Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

If you needed a perfect example of what’s wrong with the media, the coverage of Sarah Palin is for you. Let’s be clear on something: she lost last night. Badly. She proved that she can only recite the talking points that are in front of her, and it’s clear to anyone who was watching that she is not competent to be the president of the United States. (Unless, that is, you think that someone who is no more intelligent than you or your neighbor should have her finger on the nuclear button.) This is rather important when the GOP presidential candidate has at least a 1 in 7 probability of dying within the next four years.

So the question from the debate should be whether she’s prepared to stand in for the president. Clearly she’s not. The best that anyone can say about her is that she is “charming” and “middle-class” and “just folks” and so forth. None of this has any bearing on whether she’s fit to be the president. I’ve heard no one even try to argue that she is.

Instead, somehow, the framing had been established before the debate even began: if Palin avoids making an ass of herself, she’s won — or at least not lost. If Biden isn’t condescending, he’s won — or at least not lost. Obama has recently been in the lead; therefore if neither Biden nor Palin make any major gaffes, this helps Obama — or at least doesn’t harm him.

But wait. No. The question is: do they both demonstrate command of the issues, and leadership? Of course they don’t; only Biden did. But we’re asked to evaluate them both on “charm.” Why? Well, presumably because that’s what the electorate cares about. But the electorate only cares about it because that’s the narrative that the media chose to write — that they chose to write, in fact, even before the debate began. We come to believe that we should care about that; we learned in 2000 that we were supposed to care about which candidate would make a better drinking buddy. (For the record, I would much rather have a beer with Obama than with McCain. It’s likewise a Biden rout.)

So now that Palin has turned on the “charm” and the “folksiness” again, we get the standard litany of stories — such as the New York Times telling us that Palin is revitalized after not absolutely messing up last night. This is the new narrative: she now has a head of steam. She’s a leader who’s breaking glass ceilings and saying “No, sir!” to McCain. Yes indeedy (as she might say), things are really changing now for Palin … Oh, what’s that you say? All her assertiveness still isn’t putting the campaign back in Michigan? Oh, I see. Glass ceiling still quite intact? Ah ha. Thanks, then.

It’s absurd. And I think the American people see that it’s absurd. We watch her on Katie Couric, and we know that she just isn’t qualified at all. You can’t put the YouTube back in the bottle, as it were. Undecided voters thought Biden won the debate by a 2:1 margin.

Yet here I will venture a bold prediction: the coverage will continue to be about Palin’s image. As opposed to her leadership ability, or her knowledge of … anything at all (other than her apparent mastery of resource allocation, being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the oil industry).

One month and one day until the election. May the day soon come when we no longer have to see this nonsensical clown.

P.S.: Hendrik Hertzberg says it better, of course.

Because I haven’t mentioned it in a few months, I should also point here to my favorite newspaper article ever: Jonathan Lebed: Stock Manipulator, S.E.C. Nemesis — and 15 whence this quote that might as well be applied to the soft news coverage of low expectations:

Xerox and AT&T and the rest needed to put the right spin on their quarterly earnings. The goal at the end of every quarter was for the newspapers and the cable television shows and the rest to announce that they had “exceeded analysts’ expectations.” The easiest way to exceed analysts’ expectations was to have the analysts lower them.