Friday, October 03, 2008

Peggy Noonan Has To Be Kidding Me.

According to Peggy Noonan, who had been critical of the Sarah Palin choice until her performance in last night’s debate, the words:
"Nice to meet you. Hey, can I call you Joe?"
were all she needed to hear from Sarah Palin to change her mind.

So I suppose I could say:
Nice to meet you. Hey, can I call you Peg?”
and Peggy Noonan would hand me the keys to her car, her house and her ATM pin number. Because that’s exactly what we are doing when we elect someone. We give them the keys to the house and everything else.

Peggy Noonan went on to write:
The whole debate was about Sarah Palin. She is not a person of thought but of action. Interviews are about thinking, about reflecting, marshaling data and integrating it into an answer. Debates are more active, more propelled—they are thrust and parry. They are for campaigners. She is a campaigner. Her syntax did not hold, but her magnetism did. At one point she literally winked at the nation.

Actually, the whole debate was about the question of Sarah Palin’s competence. A question that went unanswered as did many important questions from Gwen Ifill. But Peggy Noonan’s cool with that. Apparently the way someone says something is more important than what it means or whether it has any substance or meaning at all.

There is a big difference between responding to a question and answering a question: You can respond to a question with a story; you can respond to a question by lying; you can respond to a question by changing the subject; you can even respond to a question by saying “I don’t know”
-but you can only answer a question with the truth.

We got no answers from Sarah Palin last night, only responses.

Last’s night’s debate was also about a question for me: How much more mediocrity can the nation stand?

Noonan mused that Sarah Palin’s responses were like an informercial: “But it was an effective infomercial.” This is ridiculous. I don’t buy it. Maybe the Republican Party thinks Americans are too dumb to know a weak and tenuous series of rationalizations when we read them in the press, or maybe they’re just betting we are.
-SJ

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