Griper Blade: Marketing Sarah Palin

New polling shows that John McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, is pretty popular. With a favorable rating of 58%, she beats both of the frontrunners. On the one hand, this is good news for Team McCain, who are now enjoying a post-convention bounce in the polls. The bad news is that political common wisdom holds true -- people don't vote for things, they vote against things, so high favorables don't mean a lot. Add to this that people don't tend to be very influenced by the second slot -- 55% say it won't influence their decision -- and she's pretty much a wash. In fact, polls show that if there's any effect, it's a negative one. Support for the ticket has gone down among women, thanks mostly to Palin's extremist views on abortion.

But popular is popular. The reason for that popularity is easy to explain; the only thing most people know about her is what the McCain camp is telling them. Sarah Palin isn't a candidate, she's a projection cast by the Republican propaganda machine. The words she spoke at the RNC weren't hers, but those of former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully. All Palin really did was read it well from a teleprompter -- not much of a challenge for a former TV sportscaster. We have yet to see Sarah Palin as Sarah Palin, Governor of a state with a population the size of Baltimore...

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Palin to Play Softball with ABC

clipped from www.politico.com Under pressure for being shielded for questioning, Sarah Palin has a agreed to sit down with Charles Gibson of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” according to an ABC News official. No other interviews are scheduled. It will be the first TV interview for Palin since she was named 10 days ago as running mate to John McCain. The McCain campaign kept her off Sunday shows this weekend and plans to be sparing with high-risk network encounters, which they contend are unimportant to voters despite the media’s fixation on them. But McCain officials could see her reticence was feeding the narrative of her being unprepared for the job.

That'd be the same Charlie Gibson who once asked Dubya, "You took a lot of doubting and rather skeptical questions about the surge. I'll give you a chance to crow. Do you want to say, I told you so?"

And it's the same Gibson who helped turn the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary debate into an an attack on Barack Obama.

Geez, was Bill O'Reilly too busy do it or what? Expect a lot of softball questions, softened with Nerf.

Griper Blade: Glorious Victory in Iraq

White House depiction of Iraq

Yippee! There's been a downturn in the violence in Iraq. The surge has been a huge success and Iraq is now a nation of group hugs, cotton candy, and rainbows.

At least, that's the impression you get from the White House and a media who's past mistakes should make them one helluva lot more cautious. In an interview with President Bush, ABC's Charlie Gibson asked, "You took a lot of doubting and rather skeptical questions about the surge. I'll give you a chance to crow. Do you want to say, I told you so?" Bush said he didn't. George W. Bush is now more circumspect about the Iraq war than the media.

And he's certainly more cautious than the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby:

With the media at last paying attention to the progress in Iraq, shouldn't leading Democrats think about doing the same? Perhaps this would be a good time for Hillary Clinton to express regret for telling Petraeus that his recent progress report on Iraq required "a willing suspension of disbelief" - in effect, calling him a liar. Perhaps Senate majority leader Harry Reid should admit that he may have been wrong to declare so emphatically: "This war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything."

All of the Democratic presidential candidates have been running on a platform of abandoning Iraq. At the recent debate in Las Vegas, they refused to relax their embrace of defeat even when asked about the striking evidence of improvement. They continued to insist that "the surge is not working" (Bill Richardson), that "the occupation is fueling the insurgency" (Dennis Kucinich), and that the "strategy is failed" and we must "get our troops out" (Barack Obama).

Jacoby ends his piece by asking how dems can "be so invested in defeat that they would abandon even a war that may be winnable?" and by saying that, with things in Iraq "looking so hopeful, this is no time to cling to a counsel of despair."

It's a little ironic that Jacoby meant to misuse the word "hopeful," but failed. The word he was looking for was something that meant "improved" -- the word he used means "optimistic." An optimist and a realist are often two different things and Jacoby's playing the optimist here...

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