We’ve been chatting on Twitter about the Newsweek Palin cover. Consensus is that it was a really stupid cover choice by Newsweek. The defenses I’ve read online for Newsweek have been pretty week. The best one, so far has come from Lindsay Beyerstein:

There’s nothing scandalous about Palin showing some skin, or wearing Spandex. But this cover image is deliberately styled to make the then-governor of Alaska look like a Vargas pinup girl. Unlike the other images in the series, this one references her status as a governor. As she poses like a swimsuit model, she’s clutching one icon of political power–the Blackberry–and leaning on another. The theme isn’t Sarah Palin, athlete. The theme is Sarah Palin, Sexy Governor. (As in: one of those dime store Halloween costumes: sexy cop, sexy ladybug, sexy sanitation worker…)

Predictably, Palin complained that Newsweek’s use of the image was sexist. Yes, the image was plucked from its original context. The whole point was that the picture was appalling it its original context. Newsweek is holding this picture up to the world and asking: Who does this?

My only problem with this explanation is that neither of the stories that made up the cover package actually addressed this point. The choice of the photograph for the cover would’ve made sense if Beyerstein’s piece was the cover story. But it wasn’t, leaving the new picture plucked out of its original context and really kind of dropped into no real context. It’s just there to catch the eye which, I guess, is what covers are meant to do.

Granted, the other pics inside apparently didn’t help Newsweek’s case any.

I’d rather see more people pay attention to what she’s actually saying about policy. Read stuff like that and it’s scary that she could’ve been VP. (make sure you read the first comment to understand how idiotic her statement was)

Here’s the analogy that keeps coming up in my head as I try to summarize my thoughts.

Politics is like chess, especially at the presidential level. It takes skill to plan out the next 18-24 months in the future, especially as other potential candidates & their allies are all jostling and repositioning to make themselves look better. Good “players” recognize not only where they need to get to, but the steps required to get there. The next move is as important as the strategy for three moves down the road.

Bad players, on the other hand, tend to focus on the grand strategy and lose sight of the next few moves. That’s how you can four-move checkmate an opponent at the start of a game. They’re too busy thinking about a complicated opening or their middle game while you’re actually checkmating them.

Perhaps this is an esoteric analogy, but Palin’s move seems like that novice chess mistake. No matter what the actual reason, she’s missed the whole “quitter” angle. It’s a big mistake. The ads for the Republican primary practically write themselves. I can’t imagine Romney is going to back down from that fight or that some deal can be struck that puts her at the top of the ticket unopposed. There are too many competing voices and egos, as there always are, in Presidential politics.

No matter what is really going on here, her ambitions are toast. She’s hurt her own chances as a candidate. She’s diminished her ability to help other candidates in close races (key part of the endorsement quid pro quo at this level). I can’t see anything that gets better because of this, and I’ve tried hard to look at this from her perspective.

I keep imagining the following scenario playing out at Team Palin HQ:

1. Palin believes she has a legitimate shot at 2012, she knows she’s popular now, and therefore can create/cement a movement around her right now. Two more years in Alaska won’t get her any more visibility but will likely diminish it.
2. Some opportunity has presented itself to allow her to focus on that movement: a book deal, tv/radio gig, etc. This is the “higher calling” she feels is a must do, because it enables point 1 which means she can “save America.”
3. If she does this while being governor, she’ll be criticized for ignoring the work of being governor.
4. Ergo, she resigned to preempt that criticism so she can be free to pursue this opportunity.

That’s the most Palin friendly explanation I can see at this point. Just to get there, I’m conceding her claims of patriotism driving this (it wouldn’t be the first time she’s confused ambition and patriotism), and conceding that there’s no scandal. Even in this frame, nothing else makes sense.

So I keep coming back to that analogy: she’s going to get four-moved. She just hasn’t realized it yet.

I’m surprised at the recent spate of OMG, Sarah Palin is popular on Google stories. The fact that she’s on the leaderboard for most searches in 2008 should hardly be surprising. She was a relative unknown. Like most people, I went “who the heck is Sarah Palin” when she was announced. It shouldn’t be surprising (or an indication of her intrinsic popularity or whatever) that her name rose the fastest. In fact, it’s an indication of how ridiculous the selection of Palin was. The world did a collective WTF? and hit Google to find out more about this person.

Yet, Newsweek’s subhead is “Sarah Palin may not have won the election, but she’s a fave of Google users.”

Sigh…

For the record, I’m usually not in my pajamas and I don’t blog from my parent’s basement (they don’t have one). And Sarah Palin is still an idiot. Just sayin’

My fundamental problem with the choice of Sarah Palin, and really what the McCain campaign has become over the last few weeks, is embodied in this clip. Their speeches are all derisiveness and snark, very little substance. No explanation of why this fruit fly research wasn’t worth it or why the earmarks process shouldn’t make sense. This was a prepared speech, by the way, so it was written into the speech that way. I doubt she even knew what the study was about.

By the way, if you’re not watching Maddow, you should. She’s funny and actually lets her guests, not all of whom agree with her, talk rather than shouting over or at them.

(last note: to be fair, the earmark Palin is criticizing is an agricultural study, not a genetic one, to ward off damage to olive crops, but I suspect that she didn’t know that as she was reading off the teleprompter… I realize I’m hypothesizing here, but based on her previous record, I’m feeling good about it)

Update: it occurs to me that perhaps the title is in the opposite order it should be… but whatever.

This was pretty much what I expected. I’ve been saying on Twitter (you’re following me, right?) that this is all Biden’s to lose. If she didn’t sound like a moron, she would win. She didn’t sound like a moron, so I stand by what I said: she wins.

I think her strategy worked well for her, by only staying with her talking points no matter the question she was given. I think if you didn’t know about the index card strategy, she probably came off pretty well. Regardless, it was a smart approach to the rules of the debate. She would just ignore the question and ask her own. As they’re saying on MSNBC, she asked to respond to topics that hadn’t even come up yet. The format worked well for her in that way. She was able to control the format, which kept her from having to, well, “think” on the fly. Well executed, quite frankly.

I wonder what the Couric interviews would’ve been like if she would’ve been able to bring her index cards?

Of course, it was an entirely substance free debate from Palin, and she repeated the same lies that McCain got called out for during the last debate. One wonders if non-political junkies know about the lies enough to dismiss them. I can only hope.

The beginning of this clip make the actual clip of Tina Fey as Palin I posted earlier (still at left at the time I posted this) even funnier.

The funny thing is that they used a bunch of lines straight from Palin’s Couric interview.

Sarah Palin is a train wreck. I don’t know if she’s just unintelligent, a poor speaker, or trying so hard to not say anything stupid that she’s sounding like an idiot. Whatever the reason, she is a national embarrassment. No wonder they’re trying to postpone or reschedule the VP debates.

For those of you still not 100% sure who you’re voting for, just consider this decision. Choosing Sarah Palin was the height of political calculation and disregard for the nation. It was a bumper sticker move, just like so many of George W. Bush’s policies: toe the line on ideology, ignore the actual outcomes.

This simple reality, encapsulated in his choice of Sarah Palin and his grandstanding this week, is the simplest, most important reason to make sure John McCain isn’t the next President. Voting for him endorses this sort of ridiculous, reckless decision making.

Putting ideology over outcomes ends up costing you and your family actual dollars. If you thought inflation was bad already, wait until the government prints $750 billion. $5.50 for a gallon of milk, anyone?

By now, I’m sure most of you have seen this, but just in case you haven’t, here you go. There really is just so much that’s awesome and perfect about that skit that it’s hard to pick one moment. I happened to catch this live on Saturday and just got sucked in. The lesson here is that I need to watch more 30 Rock.

I almost spit up water at that one. Oh my. So funny and so very good.

Atrios makes my point in far fewer words. Somehow, I find it more effective the way he said it:

Economic theory looks a bit like this. Having basic understanding of the ownership of Fannie and Freddie 18 months or so into this housing/credit crisis and after a weekend of front page coverage of them… requires reading the damn newspaper.

Bet the McCain camp circles the wagons on this gaffe instead of saying oops and moving on…

What gets missed in all the Palin-mania is she is completely uninterested in the work involved for the top job. This is what I’ve been saying from the beginning. It’s not about experience or whatever but about temperament. I don’t have time today to really gather all the links with interviews and stuff of her past staff and folks in the Alaskan government who say she isn’t interested in the nuts and bolts of getting stuff done.

Instead, let me link to the one article that reminded me to write about this and make two simple points: Steve Benen highlights a report that Palin doesn’t know that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are GSE’s, in other words they’re private corporations that happen to be government sponsored/backed. They’re not a burden on taxpayers in that they don’t represent a budget line item unless they screw up.

So, my two points are this: I know that Fannie and Freddie are GSEs. I read about this stuff every day I have time outside of my day job. I don’t think I’m qualified to be on the Vice Presidential slot or President, and yet I know this because I actually give a damn. I think the minimum standard for the national ticket is that the candidates similarly give a damn.

Here’s my simple requirement for me to consider voting for a ticket: They must know more than I do about the issues that face the nation. Obama and Biden both know this stuff. McCain probably knows this stuff, but it’s unclear if he would admit it if it contradicts Republican mantras. Sarah Palin doesn’t and has shown no interest in getting this stuff right. This is just the latest example.

The second point is that in general our expectations of what it takes to be in the top job have come down greatly. George W. Bush was an underachiever in life, and he continued that track into his time in government. Sarah Palin is more similar to him than McCain, and that’s a terrible prospect.

People keep giving me grief about being unwilling to consider voting for Republicans. While not entirely true, I can’t vote for people that are unable to meet the simple standard of knowing more than me. This is their chosen vocation. They are CHOOSING to run for this office. It would be good if they showed some interest in the job rather than the fancy job title.

One of those mocking, derisive but ultimately silly attacks made by both Giuliani and Palin yesterday had to do with mocking Obama’s time as a community organizers. I’ve read many different posts today defending the work community organizers do but Obama, as you might expect, puts the right perspective on the issue. Steve Benen has more background.

(he slightly misspeaks at the start — it was 20 years ago, not 3).

As I mentioned on Twitter yesterday, I thought her speech was excellent for the base of the Republican party. It was sarcastic, snide, and dismissive about Obama in a very disrespectful way that tended to stay away from actual substance. It’s unclear to me how well this plays with those who are undecided or “sway-able” by personality politics likes this.

The other thing that struck me (also posted to Twitter last night, hint, hint) was the sheer volume of blatant lies and demagoguery in the speech. One thing about the Democratic convention was that Biden and Obama poked fun at McCain, disagreed with him, and said he didn’t get it without belittling McCain or the Republicans. Certainly, they’re capable of that and had some moments where they got a bit silly, so I’m not saying that the Democrats were paragons of virtue or anything.

The Dems just stayed away from the kind of rhetoric featured in the speeches given last night by Romney, Giuliani, and Palin. Romney set out to vilify entire groups of people, for example insinuating that Washington was liberal (that’ll be news to George W Bush and the filibusterin’ 49 R’s in the Senate) and that east coast elites mocked them (even though he is an east coast elite).

Palin, though, was the worst of the lot. Her speech, more than the others, was filled with the sort of lies that cannot be ignored. They’re not the typical campaign exaggerations but the kind of things you grew up learning as lying. I don’t have the time to really list them all out, but here are two links to folks that do. First, Hilzoy at the Washington Monthly goes through the big ones I noticed last night. Obama’s campaign released a far more detailed (and picky) set of fact checks last night as well. Hilzoy hits on the issue I think are most important, so I’d start there.

One final thing: this party has run Washington for over 8 years. They’ve had unilateral control over Congress and the White House and a friendly Supreme Court for most of that time, too. I can’t believe that they’re trying to run on the “Washington is not working” theme at the convention. Bill Clinton and Obama both hit on this last week. What we’ve seen over the last 7+ years is the result of Republican supply-side economics meeting reality. It’s the Republican policy platform for the last few decades and they finally got a chance to implement it. It’s why this country is where it is. Think about where fuel standards would be if Democrats were in Congress. Median incomes would be a real focus rather than top line corporate profits. The tax cut in 2001 would’ve at the very least given the same percentage reduction to everyone instead of knocking an extra few points off the top bracket, etc., etc., etc.