Assessing Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin, current governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate, has a long way to go to prove to the country that she is ready to lead as John McCain’s second in command. When Governor Sarah Palin spoke to the Republican National Convention in September, she sounded like someone who was prepared for the task at hand. Despite few Americans having known of her before McCain selected her, Palin made a good impression.

That impression, the “Sarah Palin effect,” as commentators have begun calling it, is beginning to wear off. In general, when something new comes out, people are infatuated with it, and that newness includes people. Eventually, though, people have some desire to see more. They become less easily impressed. They criticize. That place is precisely where Sarah Palin is right now.

Parts of the Sarah Palin biography are under attack. The religion Sarah Palin affiliated herself with for the majority of her life is the Pentecostal church. Outside the Southern United States, Pentecostals are a rarity. They are the epitome of hardcore Christian conservatives. Though Palin now attends a different church, she does still have ties with her old church, making Sarah Palin’s religion a key factor for people who do not care for the religious right.

Another key problem is how much the Sarah Palin interview is a coveted, and uncommon, process. Palin’s campaign staffers have not made her available for many interviews. Detractors argued early on that Palin is not available because of her lack of knowledge on important affairs, but John McCain’s campaign staffers denied this report.

When Palin interviewed with Katie Couric, she had trouble answering basic questions about John McCain. In one particularly painful exchange, Palin could not identify any pieces of McCain legislation related to business regulation. She also had trouble with a Couric question about the economic bailout of Wall Street, using abstractions, such as “shoring up the economy,” that have little practical value.

This inability of Palin to answer basic non-scripted questions suggests that the Sarah Palin biography is not sufficient for someone to lead the United States, not because of a lack of desire, but because she is not well-versed on large national issues.

In all of this hoopla over Palin’s convention speech and the Couric interview, little is being said about the issues about which Palin is passionate. She is stridently anti-abortion, for example. Though most estimates show around 80 percent of the nation is at least moderately pro-choice, Palin’s position is much farther right. While Palin may prefer to discuss these issues, the McCain campaign likely is glad she is doing only interviews about subjects they can control.

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