Palin the Usurper

While watching a Sarah Palin retrospective tonight, following her resignation as governor of Alaska, a question occurred to me:

Was the election of Barack Obama, a former president of Harvard Law Review and Senator from Illinois, as the first African-American President of the United States, almost upstaged/eclipsed (or was it upstaged/eclipsed?) by a former beauty pagent contestant who was an unsuccessful candidate for Vice-President of the United States?

On "This Week with George Stephanapolous" on 7/26, conservative commentator George Will complained about the continuing over-exposure given to the pronouncements of Barack Obama on every subject. But hasn't Obama at least been elected to a national office? How do we explain the continuing attention given to the utterances of Sarah Palin?

Looking Backwards

I just finished watching the vice-presidential debate between Joseph Biden and Sarah Palin, and the line that sticks in my mind is the one Palin recited (I don't give her any credit for any original thoughts) after Biden described McCain's voting history, because Palin said, "There you go again, looking backwards."

The biggest challenge of the McCain campaign is that is must distance itself from both the past and the present. The past is the record of the Republican party, which has controlled Congress for 10 0f the last 12 years, the record of John McCain, who has been in the Senate for the last 26 years, and the record of George W. Bush, who has been President for the last 7 years. The present is the platform of John McCain, which is a platform of increasing tax breaks for the wealthy, continued dependence on fossil fuels, and the continuation of a unilateral foreign policy based on military force.

The promise of the McCain-Palin campaign is that we didn't really mean what we did in the past, we don't mean what we say about the present, and we're going to do something different in the future. Just trust us.

And Joe Biden had the correct response, which is that the past is prologue.

Talking Points Salad

Listening to interviews and off-the-cuff statements by VP Republican candidate Sarah Palin, I get the feeling I'm listening to a talking-points salad. She takes the talking points she's been given by the McCain campaign, then chops them up and puts them together in a random way to create a kind of word salad.

To see and hear what I'm talking about, here's a montage of memorable moments to date, put together by Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo.