Palin Tells Debunked Teleprompter Tale

September 15, 2008, 9:18 pm
Palin Tells Debunked Teleprompter Tale

Elizabeth Williamson reports from Canton, Ohio on the presidential campaign.

“Country Club First” read a lonely protestor’s sign, lampooning the McCain campaign’s Country First mantra, as the Sarah Palin motorcade swung past. On Monday afternoon Gov. Palin and her entourage tooled through neighborhoods still without power in storm-stricken Stark County, Ohio, where she attended a fundraiser at the Brookside Country Club.

The governor’s first “funder” raised just under $1 million. Gov. Palin raised questions among the traveling press — confined under police guard for most of her three-hour visit inside a club boardroom — by telling her patrons the Tricky Tale of the Teleprompter Triumph.

As recorded by a reporter allowed to observe the 35-minute fundraiser appearance, this was the first time Gov. Palin herself relayed the story of how a fouled-up teleprompter forced her to ad-lib big swaths of her acclaimed acceptance speech at the Republican Convention Sept. 3.

But that story has been largely debunked. Reporters who saw the equipment that night say –and the party has not denied — that any teleprompter issue was minor at most. In the days after the event it was touted — on a hush-hush, off the record basis — by top Republicans as a way to show how swift-thinking is their newest star, despite her avoidance of any and all unscripted moments on the trail.

Gov. Palin’s telling was a Canton crowd-pleaser: “There Ohio was right out in front, right in front of me. The teleprompter got messed up, I couldn’t follow it, and I just decided I’d just talk to the people in front of me,” she said. “It was Ohio.”

Like the Alaska jet put on eBay and her pit-bull opposition to pork like the Bridge to Nowhere, the T.T. of the T.T. is great theater, but not quite, not entirely, true.

 

She's a pathological liar: a perfect fit for that ticket. Her first speech was a crowd-pleaser by all accounts but she's such a lightweight in actuality that she has to try to come off like Wonder Woman, claiming she was adlibbing, not reading.

The Lower 49 voters aren't as fascinated as Alaskans with Palin (none of us are getting oil royalty checks, just in case you Republicans haven't figured that out) so we're a lot more likely to call bullshit, especially when she and McBush won't stop shoveling it.

 

You aren't getting oil royalty checks because the drilling bill the democrats just passed DOESN'T allow the states to share in the revenues.

 

We're not getting oil royalty checks because they wouldn't make sense: We're talking about the difference between 6 hundred thousand people and 3 hundred million.

You can do the math, right?