The Emperor Has No Clothes

I share the frustration of folks like Andrew Sullivan, Kevin Drum, and Hilzoy about the way Sarah Palin has been covered in the media. Never in the history of national politics has a candidate's manifest unsuitability for higher office been so apparent. As Kevin Drum put it:

I continue to think that the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate represents the breaking of a consensual cultural barrier far more fundamental than most people realize. It's not just that she was inexperienced (Spiro Agnew and John Edwards weren't much more experienced than Palin when they ran for VP) but that she was -- obviously, transparently, completely -- uninterested in and uninformed about national policy at nearly every level. We've simply never seen someone so completely unmoored from the normal requirements of national office before. She was chosen purely at the level of celebrity, and an awful lot of people seemed to be just fine with that.

Sullivan was even more blunt:

Let's be real in a way the national media seems incapable of: this person should never have been placed on a national ticket in a mature democracy. She was incapable of running a town in Alaska competently. The impulsive, unvetted selection of a total unknown, with no knowledge of or interest in the wider world, as a replacement president remains one of the most disturbing events in modern American history. That the press felt required to maintain a facade of normalcy for two months - and not to declare the whole thing a farce from start to finish - is a sign of their total loss of nerve.

Indeed. We've just endured two months of being told by Republicans that the Emperor's new suit is dazzling, while the sane amongst us can plainly see--like the boy in the story--that the Emperor is in fact naked. And throughout the process, most members of the media have chosen to ignore what their eyes are telling them and play along with the farce to at least some degree. They suggest that maybe with a little tailoring or accessorizing, the suit really could be dazzling some day.

No. It can't. No amount of studying or training or experience is going to turn the person who sat down for that disastrous interview with Katie Couric--or "debated" Joe Biden--into a person who should ever be given a moment's consideration for the job of President of the United States. I'm sorry, but Sarah Palin does not have anywhere near the intelligence, the intellectual curiosity, or the character to be worthy of such high office. She is a chronic, almost pathological dissembler. She knows next to nothing about anything. And she cannot string together even a moderately coherent response to any question. Even on her best days, there's really no logical flow at all to her answers, even on fluff questions. If you doubt this, find the transcript to any interview she's ever done and try to read it. It's damn near impossible. Subjects and predicates are completely out of order, prepositions and connecting phrases are used haphazardly (if at all), and no thought ever seems to get finished.

That people continue to take seriously the notion that Palin should run for president is perplexing and more than a little troubling.

That said, I'm still fairly confident that by the time the Republican party begins to think seriously about who its candidate will be in the next presidential cycle, Palin's prospects will have diminished considerably. Whether they'll admit it or not, there are a lot of people in the GOP--especially within the GOP establishment--who know full well that the Emperor has no clothes. They're humoring the rubes for now, but I think they'll do whatever they can behind the scenes to make sure this person never becomes the Republican nominee. George W. Bush just about killed the Republican brand. If Sarah Palin were--God forbid--ever to become president, she would utterly destroy the Republican brand, and the country would be lucky if it ever recovered from it.