PR-Bridge

Rather than rallying around Sarah Palin, the soccer moms of the world should be uniting against the media’s portrayal of her as their unofficial leader. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen: Sarah, I know many smart, engaging, intelligent soccer moms, and you’re not those soccer moms.

I cannot imagine what the Hillary Clinton voters see in Palin other than that she’s female. They are as opposite in worldview, education, and lifestyle as two people can be. The idea that women voters are going to automatically flock to McCain/Palin because of her presence on the ticket seems to mock the intelligence of female voters.

The media fallout post-debate is that Palin “held her own.” According to the Chicago Tribune: “She displayed the political strength we saw in her address to the Republican National Convention. She knows how to speak to America’s heart.”

Were the editorial board members listening to the same debate the rest of us were? ”Political strength” is not a phrase that most people would use to describe that show, but then one is hit with the AP report of a post-debate poll: 

“A CNN poll of 611 adult Americans who watched the encounter found 51 percent thought Biden did the better job in the debate, while 36 percent said Palin did. But an overwhelming 84 percent said Palin did better than expected.”

One line of thought here is that the expectations for Palin, after the dreadful performances in her Gibson and Couric interviews, were so low that she could do “better than expected” by merely speaking in semi-coherent sentences. But, did nearly 4 in 10 people really believe that she did better in the debate than Biden? 4 in 10! What about the other 13 percent. They couldn’t even decide? Results like this make me glad commentators like my friend Rick Shenkman are out there providing insight, like that found in his new book: Just How Stupid Are We?

One must wonder what the public finds so appealing about Palin. I heard one potential voter tell NPR that he liked her because she understood the middle class, since she was part of it, unlike the rest of the candidates. This is a plausible reason for the attraction. Another notion is that voters do not like “intellectuals,” an argument made so well by historian Richard Hofstadter many decades ago.

What scares many people, however, is Palin’s utter lack of knowledge of current events or anything outside her dogmatic worldview. And, at this point, there is plenty of ammunition for those who are fearful. In a recent Newsweek column, Fareed Zakaria, a really smart commentator discussed Palin’s utter lack of qualification for national office. He astutely points to her “vapid” answers to Couric’s questions, many of which were “nonsense.”

Zakaria quotes at length Palin’s answer to a question about the $700 billion bailout. In reponse to the question, Palin said, “I, like every American I’m speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the–it’s got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it on the right track…”

Is this the kind of blathering we applaud? Would anyone grading Palin’s presentation in a high school or college class give her passing marks?

Yet, here we are about a month away from one of the most important presidential elections in history with potential voters jumping on the McCain/Palin bandwagon. Palin seems like the tens of millions of working and overworked mothers/women in America. She litters her speech with soccer momish phrases like, “you betcha,” sports a perky pulled-back hairstyle and funky glasses, and has that same strange middle America inflection in her voice, like one uses in pleading with children to clean up their toys people understand. But none of that makes her qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. Haven’t the last eight years shown us the challenges of an underwhelming chief executive?