Posted on 09/13/2008 6:58:31 PM PDT by Ooh-Ah
It is indisputably a good thing to ask a possible future Vice President tough and substantive questions. What is bothering many (my email is bulging) is the seeming unwillingness of the press to subject a possible future President to the same rigorous examination.
Bill from Ahwatukee Musings passed this along to me, from a Hillary Clinton forum, of all places. I don’t know anything about the writer, Nancy Kallitechnis, but she makes some interesting observations about the difference between Charlie Gibson’s interview with Obama, when he became the presumptive nominee, and his talk with Gov. Palin:
Even the camera angle was designed to be prejudiced against Palin. She is filmed from the side and slightly with her back to the camera. …In contrast, the film crew placed the long shot camera facing Obama so at all times when he is speaking the camera looks him in the face rather than looking at his back.
…Obama was asked much easier questions mostly about feelings about winning, breaking the glass ceiling and 2008 campaign decisions. In contrast, Palin was asked numerous specific policy and military strategy questions that required extensive knowledge about treaties, U.S. anti-terrorism strategy and world history. And Gibson misquoted Palin… The following is a breakdown of the questions asked of the nominees:
Obama interview:
How does it feel to break a glass ceiling?
How does it feel to “win”?
How does your family feel about your “winning” breaking a glass ceiling?
Who will be your VP?
Should you choose Hillary Clinton as VP?
Will you accept public finance?
What issues is your campaign about?
Will you visit Iraq?
Will you debate McCain at a town hall?
What did you think of your competitor’s [Clinton] speech?Palin interview:
Do you have enough qualifications for the job you’re seeking? Specifically have you visited foreign countries and met foreign leaders?
Aren’t you conceited to be seeking this high level job?
Questions about foreign policy
-territorial integrity of Georgia
-allowing Georgia and Ukraine to be members of NATO
-NATO treaty
-Iranian nuclear threat
-what to do if Israel attacks Iran
-Al Qaeda motivations
-the Bush Doctrine
-attacking terrorists harbored by Pakistan
Is America fighting a holy war? [misquoted Palin]There’s no doubt the Charles Gibson interviews showed extreme prejudice against Palin and extreme favoritism towards Obama…He constantly questioned her ability to lead but never questioned Obama’s ability to lead, all the more amazing considering that Palin was the only one with executive experience and the presidency is the highest level executive job in politics.
Don’t forget the nonsense about Sarah’s big Holy War! There is more of same at Newsbusters, and here.
The Bush Doctrine: Josh Trevino has an exhaustive look at what it is, and decides Palin, not Gibson, got it right.
Meanwhile, Okie is taking apart Newsweek’s cover story on Palin. What struck me, immediately, was that the press is using exactly the same script over Palin vs Obama that they used in Bush vs Kerry, that being the Democrat candidate is “the sophisticated world traveler who does nuance” while the Republican is “the backwoods simpleton too stupid to experience existential angst.” You do remember how they tied Kerry to “nuance” often that some of us dubbed him Pope Nuance I?
Newsweek:
Palin is not regarded as an introspective or intellectual type—not the sort who likes to mull the deepest nuances of every issue. In that sense, she’s the anti-Obama. While Barack Obama of Hawaii, Indonesia, Hawaii, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Cambridge, Mass., Chicago and now Washington has been on a well-chronicled lifelong search for his identity, Sarah Heath Palin seems just fine being a woman of Wasilla.
Okie:
Maybe it’s because Sarah Palin has always known who and what she is, unlike the confused, confounded and still searching Obama? Maybe because she’s her own woman, and a damn strong one at that — and Barack’s looking in the national mirror to find out what kind of man he really is?
Do ya think? I just touched on this very theme the other day:
…what I’m getting is a sense of man who is looking to satisfy something inside himself, and his satisfaction (or validation) cannot be found within, so he is looking externally - and taking action externally - to bring it about. He needs to “save” the whole country, to “save” himself.
People do this all the time on a small scale, but to want do it on a large scale - a “world-changing” scale, complete with grandiose pageantry - suggests an appetite that cannot be sated in “ordinary” and “authentic” ways. And that is a little troubling.
Related to that, Vanderleun’s Monsters of the Id and how they are in control of the Democrats.
Speaking of authenticity: Ed Morrissey points out that Palin is an authentic reformer
“Should I worry about being a slave, again?” Dear God in Heaven! My Li’l Bro Thom (center-left, but moving rightward more every day) wrote asking me if I’d heard of Whoopi Goldberg’s absurd and deliberately distracting “concern” about becoming a slave if the evil Republicans get in the White House and start appointing judges who base their rulings on the constitution, rather than legislate from the bench. He sent me a link to Huffpo with the video clips from this mornings broadcast of the execrable “The View.” I couldn’t watch more than a few seconds of it, but found Ms. Goldberg making her faux point here.
Note Barbara Walters’ “joke” to Whoopi: “…us white folks, we’ll take care of you…” Egad. I is astonishing to me that this is how Barbara Walters wants to finish what had been a distinguished career. Whatever.
McCain has more patience with these women than I could ever have. Oh, and he’s supposed to be the “hothead,” right? He’s not cool like Obama!
Don Surber says bring back Rosie. I wouldn’t go that far. Goldberg is smarter and funnier.
Quick question: Do you think any “big time professional journalist” will ever ask Obama about how he’s threatened to sic the justice department on inconvenient writers like this one? Or, you know…ask him about what Stanley Kurtz is reporting?
Closer looks are good ideas, for both parties, but this article by the always great Gerard Baker urges Europe to
You can argue the merits of each case. But let me try to explain to my fellow non-Americans why Mr Obama’s problems go well beyond that. Even if you think that Americans should want to turn their country into a European-style system, there is a perfectly good reason that you might have grave doubts about Mr Obama.
You’ll want to read it all
So there, you have it - another utterly insane day in American politics, where “big time professional journalists” ask Presidential candidates how they feel about being so great while drilling vice presidential candidates on Russia, where old scripts that didn’t play four years ago are being hauled out and replayed because there is a dearth of both imagination and understanding in those same journalists. Where authenticity must rule the day because in the end, it is all there is left after this 19 month masquerade. Wherea a rich, privileged African-American woman with a successful American life can turn to a public servant who has never betrayed the least bit of racism in his whole career and declare that she’s worried about “becoming a slave again” (to a round of applause, mind you) while her white, even more privileged and successful boss-lady says, “us white people will take care of you…” Yeah, it’s just a stupid joke, but that’s some appallingly childish stuff before our eyes. All neutralized, of course, by the fact that the offenses are being committed by the elite, noble and morally authoritative Blue Americans. Meanwhile a candidate can get testy with a journalist who dares to bother him with actual investigative questions, and the country ignores its own substantial disruption of her enemies (probably because it is too busy misidentifying “the enemy” as “each other”) and also misses a seeming admission of election-results tampering in the last election. Troops are being withdrawn in Iraq by a most reviled president who - in the midst of this insanity - just keeps doing his job and avoiding the spitballs.
Oh, and there is a contingent out there - who apparently do not find things dramatic enough - who, watching The One travel hat-in-hand to The Don, have decided that the bottom of the Democrat ticket is about to be thrown under the bus. I don’t believe it, for several credible reasons. But it would certainly be the cherry on top.
That’s just one day - barely scratching the surface of one day - in the surreal election of 2008.
Whew. Who wants a Guinness?
Am I the only one that remembers Charlie Gibson the weatherman? (i.e. the guy that did the weather)
Just wait until Hannity interviews Palin. It’ll be MUCH better and more civilized than what Gibson & ABC did.
It's called pandering.
Most liberals have never gotten past the artificial guilt they have concocted in relation to persons of color or the residual inner fear they feel when actually in the presence of one.
Look. Here’s what you conservatives don’t understand. Democrat candidates don’t need foreign policy experience. See, the liberal media expect their candidates to do what they want: surrender, run away from every fight. Like Bill Clinton did. He passed on capturing bin Laden 10 times. At the first sign of trouble he hightailed it. Anybody can run away. But if, like Sarah Palin and John McCain, you’re going to stand and fight, you need experience. See? So, don’t be so hard on Charlie (say,that’s what our guys called the Viet Cong, isn’t it? What a coincidence.)
Nope, I remember when he used to play second fiddle to Joan Lunden in the morning.
Way before that.. early-mid eighties.
Palin hunts wolves from helicopters.
I am looking for the unedited video of the Gibson interview. Not the transcripts but the video.
Is it out there anywhere?
That will be the softball type of interview we accuse the liberal media of doing. Let Chris Wallace or Britt Hume do it and I would consider it a fair interview.
ABC now has something they call the “full” interview online, but I don’t know if I can trust them.
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=5793131
Perhaps Gibson is a racist and he thought he must dumb down the questions for Obama....
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September 12th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Wow..pant..I’ll take a pint. I feel like I’ve run a marathon after all that!
[Me too. I gave myself a headache! -admin]
September 12th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
[...] As usual, The Anchoress has a whole slew of thoughts and links on the issue. [...]
September 12th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Anchoress, you forgot that little gem of a commerical that Obama put out (its been subsequently pulled) where he mocked McCain for being old, and unable to use a computer, even to send an email. Of course, as Instapundit points out, had Obama, or his staff, been able to do a simple Google search, they would have found the article from 2000 which explains why. The severe beatings from the North Vietnamese left John McCain unable to comb his hair, throw a baseball, tie his shoes or TYPE ON A KEYBOARD.
How about two Guinesses, or a Black and Tan?
[It's in the newest post. I didn't want to overwhelm! -admin]
September 12th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
[...] (H/T) [...]
September 12th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
From your blog…”this is how Barbara Walters wants to finish what had been a distinguished career”.
Too late for that…she will now be remembered for her latest book in which she names many of the men she’s slept with over the years!
September 12th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
The Bush doctrine and the psyching out of Barack Obama…
Charles Krauthammer on the Bush doctrine: …The New York Times got it wrong. And Charlie Gibson got it wrong. There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another……
September 12th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
[...] bias or favoritism here. Nope, not one bit: Obama [...]
September 12th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
[...] Palin doesn’t even get the same treatment in her interviews. The Anchoress wisely notes that Obama got soft lobs of “How do you feel about this? How do you feel about [...]
September 12th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
At this point, Obama has pretty much destroyed his most attractive attribute, that he promised to be the new dawn in politics. Without that, and surrounded as he is by the same partisan hacks who have been running Dem politics for ever, he is just another Kerry, just another Internet-inventor Algore — in short, the exact same candidate that they have run again and again and again and again, the result being that Jimmy Carter of all people has been their most successful candidate since 1964, getting all of 50.1 percent of the vote!
And now he says he is going to “start” going on the attack? I’m telling you, they are political morons over there at Obama headquarters. All that will do, after everyone has witnessed the unfair nuclear barrage heaped on Palin, they will only diminish Obama even more, making him look more and more like a whiny, prissy, punk, rather than presidential.
September 12th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
So I just read that Gibson-Obama “interview.” Ha! Clearly, they have edited the ending out. You know, the part where Gibson asks where he should send his check before asking Obama if he wants to make out.
September 13th, 2008 at 1:06 am
Order a bunch of those Guinesses I will buy! I hope you do not mind an old fart from Canada making a comment on your candidates for president and vice president. I like to keep abreast of what is happening around the world and especially in the USA. The world is by far better for your place in it. When I watched Sarah Palin give her speech at the convention she was not to far into it when I informed my family that whether they believed me or not that they where looking at the next president of the USA after McCain retires due to poor health after his 1st term. I surly hope he is able to serve 2 terms but I just kind of get that feeling he won`t. Be that as it may i think Sarah Palin will be the next president after this one plays out it`s string and we will all be to the good because of it.
September 13th, 2008 at 5:47 am
In Her Own Words Part 2…
You can watch part one of the interview at In Her Own Words. One interesting aspect of this exercise is the fact that when Charlie Gibson interviewed Obama he gave him a bunch of softball questions. Palin was hit……
September 13th, 2008 at 9:10 am
[...] the Anchoress has a list of questions posed by Gibson to Barack Obama three months ago, who has arguably less [...]
September 13th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Contrasting the Sarah Palin Interview with Charles Gibson’s Interview of Barack Obama…
…
September 13th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Charlie Gibson’s bias……
… as obvious to thinking people as obvious can get. The Anchoress brings us the salient points:Bill from Ahwatukee Musings passed this along to me, from a Hillary Clinton forum, of all places. I don’t know anything about the writer,…
September 13th, 2008 at 10:20 am
To be fair, here’s a video that “mashes up” a Gibson-Obama interview in which he did ask some pertinent foreign policy questions with the more recent Gibson-Palin interview with basically identical questions. Bottom line: both candidates answer the question almost identically! One is seen as ignorant and warmongering while the other is a cultured intellectual and “citizen of the world” extraordinaire.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8-pYvr3irg
September 13th, 2008 at 10:42 am
[...] the Anchoress has a list of questions posed by Gibson to Barack Obama three months ago, who has arguably less [...]
September 13th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
[...] -attacking terrorists harbored by Pakistan Is America fighting a holy war? [misquoted Palin] source Sphere: Related [...]
September 13th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Gibson, ABC, Media Bias And Dishonesty…
I know why the McCain campaign chose someone from a liberal news outlet for Palin’s first interview but I don’t understand why it chose Gibson. Fox news could not be first or there would be claims of softball questions. Gibson was perceiv…
September 13th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
[...] the Anchoress has a list of questions posed by Gibson to Barack Obama three months ago, who has arguably less [...]
September 13th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I cant help but say:
We could certainly look at it as Palin was qualified to answer those questions where as NObama is not qualified to answer them.
Remember we have to change the standards for some people so the playing field is level.
The interview that best portrays the candidate though is…
http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/8459/Must_see_lol_/
September 13th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Since when did muddled thinking become introspection and intellecualism? I have grown so weary of this characterization of Obama. Fumbling around all sides of an issue doesn’t make you an intellectual.
September 13th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
[...] “Gibson vs Palin” vs “Gibson vs Obama” Affirmative action at Work theanchoressonline.com [...]
September 13th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
[...] ABC EDITED OUT KEY POINTS From Palin Interview. Fascist media is all about proving the prefab talking-points, to build up the pre-existing narrative about Palin’s redneck hickness, and McCain’s [...]