September 4, 2008 5:07 No Questions, Please. We'll Tell You What You Need To Know. Posted by Jay Carney | Comments (141) | Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Email This According to Nicole Wallace of the McCain campaign, the American people don't care whether Sarah Palin can answer specific questions about foreign and domestic policy. According to Wallace -- in an appearance I did with her this morning on Joe Scarborough's show -- the American people will learn all they need to know (and all they deserve to know) from Palin's scripted speeches and choreographed appearances on the campaign trail and in campaign ads. Here's the exchange: Wallace's bash-the-media exercise has its merits as a campaign tactic. It certainly rallies the base. But the base won't lift McCain to 50% in November. More importantly, in her smug dismissal of the media's role in asking questions of the candidates, Wallace was really showing contempt not for reporters, but for voters. I bet there are a lot of undecided voters out there who were intrigued by Sarah Palin last night, but who don't yet know enough about her -- what she believes, what she knows -- to be comfortable with the idea of her as vice president of the United States. It's important to them to know if Palin can handle herself in an environment that isn't controlled and sanitized by campaign image makers and message mavens. Maybe she can, maybe she can't. As far as Wallace is concerned, it's none of their -- or your -- business. http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/09/no_questions_please_were.html
The self-styled "pitbull with lipstick" is a delicate little flower who can't stand up to any real public scrutiny whatsoever. The hypocrites of the right refuse to acknowledge and the slackwits of the right are incapable of recognizing the contradiction right in front of their faces. So far, it's Republicanism as expected.
I would say she is doing just fine doing things her way. The mainstream media way overestimate how much the public relies on them or trusts them. They have already lost their credibility regarding Palin. I don't blame her for refusing to give interviews to people who think her 17 year old daughter's pregnancy is relevant. Any interview with the "mainstream", ie leftwing, media will inevtiably degenerate into a game of gotcha, with them trying to stump her on arcane factual questions in a manner they would never dream of doing with Obama or Biden.
THE ROAD TO THE WHITE HOUSE: HOCKEY MOM TRUMPETS HER CREDENTIALS Republican Barracuda bites back: After five days of scrutiny, Palin lashes out at Washington elites and media critics BY JOHN IBBITSON "ST. PAUL, MINN. -- Sarah Barracuda can take it, and as it turns out, she can give it back, too. Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (the above was her nickname on her high school basketball team) has endured five remorseless days of media reports exposing her family secrets and seeking to undermine her reputation as a crusading reformer in Alaska. Last night was her turn. In a tough, uncompromising speech before a wildly enthusiastic Republican National Convention, Ms. Palin blithely melded the media and Washington's power elites into a single, malignant foe, and then declared war on them, or it. "I'm not a member of the permanent political establishment," she told the delegates at the Xcel Energy Center, "And I've learned quickly, these past few days, that if you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone." Whether it should be seen as fighting back or digging in, Ms. Palin's address is part of a co-ordinated counterattack by the Republicans. They've had it with the media, and they don't plan to take it any more. "This vetting controversy is a faux media scandal designed to destroy the first female Republican nominee for vice-president of the United States," senior strategist Steve Schmidt said in a statement, "who has never been a part of the old boys' network that has come to dominate the news establishment in this country." "The McCain campaign will have no further comment about our long and thorough process," he went on. "This nonsense is over." At the convention itself, delegates echoed the chagrin of the party leadership. "She's a woman, and she's a Republican and she's a conservative, and that really bugs the media," said Steve Roberts, an Iowa delegate who is also a member of the Republican National Committee. "The idea that any woman could be a Republican and a conservative is for them some kind of violation." "I can't tell you the number of times I've been asked the question: 'Can she take care of her family and do this job?' " fumed Dora Kingsley, of California. "I haven't heard a male candidate asked that question in, wait, ever." "There is absolutely a liberal bias in the news media," said Dale Craft, of Maine. "... anybody with any intelligence at all sees that. It's blatantly obvious." Those delegates got the speech they wanted, a frank and tough address that blended small-town autobiography with pointed jabs at Democratic nominee Barack Obama. "From the inside no family ever seems typical," Ms. Palin told them "That's how it is with us. Our family has the same ups and downs as any other - the same challenges and the same joys." She lambasted Mr. Obama for saying last spring, in a talk he thought was not being recorded, that economic frustration led "bitter" rural voters to "cling to guns or religion." "We tend to prefer candidates who don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco," she said. And she lampooned his oratory: "Listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state senate," she said. "This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word 'victory' except when he's talking about his own campaign." At times, her delivery resembled more that of a small-town mayor than a vice-presidential candidate. But the Republican crowd ate it up. The media frenzy surrounding Ms. Palin has been extreme, though no more than that which accompanied the imbroglio over Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's association with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. It is the product of a disturbing shift in how the media cover presidential elections. The proliferation of bloggers, Web-based journals and online videos drives the agenda. They broke the Jeremiah Wright affair, the controversy over Mr. Obama's "bitter voters" remarks, and the revelation that Ms. Palin's teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock. These revelations, invariably accompanied by accusations, commentary and false rumours, are picked up by the cable news networks, and then repeated in newspapers "now that it's out there." The overall calibre of commentary declines, for which all of us in this craft are responsible. That said, the media storm generated by Republican presidential nominee John McCain's choice of Ms. Palin as running mate may well have done the Republicans some good. It remains to be seen how the news has influenced the all-important independent voters on whom this election hinges. But it has certainly energized the social and religious base of the Republican Party. Ms. Palin's impeccable anti-abortion, pro-gun credentials have been affirmed, and often criticized, by the mainstream press, which the Christian right loathes. These God-and-guns conservatives have always been leery of Mr. McCain, whom they see as dangerously permissive on social issues. But with his choice of Mr. Palin, and his staunch defence of her this week, they once again have a candidate they can believe in. "I am now more confident about the McCain candidacy than I am about President Bush," said Tony Perkins, president of the Christian, conservative Family Research Council, in a newspaper interview. "The campaign has courted conservatives aggressively, and it has turned around remarkably in just the last few weeks." Ms. Palin also had a cutting riposte in her speech for the Democrats, who claim she is manifestly unqualified for the office of vice-president. Alluding to Mr. Obama's first job in Chicago, she said: "Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities.""
Ah there's that rightwing revisionism I was expecting. Yeah nobody in the media has ever asked tough questions of Obama or Biden, we never heard about Reverend Wright, Joe's plagiarism, yada yada. It's all a dream, folks, you just imagined there were 25 Democratic primary debates and many months of press scrutiny before, during and since.
A VP who refuses to give interviews looks pretty bad. Whatever she's hiding can't be kept under wraps for long.
C'mon, we were all here while this was developing. The mainstream media never scrutinized Obama - it was Sean Hannity (Fox cable news journal) who first interviewed Wright (4/07) and showed America his church's racist tendencies. Sean was attacked repeatedly by the media for several months until Politico's journalist obtained that famous DVD that became a sensation, but still not in the mainstream media. Much later, George Stephanopoulos (ABC) asked Obama some related questions and almost got fired. At that point, Wright came out himself and impressed everyone with his anti-American "style" so that, finally, Obama repudiated him. Biden's story is different - his stupid mistake was so public that it backfired on him relatively easily and was out of the 1988 race.
I would like someone to ask Sarah Palin not about her teenage daughter pregnancy, because that happens to familys. But the media uses that pregnancy both ways. One, to highlight her daughters choice to keep her child, (to appeal to the christian right( and that is very admirable of her in my opinion, but I would not judge her harshly if she chose to not keep her baby either) It is a family matter. But then the media chooses to appease the christian right again by highlighting that they think the left media is using the pregnanacy of Palin's daughter for the democratic gain. So really the left and right are using the pregnancy to their advantage for their side. I would like someone to ask her why she fired the librarian who did not agree with Sarah Palin on banning some books from the library. And ask Sarah Palin what she fears if people read some books, and which books, and why.