Relatedly, I was talking with colleagues this morning about Sarah Palin’s scheduled rollout of a health care plan and the difficulties of scheduling an event in Alaska that can be well-timed to get news coverage on the east coast. It was a reminder that a governor of Alaska will face some logistical hurdles in trying to remain in the national eye. I also suspect that needing to talk about how falling oil prices are causing economic harship will remind people that experience as the chief executive of an underpopulated petro-state has relatively little to do with big national issues.

Red State’s Erik Erikson plans a purge of those committing crimes against Palindom:

RedState is pleased to announce it is engaging in a special project: Operation Leper.

We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

So far, Steve Schmit, Mike Murphy, and Nichole Wallace are all on the leper list.

It’ll be interesting to see how she tries to keep her national profile up from the vantage point of Alaska.

“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”

Needless to say, there is no first amendment right to be immune from criticism. Not to be immune from criticism from Sara Palin, not to be immune from criticism from bloggers, and not to be immune from criticism from the mainstream media. There’s nothing remotely like that in the first amendment, and rightly so.

Lawrence Eagelburger is a rock-ribbed Republican, a McCain supporter, someone listed as a McCain adviser, etc. And he says this:

The remarks took place during an interview on National Public Radio that was, ironically, billed as “making the case” for a McCain presidency. Asked by the host whether Palin could step in during a time of crisis, Eagleburger reverted to sarcasm before leveling the harsh blow.

“It is a very good question,” he said, pausing a few seconds, then adding with a chuckle: “I’m being facetious here. Look, of course not.”

It’s all old hat at this point.

But here’s a different point. Recall when Palin was first picked? I recall reading at the time various dire warnings from hither and yon — from friends of mine, even — that liberals attacked her at our own peril . . . that the American people were secretly yearning to be led by a dim-witted, far-right, scandal-plagued first term governor of a weird state. What ever happened to that? I think it’s easy to overstate the role the disastrous Palin pick has played in creating John McCain’s problems, but I don’t see any way to deny that it’s been a net negative for exactly the reasons it seemed like a problematic choice on the day she was announced.

If Sarah Palin wants to bilk the RNC’s donors out of tens of thousands of dollars in designer clothes, that’s her business as far as I’m concerned. It does, however, certainly further complicate efforts to portray a woman with a six figure household income and a personal airplane as a simple country gal with working class tastes. Marc Ambinder reports that Republicans are none-too-happy with this turn:

There is already an attempt to blame the media — as in, the liberal media would have looked askance at Palin if she wasn’t clad in Neiman Marcus, but this won’t wash. Republicans, RNC donors and at least one RNC staff member have e-mailed me tonight to share their utter (and not-for-attribution) disgust at the expenditures.

This sort of spending is without precedent — the closest approximation for any campaign I’ve ever covered is make-up expenses for television interviews and commercial shoots — , and Schmitt’s weakly defensive response tonight indicates that the campaign is deeply embarrassed by it and has nothing to say in their defense. Spokespeople have clammed up, a sure sign that they’re trying to figure out who authorized the expenses and who knew about them. Did Palin wear all of the clothing? Where is it kept?

It seems like it shouldn’t be too hard to assess who authorized the expenses. Don’t people keep records of that kind of thing?

BENNETT: I don’t know which drives them more crazy. Let me give you three things that I think drives them crazy, and you don’t have to comment. That’s she’s very attractive. That she’s very competent or that she’s very happy. You know, as a human being.

DAVIS: Yeah, all of the above.

Rachel Maddow did a segment on this last night:

That’s via Jessica Valenti. The idea that feminists, like politically conscious people of all genders and ideological inclinations, might have substantive views on the issues that contradict Palin’s doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. But in general, women are more liberal than men. And John McCain is more conservative than most politicians and Palin’s record is considerably more conservative than McCains. There’s no great mystery here. And yet Davis and Bennett can’t help but compound their problems by suggesting that women are somehow incapable of reaching conclusions about politicians for any kind of real reasons — instead feminists just hate attractive women.

Normally a VP nominee would avoid contradicting the top of the ticket, but perhaps this is pre-positioning for 2012.

Brendan Nyhan writes:

It’s amusing to me that people think Sarah Palin is going to run for president in 2012 if McCain loses. Her favorable/unfavorable numbers in the new CBS/NYT poll are 32 percent favorable/41 percent unfavorable. That’s where Hillary Clinton and Al Gore were in early 2007 after 15+ years of negative press. By contrast, Palin has been in the public eye for less than two months. I find it hard to believe that GOP primary voters would see her as the person they think can defeat Barack Obama.

Maybe so. It’s striking to me, though, that explicit “electability” arguments don’t seem to feature heavily in GOP presidential primaries. This is a huge contrast from the Democratic side, where both the 2004 and 2008 primaries ended up showing a heavy focus on those questions. All signs are that a lot of conservatives like Palin just fine. If she can connect with a donor base, it seems to me that she’d be a reasonably strong primary contender. She’d have the leg up, meanwhile, of being better-known nationwide at this point than just about any other eligible Republican.

Marc Ambinder points to some Sarah Palin remarks in which she says “John McCain and I will protect the entitlement programs that Americans depend on – and above all, Social Security.” But it was just a few days ago that the McCain campaign decided that rather than raise taxes on health care, they wanted to save money by cutting spending on Medicare and Medicaid. In other words, the very entitlements that Palin just promised to protect.

Meanwhile, it’s still the case that McCain has long favored privatizing Social Security — not protecting it.

Three days after a mostly gaffe-free debate performance, the Alaska governor fumbled during a speech in which she praised U.S. soldiers for “fighting terrorism and protecting us and our democratic values”.

“They are also building schools for the Afghan children so that there is hope and opportunity in our neighboring country of Afghanistan,” she told several hundred supporters at a fundraising event in San Francisco.

There’s some speculation that she meant that Afghanistan neighbors Iraq. But, of course, it doesn’t. Here’s a map to help clear things up:

Here’s a previous map I made about McCain’s belief that Iraq is adjacent to Pakistan.

“The [Palin] administration killed our bill,” said Alaska state representative Les Gara, D-Anchorage. Gara and state Rep. Bob Lynn, R-Anchorage, co-sponsored a resolution early this year to force the Alaska Permanent Fund – a $40 billion investment fund, a portion of whose dividends are distributed annually to state residents – to divest millions of dollars in holdings tied to the Sudanese government.

In an e-mail later, Gara clarified that he believed opposition from the Palin administration helped kill his bill, but was not solely responsible for its death.

Bizarre.

Everyone’s already made fun of this from National Review editor Rich Lowry, so I’ll quote it then try to make a slightly non-mocking point:

I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it.

Now the simple fact of the matter is that Palin is an unpopular figure. There’s no sense arguing about this. Likewise, the polls show unambiguously that most people who watched her debate performance were unimpressed. And yet among male conservative pundits, this sort of gushing praise was extremely common. But before this loose talk of a Palin 2012 campaign takes off, people need to realize that her appeal seems grounded in the psychosexual hang-ups of conservative men. Her hyper-unpopularity with women makes her an unpopular figure overall, and talk of her mesmerizing qualities doesn’t change that.

You know a narrative has really broken through when it starts popping up in the non-political media. For example, this Bill Simmons column:

I like reading all kinds of publications. All of them. Any of them that have been in front of me all these years. I have a vast variety of sources from which I get my news.

(Oh, wait, you wanted details?)

This is followed by him saying something totally non-political about USA Today Sports Weekly.

Jim Henley has a smart observation on Sarah Palin’s inept method of connecting with ordinary people:

Palin seems to have a “Message: I Care” problem. She gets too meta with her answers, wanting to explain – “I’m going to talk straight to the American people and show them my etc.”; “I’m the new energy” – the symbolism of herself. For the apotheosis of Republican anti-intellectualism she’s determinedly postmodern, embedding the essay about her novel into the story as she tells it.

Millionaire television celebrity pundits seems to find this incredibly convincing but ordinary people don’t, probably because ordinary people prefer a candidate who talks about the problems facing ordinary people rather than a candidate who talks about how she’s a symbolic instantiation of the Idea of Ordinariness. But in Palin’s defense, it’s not really clear where else she can go. There was only one issue last night where I thought she really said something that engaged with a substantial national problem — her little talk on education:

You mentioned education and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more. I come from a house full of school teachers. My grandma was, my dad who is in the audience today, he’s a schoolteacher, had been for many years. My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here’s a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.

Education credit in American has been in some sense in some of our states just accepted to be a little bit lax and we have got to increase the standards. No Child Left Behind was implemented. It’s not doing the job though. We need flexibility in No Child Left Behind. We need to put more of an emphasis on the profession of teaching. We need to make sure that education in either one of our agendas, I think, absolute top of the line. My kids as public school participants right now, it’s near and dear to my heart. I’m very, very concerned about where we’re going with education and we have got to ramp it up and put more attention in that arena.

I think that’s passionate and just about right on the merits. Unfortunately for her, it’s total bullshit that has nothing to do with what her campaign is proposing. Instead, McCain’s tax and budget policies have the following inflation-adjusted consequences for education:

• Cuts in Head Start.
• Cuts in Preschool.
• Cuts in elementary school.
• Cuts in college aid.

And that’s in aggregate terms. In per capita terms, the cuts will be bigger. And of course beyond the narrowly educational, McCain will also cut back on S-CHIP and his health care tax changes will result in a decrease in the level of prenatal care in the United States. At the same time, we’re heading into an economic slowdown that will force state and local government to cut back on their investments in early education, primary and secondary education, and higher education. In principle, the federal government cut step in to fill the gap, but McCain has no plans to do so. The result of all this would be to kneecap efforts to improve education at the very time, as Palin said, our commitments in this area “have got to be really ramped up.” Under the circumstances, “meta” is a good option.

Some background on how the Couric-Palin interview came together:

“In one part of the interview, I asked her what newspapers and magazines she read before being asked to be John McCain’s running mate,” Couric said. “And she couldn’t name any. So again, I turned to the crew and I said, ‘Hold it, guys,’ and I went to the Governor privately and said, ‘Governor Palin, did you not understand the question? I’m asking you to name some newspapers or magazines you read. You can’t come up with any? I’m just trying to make sure you’re clear and to give you a fair shake here.’ And she said, ‘Okay. Nightline? Is that a magazine?’ I said, ‘No, that’s a television show.’ She said, ‘What about Lou Dobbs? Isn’t that a newspaper?’ And I said, ‘No, that’s a man. Lou Dobbs is a man.’ And there wasn’t much more I could do. I’m not a miracle worker.”

If I were Governor of Alaska, I might consider keeping tabs on what’s being said in Alaska magazine.

UPDATE: From a reader: “Hey, Matt. That item about Couric and Palin comes from a political satire site. I.e., I don’t think it’s real.” Well, that’s certainly a big difference! Apologies for the error.

It’s a little hard to believe that there’s actually more bizarre stuff in Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric, but Jeffrey Goldberg rightly calls attention to this revealing exchange:

KATIE COURIC: “What happens if the goal of democracy doesn’t produce the desired outcome? In Gaza, the U.S. pushed hard for elections and Hamas won.”

SARAH PALIN: “Yeah, well especially in that region, though, we have to protect those who do seek democracy and support those who seek protections for the people who live there. What we’re seeing in the last couple of days here in New York is a President of Iran, Ahmadinejad, who would come on our soil and express such disdain for one of our closest allies and friends, Israel … and we’re hearing the evil that he speaks and if hearing him doesn’t allow Americans to commit more solidly to protecting the friends and allies that we need, especially there in the Mideast, then nothing will.”

As Goldberg says, the issue here isn’t that she gave a bad answer, rather “the issue here is that she didn’t know the question.” Indeed. This is one of those hard questions where you don’t expect a thoughtful, well-informed person to have a quick and easy answer. But by the same token, you do expect a thoughtful, well-informed person to be aware of the basic contours of the situation — the U.S. told the Palestinians that there could be no peace deal with Israel unless they held free and fair elections, then free and fair elections were held, and Hamas won. This is especially interesting in light of the fact that Palin has an Israeli flag in her office. It ought to tell you something about Israel’s false friends in the Christian Zionist movement that they feel free to take strong positions on life-and-death issues of middle east policy without having even a vague familiarity with the situation.

During her interview with Katie Couric, however, Sarah Palin reiterated her absurd view that the President of the United States shouldn’t “second-guess” Israeli policy under any circumstances:

Palin is okay at repeating various “pro-Israel” buzzwords, but she can’t run away from the fact that her underlying position on this topic is stupid. Allies are allies and you need to give them some deference in forming their own views about what their security requires. But the United States and Israel are separate countries and our government needs to make an independent judgment about the implication of actual or potential Israeli policy initiatives.