A Review Of a Portion Of The Palin Extravaganza

ABC sent Charlie Gibson up to Wasilla to mine the earth for rare nuggets. The rarest of nuggets: direct face time with Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin. And because this material is so precious, they used all of it.

Typically of TV news, they couldn't just take a chunk of footage and air it. They had to cut back and forth between several locations, throw in some archival footage when a sentence ran a little long, add a little narration, report on the reporters, and so on. I wonder if anyone told these people that rock videos aren't popular any more. News to them!

But most unusually, ABC was smart enough to use this little ratings viagra pill to engorge the numbers on the nightly news Thursday, then shave off a little more for the news on Friday, then they took a whole bottle of stuff for the 20/20 newscast on Friday night, finally attempting to push the erection to a fourth hour by devoting a NIGHTLINE episode to footage as a lead-in to Jimmy Kimmel. At this point they've either run out of Palin footage or they are consulting a physician.

I thought I had set my computer to record the Nightly News episodes but I was mistaken. However, I did catch 20/20. Aside from the juicy "Bush Doctrine" misstep, I suspect the rest of the interview was roughly like this. Gibson throwing tough questions at the Pitbull With Lipstick, the Pitbull hanging tough and holding her ground. Ultimately, of course, it was a stump speech in the Socratic Dialogue format, just like all candidate interviews. The double-O O'Reilly/Obama) was quite similar.

So what to take away from this? As advertised, Palin is tough and charming. I hope that after this we can put to rest the myth that attacking her is mean. She eats up attacks. Bring 'em on. Beyond that, I doubt the ABC interview (segment 3, 20/20) changed any minds about Sarah Palin. To me, she's still more far-right policy, and she only represents change in the sense than she's cuter than the current Republican president or her running mate.

UPDATE: The complete transcript without the jumpy editing! H/T to WHERE ARE MY KEYS for the link.