the plus side, of course, the whole debacle gave us six months of sort-of funny "hanging chad" jokes, followed by six months of not-at-all funny "hanging chad" jokes.
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