Vice-presidential tea leaves

Finally caught the Palin debutante speech from the GOP convention, and I have to admit, I just don’t get it. Something about her speaking style put me back into a high school auditorium listening to a lecture about dental hygiene.

The GOP faithful are treating her as the second coming of the Virgin Mary (and she’s got the edge on Mary, with two immaculate conceptions in one year). So far the selection of Vice President Fátima has indeed magically erased the memory of McCain as a weak candidate. Already some Democrats are gulping Xanax and waiting to see how we fuck it up this time. Really, we’re the party of the Grinch Who Gave Away Christmas.

We’re all reduced to reading the tea leaves about Sarah Palin, because 99.78% of us had never heard of her before Labor Day (and the fact that that’s not telling us something is what causes me to reach for the Xanax). We’re debating earmarks on bridges and whether she tried to ban books in a local library, as the major ingredients of a national debate. Why? Because those are the largest things we have to talk about in figuring her out.

A few more leaves for the tea, courtesy of Talking Points Memo:

Here’s the interesting bit that I had missed until I saw that report: Alaskans find the phrase “Bridge to Nowhere” to be offensive. Huh. With 10 seconds’ consideration, it occurred to me: of course they do. It’s the same way I feel whenever someone refers to Philadelphia dismissively in comparison to New York.

Yet the governor of Alaska immediately uses that rhetoric as soon as she’s on nationwide camera, and the hell with how it plays at home. She might publicly despise the Washington insider media, but she’ll happily play with their tropes when it suits her. I’m willing to call that a character issue; she can lie about what she did with 200 million federal dollars while at the same time not demeaning the people who put her on the national stage. But she doesn’t.

More tea leaves: as I write this, the first clips are circulating of the Charlie Gibson interview with Palin (supplanting People magazine as the most incisive news gatherers to have access to her). It starts off with this excerpt:

GIBSON: Can you look the country in the eye and say “I have the experience and I have the ability to be not just vice president, but perhaps president of the United States of America?”

PALIN: I do, Charlie, and on January 20, when John McCain and I are sworn in, if we are so privileged to be elected to serve this country, we’ll be ready. I’m ready.

GIBSON: And you didn’t say to yourself, “Am I experienced enough? Am I ready? Do I know enough about international affairs? Do I — will I feel comfortable enough on the national stage to do this?”

PALIN: I didn’t hesitate, no.

GIBSON: Didn’t that take some hubris?

PALIN: I — I answered him yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink.

Now, you’ve got two ways of looking at that statement: either it’s admirable self-confidence, or it’s terrifying overconfidence. I’d prefer to hear something which perhaps would be more truthful, such as, “Like most of America, I was surprised to be asked, and the enormity of it didn’t immediately set in. But I realized I could do it when John and I talked about it.”

The problem with overconfidence is obvious, but it’s even worse when it’s tested in a state of national crisis — which would be pretty much the definition of any ascension of Sarah Palin to the presidency before 2017. It’s what scared me about George W. Bush on 9/11 — no, not The Pet Goat clip, I didn’t see that until years later, but rather his noontime speech to the nation with that deer-in-the-headlights million-yard stare and the talk of crusade.

So if I saw that in Palin, I’d be concerned. And I am concerned. Again, this is tea leaf tasseomancy, but check out this clip in which, as TPM points out, Palin is caught with no idea what she’s talking about:

It doesn’t bother me that she didn’t know the term; I think I’ve heard “the Powell Doctrine” more often than I’ve heard “the Bush Doctrine” in the last eight years. What bothers me is her instinctive response to the question. Don’t just listen to what she says; that’s the part that’s prepared. Check out what she does. Note her posture at the beginning of the clip:

And about halfway through:

Her shoulders hunch. Her arm is raised and held in front of her torso. In her answer, you can see her lips purse. These are classic limbic system signals for “I wasn’t ready for this and now I’m afraid of screwing it up.” A confident person would remain physically relaxed during these questions, regardless of what she actually said. You can watch her try to regain her footing, literally; as she answers Gibson’s questions, she waves her foot in time with the key words of her statement, probably the ones she thinks put her back in control of the interview.

But her body language remains crouched against attack. She’s not confident, on a level that goes beyond coaching. You can’t coach for this.

So we have a candidate who wants to project the image of perfect confidence, but can be thrown off by a question she can’t answer. I’m calling her on it because the language of “blink” tries to imply instinctive confidence. That’s pretty much both the image and the shortcomings we have in the White House now, and in my view it was that fear of failure that psychologically helped lead to seven years of political swaggering and military force.

Thankfully, we’re at least two major events from the concern of watching President Palin face that kind of crucible. Even so, I trust this kind of read more than the next two months of airbrushed pablum I’m going to be fed, and I’m quite comfortable saying that I’ll be scared shitless if she finds herself behind the desk of the Oval Office.

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