Waaaahhhhambulance coming

Uh Oh. Bible Spice is Annoyed. And that Couric lady didn't ask enuff issue questions and stuff.

Palin also commented Friday on her widely-panned series of interviews with Katie Couric, telling Fox interviewer she did not think the CBS News anchor asked enough issue-based questions.

“I did feel there were a lot of things she was missing in terms of an opportunity to ask what a VP candidate stands for, what the values are that are represented in our ticket," Palin said. "I guess I have to apologize for being a bit annoyed, but that’s also an indication about being outside that Washington elite, outside that media elite also, and just wanting to talk to Americans without the filter and let them know what we stand for."

In two separate and lengthy interviews with Couric over the last week, Palin seemed to struggle with a number of answers, including a defense of McCain's record on regulation issues. She also appeared to stumble when relating her views on the financial bailout, her foreign policy credentials, her preferred news sources of news, and a Supreme Court case she disagrees with.

"Man, no matter what you say you are gonna get clobbered," Palin told Fox about her heavily-scrutinized performance. "You choose to answer you are going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to pivot and try to go onto another subject that you believe Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that too."

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Life sure is hard and unfair, huh? All them filters and stuff.

Dissension in the ranks

This is a pretty interesting article on the politics of the bail-out, particularly as it pertains to the split in the Republican ranks between southern "populists" and mostly non-southern Republican moderates.

The Decider

If Obama goes on to win this thing, the key issue in most campaign post-mortems will be why a GOP administration declared an economic crisis whose solution was deemed to be a massive bailout of Wall Street six weeks prior to a general election. This was about the worse sort of development the McCain could have imagined, and it was for the most part, a crisis declared from above, not from the media, or talk radio, or from the public. I think there will be many a pundit and strategist who will look back from February to September and wonder why the administration didn't try to weasel out of taking any kind of responsibility for the economic state of affairs. Nobody in this crowd has been especially known as truth-telling straight-shooters after all.

Debate-a-thon

I'm not usually one to feel confident of anything politically, but I have a hard time seeing how anything Palin does tonight changes the current dynamic of the race. The simple fact is that if issues were major league baseball standings, the economic crisis would be leading the pack by about 30 games with 12 games to play. And while Biden's populist bonafides aren't much to get excited about, the usual tools available in the right-wing kit for selling their candidates don't much help here. And the other simple fact is that six weeks prior to an election for his successor, a Republican president has declared an economic crisis exists. I doubt the media or public will be much inclined to rally around a snarky one liner or two from a one-year governor of Alaska given the political and economic climate. The Republican specialty is identity politics, and the wedge-issue grievances they seek to exploit and the personality cult they seek to enhance is poorly suited for the current situation. Anyway, let's see how wrong I am.