Sarah's not as skilled at the dodge
The other three are much more evasive, but just more experienced at hiding from the voter, according the the Atlanta Journal Constitution.- Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has gotten the most heat for being evasive in this season of political debates, but new research suggests that the contrast between her and the other top-of-the-ticket candidates has less to do with her lack of responsiveness than with the three senators’ skill at dodging questions without seeming to.
- "Voters say they prefer candid politicians, but the experiments suggest politicians may pay a higher price for intellectual honesty than dishonesty.
“When (Palin) acknowledged the question and said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ it was intellectually honest, but it alerted people that she was not going to answer the question,”
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But why didn't she want to talk about it? It's one thing to say, "I don't know," which I wish Biden would do more often instead of BSing an answer. But Palin rarely is willing to say "I don't know" -- the only time I have seen her do it is when Couric asked her to give an example of her running mate's advocating a regulation, and Couric wouldn't be satisfied with dodging the question.
True intellectual honesty is being able to admit what you don't know. If someone asked me to talk about U.S. intervention in Darfur, I'd have to admit that I am extremely uninformed on the subject of military logistics and, off the top of my head, don't even know all the points at which we could stage such an intervention because I don't know Africa's geography well. The only thing I could talk about was whether I thought such an intervention was morally good, politically palatable, likely to be effective in stopping the killing and displacement of people, etc. These are subjects on which I still wouldn't claim expertise, but I know enough about them to state an opinion with some basis in fact. (For example, I spent some time studying Sudan's history in a college seminar several years ago, but I've never even played Diplomacy so my knowledge of military logistics really is very bad.)
With Palin on every subject except pipelines and Alaskan ethics reform, it's impossible to tell whether she is as ignorant as I am about logistics, or as layperson knowledgeable as I am about Sudan's overall history and political tensions, because she just won't answer. She's evidently not even knowledgeable about federal political ethics reform, or she could have told Couric that McCain championed campaign finance reform.
I think it's great that Palin knows two subjects well that are important to her current job, governor of Alaska. However, I am alarmed by the prospect of her trying to learn everything she should know about the world today in a matter of four months. She has been so focused on the things that are important to Alaska, she admits that she has paid very little attention to the outside world -- she wasn't following the war in Iraq.
If like me she had taken a lot of interest in the buildup to the war, she would have known that the Iraq war was justified on a *preventive*, not preemptive basis (the theory she described herself as holding, that we couldn't invade until an imminent threat, is actually preemption and NOT what we did in Iraq). She would have known that when Gibson asked about Israel's bombing an Iranian nuclear reactor, the "we can't second guess" goes against what Reagan did when Israel blew up Iraq's reactor in 1981, killing a French engineer. (This being of course when we were semi-allied with Iraq against a newly theocratic Iran.)
I didn't study any of this stuff and it's never been necessary for my job -- it's just what you pick up when you are interested in the world around you rather than being a specialist focused solely on the subjects that are immediately useful to you.
Sarah's interviews by the media have been edited, and they try to trap and trick her because of their support for BO. You are quite logical and coherent, but perhaps facing Katie Couric and Charlie's scowls, you might slip up on a word or two. I personally think, Obama, who actually is running for president (she isn't), is terribly disjointed and stammers off teleprompter yet even conservative columnists swoon because he writes and speechifies well. Doesn't impress me, but your writing does. You should have your own blog--comments as lengthy as yours don't work well because of short attention spans.
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