Winking Aloud
I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it. — Rich Lowry. Notable is the CNN “tracking” line of favorable / unfavorables in a group of “undecideds” from Ohio pushing a level around. It was divided by men and women. It is probably the basic partisan make-up of the genders, but the men’s response was higher with Palin and the women’s response was higher with Biden. Apparently the men all thought she was winking right at them.
I heard parts of it on the radio, and saw parts of it on the television. The effect was that I missed some Palin winks, and saw other Palin winks. Listening to it, I was sorting through the Tina Fey skit. Clearly the show could not pull off what it did on Saturday, which was to actually just pluck one exchange from the Katie Couric interview and re-enact it, with no exaggeration, to widespread laughter. But, seeing the television, I see that Tina Fey is going to wink a bit. Throw in the home-spun homilies to a “heartland” she does not really belong to and you have the makings of a parody, as opposed to a transcription passed off as a parody.
There is something surreal in the “Expectations Game”. Going in the consensus had seemed to become that Sarah Palin would, indeed, “Exceed Expectations” — she has a political career behind her and has personal skills, and the rules of the “Debate” play to her strengths in allowing her to never be tied down to having to answer a question. She can flow throw cue cards, toss in a couple wittisomes against Biden, and, most importantly, wink. But what does it mean when everyone expects an “exceeding of expectations”, and for her to meet the expected exceeded expectations?
I want to siphon Biden into these comments, but there is nothing much to say. By way of theater review, he transposed words a little, flubbed awkwardly a number of times, and if anyone were really paying attention to Biden in this “Theater Review” sector they might be a little surprised by some things that don’t really matter all that much but are usually played up in the media anyways. There was no sizzle there, and that is how he won the debate. The thing was an anti-climax because Palin’s status in the public mind has already been cemented — the downside of the so-called “Expectations Game” is nobody is going to forget what lead to the low expectations in the first place. The poll numbers show an absurdly high percentage saying they thought Biden looked “presidential” — upper 80 percentile — and that is all Palin and all Biden resisting the urge to play the attack dog. Palin was in color; Biden was in black and white — and we just have to be happy with that. One thing about Biden, which seemed telling, was he kept referring not to people watching at home but to people listening on the radio. I don’t know if this was wishful thinking so people would not notice his Left eyebrow, or if he was snake-bitten by the whole “FDR On the Television” mistake.
Yesterday the news came out that showed it is now difficult to see how McCain wins this election, or probably a bit more unfadingly Obama is on a clear glide to a victory. McCain pulled his campaign staff out of Michigan.* McCain’s collection of states he needs to pull through thus becomes impossibly (or nearly so) narrow. Take the polls and add up the states where Obama leads by more than five percentage points, and he sits at 269 electoral votes, which is a tie which is a win. The effect was that I listened and watched thinking more along the lines of the future of Sarah Palin. My take was that if she fell down to the unexpected expectations nobody thought she would fall to, her national career was over. If she passed the “Pass / Fail” test, she would be back, in four years, in eight years, who knows?  The difference is how able her constituency can convince themselves, and project outwards, that everything bad they’ve seen was an aberation. In the respect her introduction on the national scene in 2008 and, subsequent disappearance, is like Q introducing John Luc Picard to the Borg on Star Trek. A foreboding of the future, the Borg would be back. I suppose Palin will be better groomed next time, whether in a presidential contest or into the Senate — better able to meld winks with nods with plausible answers on what she reads for information. Also be a little more attentive and flexible in responding to opponent’s heart-broken story of a wife being killed in a car accident — it is sort of necessary when running as, in part, a “Mom in Chief”.
* On the other hand, McCain opened up an office in the more competitive district of Maine, which splits some electoral votes by district. Obama countered by doing the same in the other Republican heavy split electoal vote state, opening up an office in Omaha, Nebraska.