Anyone notice that attempts to reform Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae by Republicans (specifically, by George Bush) have been stymied for the last eight years hasn’t really been big on the network news stations? Instead, we get lots and lots of coverage of people like Nancy Pelosi blaming Republicans for causing the mess that they’ve been trying to fix.

I’m not saying that Republicans don’t bear their share of the blame, but it’s unfair to insist that they’ve had the Presidency for the last eight years and should’ve done something when they’ve never had a filibuster-proof majority and Democrats have been dead-set against letting them reform the FMs.

Why did Democrats try to stall reform of the FMs? I can’t say for certain, but the fact that the Dems have been getting a ton of money from them seems awfully telling. It’s even more telling that, as far as I’ve seen, no major news organizations seem to be reporting on this oddity.

I am among those who was very excited by Palin when her nomination for the Vice President position was announced. Heck, if it comes down to it, I was even pretty hopeful about the possibility of her nomination before it was announced. In the time since then, she’s performed very poorly in a few interviews (while some of the problems can be attributed to editing, not all of them can), which has cooled my enthusiasm considerably. Her poor performance in these interviews runs counter to what I’ve seen in clips from her run for Alaska’s governor position, and it makes me wonder what the difference is.

My theory is that she’s really not as comfortable discussing the issues facing the United States at large as she is with the issues that face the state of Alaska. While Alaska is, obviously, part of the United States, the focus of a governor is much, much different from the focus of a vice president. As many of her critics have noted, she has no foreign policy experience, because foreign policy is, by and large, outside of the scope of a governor’s job.

This is where the three senators on the tickets have an advantage over Palin. Their jobs may not come with any executive experience — individually, Congresspeople aren’t leaders in any real sense — but they do come with a need to be educated on issues facing the nation as a whole.

Or, at least, they come with a need to seem educated. Palin’s lack of experience has been criticized heavily ever since her nomination was announced. Her political career hasn’t been all much shorter than that of the Presidential candidate on the other side, and it includes actual executive experience, so I’m not buying into the idea that she has less relevant experience when it comes to running the country… but when it comes to running a campaign?

Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson was the first glimpse many Americans really had of who she was. Out of the entire interview, there were two minutes that made the biggest impression on America, I think. First was her response about seeing Russia from Alaskan soil, in response to a question about foreign policy experience. Second was Palin’s not knowing what Gibson meant by “the Bush Doctrine”.

That first response was, arguably, made to seem much worse than it actually was due to the way the exchange was edited, and the second is somewhat misleading due to the multiple (sometimes wildely divergent) definitions of the unofficial term “Bush doctrine”.

While I admittedly don’t know a lot about Alaskan politics, I can compare West Virginia politics to that at the national level, and there’s not nearly as much scrutiny on every single word that passes from our governor’s lips as there is on any given Senator. My suspicion is that Governor Palin’s admission that she didn’t quite know what Gibson meant when he said “Bush Doctrine” wouldn’t have been nearly as poorly received in a state Governor’s race.

So, I imagine what happened after the Gibson interview is that Senator McCain’s campaign staff started coaching Governor Palin on how to handle these sorts of questions, essentially training her on how to BS more efficiently in the national political arena. This is something that McCain and Biden have had decades to perfect and even Obama has had several years in national politics to get his BS well honed.

When national politicians are not well educated on the issues, they need to be able to pretend to be up on them. When Obama made a comment about the UN Security Council doing something about Russia even though Russia has a veto on that council, it was just as dumb as anything Sarah Palin has ever uttered in any of these interviews, but because he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, he wasn’t as heavily criticized.

All in all, I don’t believe that Sarah Palin’s bad interviews are an indication that she’s stupid by any means. I also don’t believe that they are an indication that she’s less ready to lead than Obama^[a]. I don’t even think they’re indicative that she would be unable to lead successfully if events would put her in the President’s seat. Mostly, I think they’re indicative of her being unfamiliar with the skills needed to campaign successfully on a national scale.

Hopefully, her performance in the debate this evening (which will require a related but somewhat different skill set than interviews) will be better than her performance in her interviews, but even if it isn’t, I can’t imagine that her performance could possibly be so bad that I’d start thinking that having a marginally qualified person in the Vice Presidential seat would be better than having a marginally qualified person in the Presidential seat.

1. Of course, that’s akin to saying that a first year med student is no less ready to perform surgery than a college freshman — I wouldn’t want either of them doing it. [↩]