Over at Q and O, Bryan Pick criticizes the “Bush Doctrine” question from Palin’s interview, and closes with this:

That said, Sarah Palin was very obviously not prepared to answer Gibson’s question. She wasn’t caught off guard because the Bush Doctrine is ill-defined or even ambiguous, but rather because she wasn’t familiar enough with the concepts involved to discuss them. In general, she allowed Gibson’s little exam to put her on the defensive and her answers were often meandering and even off-topic. Several times, when she answered a question, I had (what I think was) a better and more succinct answer in mind. I say this as someone who has been optimistic about Palin: she must improve her performance and display greater poise in the coming weeks. The sharks are circling, and they smell blood. They are prepared to be rankly biased and unfair — to misquote her to her face and to draw patently ridiculous conclusions from her statements. She will be held to a standard no one can meet, so to prevent the press from making her a liability, she must be better than good; she must be great.

I’m also still pretty optimistic about Palin — a bad interview does not mean a bad leader, after all — but she has to do better at things like this if she is going to be electable in any national campaign.