The Sarah Palin Interview

I admit this is not exactly timely. But last night I saw the Oprah interview with Sarah Palin. I had several impressions:

1) Palin is a lot more intelligent than she was portrayed in the media when she was a candidate for VP. During the campaign I got the impression that the media thought it was there job to play gotcha with Palin - and for the most part they succeeded. But based on her comments last night and what she had to say during the campaign I believe she was at least as qualified as our current VP - whose gaffes are legendary but not covered much by the media.
2) With the book, she has better handlers Whether we like it or not all politicians have handlers - people who brief them on what might happen and what the issues might be. That is also true on book tours and all sorts of other media events. It is clear that her publishers have a much better idea than the McCain staff about how to market Palin. McCain's staff was inept on many fronts - but I think they under-estimated Palin's appeal. I also think the egos of the handlers that she worked with in the campaign were very much in the way of trying to achieve their objective which presumably was to help McCain/Palin to get elected.
3)I like a lot of her values. She has some good firm notions of right and wrong and forgiveness and a whole bunch of other things that are important. I thought her comments on the father of her grandchild were right on target.
4) My vote in the last election (I chose not to vote for either major candidate) was a correct one. In 2008 I decided not to vote because I thought McCain was simply not wired right to be president (and the wires may be fraying a bit); Obama was an ideologue who would be considerably farther left than where he campaigned and was too inexperienced to accomplish what needed to be done (that one seems to have rung true also); Biden was simply silly - what at one point in our history was called a political fop (again the last year has reinforced that view - a fop in the 19th century was one who was too concerned with appearances - Biden simply takes that trend and applies it to politics. In the original use of the term a fop was harmless - with a political fop a lot of harm can happen; and Palin did not have a broad enough world view to handle the next job up. Last night a lot of her views were well informed but they also reflected a small town view of the world which would not serve any president well.
5) Oprah was a bit too respectful. I have not seen a lot of Oprah but I suspect that may be her interview style. She asked good questions but a lot of them sounded like something I would expect out of People Magazine - that short breathless kind of journalism which assumes some level of common insider knowledge. That's not journalism but I thought she covered a lot of topics in an hour. Katie Couric gets paid to be a "serious" journalist - I think Oprah (who comes from the same side of the political fence) is much more skilled. Neither should be called an investigative journalist - but then Oprah never claimed she was.
6) My feeling about Palin has not changed. I choose not to vote for Palin and I still think that was a right judgment. But my guess is that she will not choose to exercise her role from a position in politics and that if she chooses to be a media person (aka Huffington or O'Reilly) she is likely to be very successful. I am not sure we need more of those people (although that may seem off for someone who does a blog that is partially on politics).