Playing the part of Palin
Quick. Name a Supreme Court Decision you disagree with.  Bush V Gore does not count.Â
I can’t help but try to figure out how I would answer the questions which Palin flubbed in the Katie Couric interview. (Is this thing being stretched out for maximum ratings or what?) “What Supreme Court decisions do you oppose?” “Um… that Imminent Domain decision… no, wait. That one actually came out right. Didn’t it?” My ability to answer the Couric question would depend solely on my state of mind at the moment.   Naturally I expect more from a potential president, and the times and circumstances I’d allow one to go blank on such a question are close to nil, perhaps limited to shouting out the question as s/he is being chased in the Forest by a hungry Bear.
The one exception for this question, one that probably should come to mind with ease even when being chased by a hungry bear: The Dred Scott Decision.  Perhaps Palin could not answer “Dred Scott” because it is a sort of fifth grade answer — Biden, for instance, provided an answer of a Supreme Court decision which struck down a law he wrote and passed — but it is better than nothing. Further, it is a decision which politicians coming out from her socially conservative — read “pro-life politician” — milieu are trained to be chime in as a way of referencing “Roe v Wade” — supposedly a historical antecedent of a moral bankrupt culture that can think of some people as less than full peoples. George W Bush, at one of the 2004 “Debates”, went off on a tangeant against Dred Scott for this purpose. In that sense, even if it might have seemed a bit odd to some people, it would have been the right answer to some people. But, for whatever reason, she failed this basic Christian Conservative Politician test of being able to equate Dred Scott with Roe v Wade.