McCain Campaign: Americans don't care if Palin can answer questions on foreign and domestic policy

http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/09/no_questions_please_were.html

September 4, 2008 5:07
No Questions, Please. We'll Tell You What You Need To Know.
Posted by Jay Carney | Comments (138) | Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Email This

According to Nicole Wallace of the McCain campaign, the American people don't care whether Sarah Palin can answer specific questions about foreign and domestic policy. According to Wallace -- in an appearance I did with her this morning on Joe Scarborough's show -- the American people will learn all they need to know (and all they deserve to know) from Palin's scripted speeches and choreographed appearances on the campaign trail and in campaign ads. Here's the exchange:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhgUvX_8Joo

Wallace's bash-the-media exercise has its merits as a campaign tactic. It certainly rallies the base. But the base won't lift McCain to 50% in November. More importantly, in her smug dismissal of the media's role in asking questions of the candidates, Wallace was really showing contempt not for reporters, but for voters. I bet there are a lot of undecided voters out there who were intrigued by Sarah Palin last night, but who don't yet know enough about her -- what she believes, what she knows -- to be comfortable with the idea of her as vice president of the United States. It's important to them to know if Palin can handle herself in an environment that isn't controlled and sanitized by campaign image makers and message mavens. Maybe she can, maybe she can't. As far as Wallace is concerned, it's none of their -- or your -- business.

kind of contradictory --typical though:eyes:

scary she would be if she had to run this country.

They may very well be right. We'll find out this November.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13096.html

a look at the actuarial tables insurance companies use to evaluate customers shows that it’s not an irrelevant one. According to these statistics, there is a roughly 1 in 3 chance that a 72-year-old man will not reach the age of 80, which is how old McCain would be at the end of a second presidential term. And that doesn’t factor in individual medical history, such as McCain’s battles with potentially lethal skin cancer.

“For a man, that’s above the expected lifetime at the present,” said Michael Powers, a professor of risk management and insurance at Temple University’s Fox School of Business.

The odds of a 72-year-old man living four more years, or one full White House term, are better. But for a man who has lived 72 years and 67 days (McCain’s age on Election Day this year), there is between a 14.2 and 15.1 percent chance of dying before Inauguration Day 2013, according to the Social Security Administration’s 2004 actuarial tables and the authoritative 2001 mortality statistics assembled by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

...if she were part of a group where they claim on VIDEO that "we're not Americans".

No doubt!

This is a very high stakes presidential campaign, not a f*#@ing audition for a role in a Lifetime movie.

If the media rolls over and lets McCain/ Palin get away with such outrageous behavior, this country is doomed.

They shouldn't be lauding her, they should be vetting her since the McCain seems to have neglected to do so.

also on Scarborough, was saying basically the same thing. Joe and Mika and I do not remember who else was on at the same time were not exactly happy.

I think the difference between a Governor who runs for President and a Governor who is picked as VP is that someone actually running for the office will take an interest and will be fairly well versed in the national and international situation prior to getting in.

A Governor who is picked as VP may have never had the ambition or the intellectual curiousity to examine what is going on in these realms.

How can they agree to this nonsense and praise it as a "good campaign tactic"? :shrug: And then they roll over like the lapdogs that they are, and accept the idiocy that they should shut up and not question the repuke campaign propaganda message. :eyes:

But of course this then leaves them time to go back to bashing Obama 24/7, insulting him for not granting interviews or for complaining when they skew and twist around sound bites from his comments, and engage in "gotcha" reporting.