Wednesday, October 01, 2008

My Advice for Sarah...   [Rich Lowry]

...is different than that of the "free Sarah Palin" camp. It's probably right that the McCain campaign should have eased her into national media interviews, rather than throwing her into extremely high-stakes situations immediately. But the fundamental problem is that she doesn't yet know a lot about national affairs, especially foreign policy. So the most important thing is for her to cram, cram, cram. As she knows more, she'll be more comfortable and, naturally, give better answers. I hope the McCain people have given her time to do this. I remember back during the primaries when Mike Huckabee went through a period of particularly flagrant mis-steps on foreign policy. He was going on "Meet the Press" soon thereafter and everyone expected a disaster, but he had boned up on Pakistan and other things and did just fine. It doesn't take much to sound credible on this stuff in the short bursts politicians usually need to get through interviews. Of course, Palin has a lot to bone up on, and there will probably be, even in the best of circumstances, a few things she doesn't know. That's why she needs a straight-forward and/or self-deprecating way to occasionally say, "I don't know." People will be much more forgiving of that than round-about and very transparent attempts to try to talk her way through it, which are much more discrediting. Her potential ace-in-the-hole, of course, is Joe Biden. He'll very likely find a way to be an ass, whether he's confronting her or deferring to her.

10/01 12:17 PMShare