Newt Gingrich
If you think reporters have been rough on Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, here’s what former House speaker Newt Gingrich thinks of what the McCain campaign did to her.
“I have no idea why they decided why they ought to start with Charlie Gibson and Katy Couric. It just strikes me as suicidal.” Gingrich says that may go down as a big mistake for the McCain campaign. “These are tough, national, professionals. Who are both liberal.”
But what Gingrich is omitting is that in between the two network interviews, was a long session on the Fox network with Hannity and Colmes. That interview was so filled with softballs many discounted it. It didn’t do Palin any good either.
“The fact is, they should have started out with friendly media. They should have started out with local media.”
He’s absolutely right. Getting Sarah Palin comfortable in an interview setting was needed. But not because she can’t express herself. Nor is the fact she was not used to TV cameras. She had a been a small market TV sportscaster. That is a job that requires some skill at public speaking. Her beauty pageant experience helps there, too. I mean it.
But think about what happened to her. It was mid August when Palin first realized there was a possibility of joining the McCain ticket. Things happened in a stunning fashion. She went from a fairly routine life to madness.
Crowds, bodyguards, cameras, surrounded her. In the midst of it all, she had to help her family adjust to this. She had to shift from full time governor to full time national candidate. She had a large encyclopedia of national and world affairs to learn within days.
In the midst of all this, one of the few things she was relatively comfortable with, public speaking, was frozen for three weeks.
“They should have taken her to local interviews all over the country. which all of them would have been relatively favorable . Because local reporters would have been actually curious about her”, said Gingrich.
He’s right. Palin would have been on the receiving end of a lot of easy questions. She could have hit the morning TV news shows. Not Good Morning American nor Today, but the local shows. The campaign calls up a highly rated local morning news show and offers up the freshly minted Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin. Can you imagine any local morning producer turning that down? (Besides Air American and MSNBC)
The way they campaigns do this is they’ll place the candidate in a room lit for TV, or even a formal studio. They’ll book a series of interviews. They are usually five to seven minutes long. That’s enough time to feel like the candidate is having a chat with the anchor, but not long enough to get into a series of in-depth questions and answers.
The rest of Palin’s day could have been consumed by those joint appearances with John McCain and reading and studying the intricacies of foreign policy, the welfare system, and who knows what else.
But they didn’t do that. So after all of the initial praise for Sarah Barracuda, the McCain campaign froze her. She didn’t do well in a couple of the big interviews. interviews, by the way that did not have to be the ‘events’ they turned out to be. Doing many interviews dilutes the impact of doing a just few interviews.
So, when she tanks on the big ones, she gains the rap Democrats tried unsuccessfully to pin on her from the start. That’s she’s not ready.
I believe there was an awful lot of politics in the Palin pick. And there was very little Country First. The base may love her and her positions, but Middle America, according to the polls, have their doubts.
Gingrich probably sums one Republican perspective the best, ” I have no particular concern about her as a potential vice president. But I think the way she was introduced was destructive.”
