Sunday, October 5, 2008

Scary Self-Confidence

Is John McCain's old age, coupled with Sarah Palin's scary self-confidence, combining to make her TV exposure last week a loser for the GOP? Frank Rich at the New York Times thinks so.
The standard take has it that she’s either speaking utter ignorant gibberish (as to Couric) or reciting highly polished, campaign-written sound bites that she’s memorized (as at the convention and the debate). But there’s a steady unnerving undertone to Palin’s utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right G.O.P. base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder.
Wow. 'Hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition.' Sounds like Barack Obama, doesn't it?


But the debate’s most telling passage arrived when Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Palin’s perky response — she immediately started selling McCain as a “consummate maverick” again — was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis’s notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being “raped and murdered.” If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.
That Sarah! She just hasn't learned to be phony and slick up there in Alaska the way the mainstreams expect.
After the debate, Republicans who had been bailing on Palin rushed back to the fold. They know her relentless ambition is the only hope for saving a ticket headed by a warrior who is out of juice and out of ideas. So what if she is preposterously unprepared to run the country in the midst of its greatest economic crisis in 70 years? She looks and sounds like a winner.
Wow - 'preposterously unprepared to run the country in the midst of its greatest economic crisis in 70 years' sounds like a pretty good description of Barack Obama, doesn't it?
So how can a desperate G.O.P. save itself? As McCain continues to fade into incoherence and irrelevance, the last hope is that he’ll come up with some new game-changing stunt to match his initial pick of Palin or his ill-fated campaign “suspension.” Until Thursday night, more than a few Republicans were fantasizing that his final Hail Mary pass would be to ditch Palin so she can “spend more time” with her ever-growing family. But the debate reminded Republicans once again that it’s Palin, not McCain, who is their last hope for victory.
Just as Dems were wondering about dumping Joe Biden a couple of weeks ago - just a couple of weeks after they had been wondering how they had created a ticket that was so upside down.

You have to wonder how long it will be before they plead with him to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.

All of the above is, of course, just Rich trying to be rich. What is working against McCain is 8 years of George W. and an economic disaster, forces so powerful that the unelectable Obama could actually win this election.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, so that's Rachel Maddow. She's so obnoxious. No wonder MSNBC is at the bottom of the ratings scale.

Anonymous said...

On another note, did you see this Obama youth video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUEQz5dltmI

Looks like the Nazi youth, scary stuff.
MS

Anonymous said...

Just went to youtube to see this video...sick group of brainwashed kids. It's pretty pathetic that they can't aspire to becoming successful in life without Obama. Add this to the list of his communist ways of wanting to run this country. On a lighter note YAY Pats, go Sox!

Anonymous said...

Just went to youtube to see this video...sick group of brainwashed kids. It's pretty pathetic that they can't aspire to becoming successful in life without Obama. Add this to the list of his communist ways of wanting to run this country. On a lighter note YAY Pats, go Sox!