Tonight CBS News aired another piece of Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin (you can see the video here.) One bit especially caught my attention (from the transcript):
Couric: And when it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?
Palin: I've read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.
Couric: What, specifically?
Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.
Couric: Can you name a few?
Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn't a foreign country, where it's kind of suggested, "Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?" Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.
Now, I've lived in Alaska, and she's quite correct; it isn't a foreign country, though it's amazingly different than the Lower 48 in countless ways.
But there are bookstores, and magazines, and newspapers, and the internet. And while this interview won't tell you what Sarah Palin reads, a photograph about half-way down in the left column of this New York Times story might give you a hint.
The photo, credited to the Heath Family via Associated Press, was republished in the New York Times on September 14. It shows Palin, with a magazine in front of her, at her desk in Wasilla when she was a city councilwoman.
That sure looks like the March 1995 edition of The New American, a publication of the John Birch Society.
I wonder if she read it?
On CNN this evening, a talking head (Bay Buchanan, I believe) responded to this interview by vehemently insisting that Palin is a 'real person', which makes her a much better "candidate" than a 'professor'.
Should we be concerned that Republicans are more concerned about who makes a good candidate than who would make a good vice president?
Or president?
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Kenneth Wolman
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Comments
Palin: It's time that normal Joe six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency, and I think that that's kind of taken some people [Ed: the news media] off guard, and they're out of sorts, and they're ticked off about it.
I really get tired of this style of populism. You know, if I pulled a random person out the population, a normal Joe six-pack American, and I had to guess whether average Joe was more or less well-read, knowledgeable, intelligent, etc. than the Vice President of the United States, I'd want the odds to be better than 50-50 in the Vice President's favor. I'm just saying. . .
"Most of them... all of them... any of them!" This deer-in-the-headlights reaction -- though in response to a question about a relatively trivial subject -- demonstrates her lack of qualifications as much as anything else could.
I wonder -- has she maybe considered actually sending Tina Fry to the debate in her place? Fey has got to be more quick-thinking than Palin.
Actually, once Quayle was pegged as a dim bulb, he was able to prep for the VP Debates and rattle off a series of relevant (from a Neocon) books he said he'd just read, and tie together how they supported Bush foreign policy...
"Richard Nixon's Victory in 1999, Richard Lugar's - Senator Richard Lugar's - Letters to the Next President, Bob Massey's Nicholas and Alexandra, which deals with the fall of the Russian empire and the coming of Leninism in 1917..."
(from http://www.debates.org/pages/trans88c.html)
It had been perfectly set up for him by Brit Hume, who was on the interviewer panel, and who lobbed an expectations-based softball.
I hadn't occurred to me that Palin might not want to name 'liberal' publications, for fear of antagonizing her base; actually, I doubt that she reads such things anyway.
It had occurred to me that she might avoid mentioning the extremist publications she apparently has to hand on her desk, for fear of scaring off everyone else.
Or president? "
Let's never forget that Karl Rove said of George Bush that here was a man who he could MAKE president, not here was a man who should be president.
Maybe Sarah does read - she just had difficulty remembering the talking points on what she's supposed to tell the "average Joe" she reads.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kkGnfwzT1g
Not expecting the question she was.
I know people who don't read ANYTHING! My parents had nothing resembling a book in the entire house when I was growing up. I had to steal the 'Readers Digest Condensed Books' from my grand parents. We did finally get a hand-me-down encyclopedia set and I devoured it. They pitched them after I moved out. My house is filled with books. I love my books. They are the fuel of my imagination.
I remember being asked, on the spot at a meeting what magazines and periodicals I read. I thought about it and the person asking made a joke about me not reading anything to which I said that I was trying to figure out which ones would be appropriate to mention in the current context. I then rattled off a whole list of journals and magazines that I read at the time. People were impressed and the jokester was smacked down.
I would have freaked if she said that she read 'The Nation'. I seriously doubt that she runs that deep...
Thank god for Jack Cafferty, et.al., and all of you.
I have clients that I visit and someone was singing 'Barack the magic negro' last week...
I commented that 'Some people never grow up' and was slammed with the 'Yeah, I guess some people never do'.
Yeah. I'm the infant...
She may receive summaries like these, and go over them in detail and not make the names of any publications trip off her tongue, under the pressure of Katie Couric. (shudder)
Or she may receive summaries, and they sit, piling up on a corner of her desk, as she reads The New American, or just hangs out with her staff. How she spends her time as executive is a pretty interesting object of curiosity. The same for the others, but still.
Haydee Pelosi
Nice work.
Sarah preferred nonfiction to the Nancy Drew books that her classmates were reading. In junior high school, Heather [another sister] � a year older in school�often enlisted Sarah's help with book reports. "She was such a bookworm. Whenever I was assigned to read a book, she'd already read it," Heather said.
Sarah's thirst for knowledge was nurtured in a household that emphasized the importance of education. There was never any question that all the Heath kids would go to college. With her love for newspapers and current events, Sarah majored in journalism and minored in political science. Her brother, like their father, became a teacher. Heather works for an advertising firm. Molly is a dental hygienist. "
from Kaylene Johnson's biography, 'Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment Upside Down,' (excerpt linked from barnesandnoble.com)
(It seems weird to be responding to my own initials.)
I'm not familiar with that book, or the author - her qualifications, previous publications, or relationship with Palin. But, assuming this is true, what do you think caused her to be unable to name a single newspaper or magazine in response to the question?
Did she just suffer brain-freeze? Was she afraid her answer would not be acceptable? Was she too stuffed with talking points to answer a question having to do with herself?
The debate did not reassure me; she still seemed to be a person able to parrot memorized phrases, but not able to formulate ideas from her own thinking.
Am I mistaken?