The Problem of Low Expectations

Only really low expectations, or the extemporaneous regret of her most fervent critics, could have led to the consensus that Palin didn’t do so badly in her debate with Biden.

By any mild standards, she was terrible. And not because she spoke with an accent, expressed too many colloquialisms or mispronounced “nuclear.” Because her answers were so obviously memorized—a small number of slogans surrounded by disconnected phrases—and, on various occasions, she switched around the order of the components of the phrases. An example was when she said that it didn’t matter if “climate change affected human activity.”

When cornered, Palin resorted to winks, smiles and other vulgar coquette gestures that must have led to some sort of fascination from the male public—the green line on CNN, which measured the reaction of male independent voters from Ohio, would go up. But the women, represented by the yellow line, were not as fooled.

It was already the end of the debate and the spectators and journalists must have been tired, but at least one of Palin’s answers was in the line of her incomprehensible declarations to Katie Couric on CBS.

It was when she had to speak about the executive powers of the vice presidency, which were arbitrarily amplified by Dick Cheney during the Bush administration. When asking the question, the moderator referred to the “Unitary Executive” doctrine, defended by ultra-conservative judges and embraced by the Bush administration, according to which the president can supervise and direct all the operations of the Executive branch, including the currently independent institutions, such as the Federal Commerce Commission and the SEC, the regulator of the markets. To critics, the doctrine risks the system of checks and balances between the presidency and the legislative branch of the United States.

Palin’s answer was caught by columnist Linda Hirshman, of The Nation, and shows that, just like she did not know what the “Bush Doctrine” on national defense was, she also had no idea as to what the moderator was talking about. And any American politician who had followed the hearings of Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, in 2006, would know that “Unitary Executive” was one of their principal topics.

Palin’s answer is below:

“Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president’s agenda in that position. Yeah, so I do agree with him that we have a lot of flexibility in there, and we’ll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation. And it is my executive experience that is partly to be attributed to my pick as V.P. with McCain, not only as a governor, but earlier on as a mayor, as an oil and gas regulator, as a business owner. It is those years of experience on an executive level that will be put to good use in the White House also.”