http://alaskadispatch.com/tund.....al-fallout
Christen is highly qualified and was clearly the best candidate on the short list. She dominated every critical category in the Judicial Selection Survey scores and was reviewed by a higher percentage of respondents than any other candidate.

http://helpmejoseph.typepad.com/puma_for_life/

Your very interesting comments have inspired me to get off the dime and create PUMA for Palin at Blogspot.

I’ve copied my recent posts to
http://pumaforpalin.blogspot.c.....tions.html

I’d like to pursue the issue of a possible difference in kind of intelligence between Hillary and Palin. I haven’t seen either of them discussing “complex and esoteric subjects” in a complex way. Can you give some examples?

Liberal/conservative policies are off-topic for me here. I’m interested in the issue of Palin’s intelligence, the media treatment, etc — and people judging Palin’s intelligence by factors like her speech patterns, hairstyle, and mannerisms (I had such negative reactions myself and am re-examining my own prejudices).

My comment about ‘good instincts’ was clumsy and I’d like to withdraw it.

As for the Gibson intervinew, it was not his glowering but the extreme editing of content. Have you seen the fuller transcript at Mark Levin? It’s too long to copy here, but I can find links for you. Whole chunks were dropped out, her answer to one question was presented as though it were the answer to a previous question.
In the Couric interview, the minor editing given to most interview subjects, cleaning up their grammar, etc, was not done; her words were spelled phonetically to make her sound uneducated: “get back to ya.” Couric went after questions about McCain that had nothing to do with Palin’s own experience or expertise. She put words in Palin’s mouth and then asked McCain to comment on them, as though Palin had initiated those words (“depression”). Palin said later that she had told McCain’s staff that the Couric interview (spanning several days) was not going well and she wanted to end it, but the staff insisted she go on. (Maybe I should start a blog “Puma for Palin” to put all this material in one place. , if that hasn’t been done already.)
In the debate and elsewhere Palin was speaking for McCain as instructed by his staff.

In a national campaign she was out of her element, performing on short notice, and following orders from the McCain staff. Her poor appearance there is not a reflection on her intelligence in general, or on her fitness for the Presidency in future.

Wow, interesting perspective — “north”. That seems very credible to me, and I’d love to hear more details.

As to Hillary, how did she actually do in the Alaska primary (and other US states you’d call ‘north’, if there are any)? She did very well in most non-urban areas of the US. There were many county-by-county or even precinct-by-precinct studies showing the rural areas were her strength, the urban areas were Obama’s.

What little editing was done on her interviews (editing is done on all interviews) does not make up for her ridiculous and often completely incoherent answers, and Gibson’s glowering does not seem to me to be a good excuse for incoherence. As for Couric–hostile? I am sure that right-wing websites and commentators like the ones you named did find her hostile, but really, she simply asked questions and asked them again if she did not get an answer. Are journalists not supposed to do that? The fact that Palin often couldn’t answer her questions can’t be put down to any imagined hostility on Couric’s part. As for the debate, it was not edited, and what it showed did not reflect well on her.

I don’t think less of Palin than I do of any number of GOP candidates. I did not start having negative feelings about her as a person until she starting going on about how Obama was “palling around with terrorists” and how only some of us live in “real America.” She is in many ways impressive. But I simply do not understand how anyone with liberal, progressive values could want Palin or anyone with her stated views, male or female, as president.

One other thing: Palin does not seem to be a culture warrior as governor, which I thought was already clear during the campaign (I remember one of the first things I heard about her was her vetoing the bill that would have discriminated against gay couples). But Bush was also considered by many to be a moderately conservative governor. Past performance does not always indicate future performance, so I would be wary of voting for a conservative if you are banking on that conservative remaining relatively moderate. They might–they might not.

As for Hillary: She is completely brilliant. I think she is very practical, as you say, but she also has a great ability to master complex and esoteric subjects. She and Obama are both gifted in that area, and I felt proud throughout the primary to have the choice between two such intelligent candidates.

Flora, may I ask (and I mean this as a sincere question, not any form of attack): do you really believe that women such as Sebelius who supported Obama are backstabbers?

From her record in Alaska, it seems clear that she is brilliant in dealing with the details of these huge complicated projects, and in negotiating agreement among mega-parties. To go from the PTA to defeating her own party incumbents and governing with a high approval rating argues some sort of unusual abilitiy/s; either sound instincts or a brilliance to fake sound instinct.

I don’t think we can just average this evidence together with the bad performances in the interviews and come out with a verdict of ‘mediocre intelligence.’ For a very capable person to occasionally make a bad performance (especially in an area marginal to their expertise) is a common occurence. For an idiot to manage the accomplishments she has in Alaska, is not even possible.

As to just how much of the interview problem was hers and how much was hostile interviewers, see a Mark Levin page with a less edited transcript of the Gibson interview. I could also find cites showing hostile maneuvers by Couric (newsbusters or media matters or some such site, plus some of it was visible to the naked viewer). Even in those, we are still getting transcripts that came through the Gibson and Couric agencies; we don’t have the full raw data. (Greta at Fox may have published raw data from her interviews after the Nov election; certainly it is very different.)

As to ‘non-intellectual’ — how would you rate Hillary on that? Hillary’s brilliance also seems practical, how to rather than why to.