Palin’s Perils
By Kate Phillips
The New York Times

Add Mitt Romney’s voice to those expressing at least a modicum of dissatisfaction about the rollout of Gov. Sarah Palin in her first month as the Republican vice-presidential nominee. He expressed confidence that Ms. Palin would be able to “hold her own” in the debate this Thursday night against the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.

But on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Mr. Romney — while not criticizing her TV interviews as others have for their substance or lack thereof — seemed to blame some of her stumbles on the McCain campaign staff. Asked by Andrea Mitchell whether he agreed with some conservatives’ calls for Ms. Palin to drop off the ticket, Mr. Romney said he concurred with conservative writer Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review:

“I think Kathryn Lopez had it right,” he said. “Holding Sarah Palin to just three interviews and microscopically focusing on each interview I think has been a mistake. I think they’d be a lot wiser to let Sarah Palin be Sarah Palin. Let her talk to the media, let her talk to people.

“Look, she wasn’t selected by John McCain because she’s an expert in foreign policy,” he added. “John McCain’s the expert in foreign policy … She’s a person who identifies with people with homes across America.”

Still, the bad reviews, the parodies on shows like “Saturday Night Live” and commentary about Ms. Palin’s readiness to be vice president, let alone president, kept pouring in over the weekend. At Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria’s headline was “Palin is Ready? Please.”

He wrote: “Palin has been given a set of talking points by campaign advisers, simple ideological mantras that she repeats and repeats as long as she can. (”We mustn’t blink.”) But if forced off those rehearsed lines, what she has to say is often, quite frankly, gibberish.”

And, as Ms. Mitchell noted this morning, The Times’s David Brooks called her candidacy “embarrassing.”

Ouch.

Senator McCain himself confronted a Palin moment — pretty much akin to one of those Biden moments Mr. Obama has had to deal with — when the Republican nominee was interviewed on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanoupolos. Mr. McCain walked back what Ms. Palin — in a rare impromptu moment in Philadelphia — said about going into Pakistan, along the same veins that Mr. McCain had just chastised Mr. Obama about in their Friday night debate:

Mr. Stephanopoulos: She says, ”If that’s what we have to do to stop the terrorists from coming any further in, absolutely, we should.”

Mr. McCain: She would not — she shares my view that we will do whatever is necessary. The problem is, you don’t announce it. You don’t — you don’t say to the Pakistanis, “We’re coming in unilaterally and carry out operations.” Teddy Roosevelt, speak softly but carry a big stick. She shares my view on that. That’s just — that’s fundamentals of knowledge and maturity and judgment.
…
Mr. Stephanopoulos: So she shouldn’t have done it?
…
Mr. McCain: This business of, in all due respect, people going around and — with sticking a microphone while conversations are being held, and then all of a sudden that’s — that’s a person’s position, this is a free country, but I don’t think most Americans think that that’s a definitive policy statement made by Governor Palin. And I would hope you wouldn’t, either.

Well, granted, the senator is far more accustomed to having a microphone in his face; in fact, he’s often taken advantage of its availability, although not recently.

Yet others have the sense that he would be better-served to tutor her in his facility with the media glare. They tend to believe that the McCain-Palin ticket would benefit from giving Ms. Palin almost a karaoke microphone, and that it’s been a mistake — as Mr. Romney suggested today — to keep her so bottled up that she can’t become more accustomed to the old-style, free-wheeling straight-talk. So what if she’s not a foreign policy wonk?, some ask.

In a column in The Times today, William Kristol talked about Mr. McCain’s own concerns about Governor Palin’s recent missteps, or perceived problems:

With respect to his campaign, McCain needs to liberate his running mate from the former Bush aides brought in to handle her — aides who seem to have succeeded in importing to the Palin campaign the trademark defensive crouch of the Bush White House. McCain picked Sarah Palin in part because she’s a talented politician and communicator. He needs to free her to use her political talents and to communicate in her own voice.

I’m told McCain recently expressed unhappiness with his staff’s handling of Palin. On Sunday he dispatched his top aides Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis to join Palin in Philadelphia. They’re supposed to liberate Palin to go on the offensive as a combative conservative in the vice-presidential debate on Thursday.

On the “Today” show this morning, Mr. Romney also talked about how the McCain campaign could use Ms. Palin more effectively. Citing her bad reviews after the broadcasts last week of interviews with Ms. Couric, the host Matt Lauer asked Mr. Romney whether something deeper was going on than just the fact that “the honeymoon was over,” and whether the former presidential candidate wondered if she should drop out of the race.

Mr. Romney dismissed that notion, saying Ms. Palin had executive experience as a governor and showed “great capacity.”

“And you know she’s not a lifelong politician,” he said. “She’s not the master of words that Joe Biden is. And as a result she’s going to come across like an ordinary citizen, a person of great capacity and that’s what John McCain wanted.”

Mr. Lauer also asked Mr. Romney his take on sentiments uttered earlier by Republican strategist Ed Rollins, who suggested that the McCain campaign’s decision to “put her in storage” — meaning limiting access to her through few media interviews or daily give-and-take — had broken her confidence. (That’s something Christopher Orr wrote about last week, at The New Republic: whether Ms. Palin has been so coached, and so constrained by advisers, that she had lost her own sense of self.)

Mr. Lauer’s question allowed Mr. Romney to offer advice to the McCain campaign for the next and final stage of the campaign:

“I think it’s going to be better for her to be out talking to more reporters and just being herself,” he said. “I think if you have only one or two interviews the focus goes on those and any mistake is going to be amplified dramatically. So let her get out there and be herself. And I think people will say you know, I like what I see. She’s a person who understands the needs of the American people.”

What is the McCain campaign doing about Ms. Palin in preparation for the debate on Thursday? The Wall St. Journal reported today that top aides to the campaign, like Steve Schmidt, will whisk Ms. Palin away to the senator’s home in Sedona, Ariz. for debate prep.

As for anticipating the Thursday night duel between the ever-loquacious, verbose Mr. Biden and Ms. Palin, Mr. Romney said:

“You know I think she’ll be facing in Joe Biden a veritable wall of words … But I think if you looked at her debate performance as the governor of Alaska, you’re going to see a person who can hold her own. She’s a very competent, well-spoken thoughtful individual and I think she can hold her own.

“But there’s nothing like being able to create low expectations and that’s certainly been done for her.”

Right, the problem may be, that those expectations are raining down on more fronts — and perhaps friendlier ones than on the Democratic side — than by just the McCain campaign. And not merely in the traditional parlance of an expectations game.

Curbing Their Enthusiasm

The drip, drip, drip of bad reviews keeps falling this week against Gov. Sarah Palin, whose two-day segments of interviews with CBS’ Katie Couric have weakened conservatives’ initial embrace of and enthusiasm for the vice-presidential nominee. As if Senator John McCain already hadn’t faced a rough week, which started with conservative columnist George Will bemoaning the Republican candidate’s positions on the economic bailout and suggesting Mr. McCain may be unfit to be president.

Now, conservatives had never warmed to Senator McCain this time around, but they were wowed by Mr. McCain’s selection of Ms. Palin as his running mate and at first, circled the wagons to defend her, despite her lack of foreign policy experience. She talked their values and represented small-town America, something neither ticket had offered to anyone before she surfaced.

But it seems a watershed moment occurred online earlier today when Kathleen Parker, a writer for TownHall.com, reversed her initial support for the Republican vice-presidential nominee and said Ms. Palin should drop out. Put the country first, she basically advised, by saying you need to go take care of your family first.

In a devastating assessment, Ms. Parker writes:

Palin didn’t make a mess cracking the glass ceiling. She simply glided through it.

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

And then Ms. Parker winds it up, turning the backlash against women who criticize women on its head:

If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true.

What to do?

McCain can’t repudiate his choice for running mate. He not only risks the wrath of the G.O.P.’s unforgiving base, but he invites others to second-guess his executive decision-making ability. Barack Obama faces the same problem with Biden.

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

The National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez chimed in: “I don’t know Sarah Palin. Having missed the last cruise to Alaska, I’ve actually never met her. National Review wasn’t on her list of stops this week in New York. So I can’t pretend to know what her wiring is all about. But I know I like a lot of what I’ve heard her say. I also know a lot of what I like about her could be projection. I’m not where my friend Kathleen Parker is — wanting her to step aside to spend more time with her family and Alaska — but that’s not a crazy suggestion. She’s right to say that something’s gotta change.”

Ms. Parker’s words fell like dead weight on top of earlier columns this week on the right-leaning side of the blogosphere about the McCain-Palin ticket.

In a column on Thursday, conservative Rich Lowry compared Senator McCain to the “proverbial cartoon character over the edge of the cliff, in midair, desperately flapping his arms and somehow maintaining altitude.” Mr. McCain, he continues, has been “making moves that mark him as different, but can be seen as risky or gimmicky.” One of those moves, according to Mr. Lowry, was adding Governor Palin to the Republican ticket:

Does Palin know enough to be a national candidate right now? No, but she can be mostly walled off from the press. Will attacking Obama on Fannie and Freddie open McCain to attack because one of his top aides lobbied for the organizations? Yes, but he can bulldog through it. Is going to Washington going to help much of anything? Probably not, but the symbolism matters. All the unconventional moves risk eroding McCain’s reputation as a steady hand, but the alternative is simply being overwhelmed by the gravitational pull of the public’s desire for change.

And at The American Spectator, Philip Klein twice reviewed Governor Palin’s interviews this week. At first, he said: “Her answer that not supporting a bailout could mean a Great Depression was off message and irresponsible. For the rest of the interview, it was just lots of tired cliches, and random jargon that made it seem as if she was reading off of mental index cards. I know a lot of conservatives like Sarah Palin and always rush to her defense. But it’s absolutely not meant as an insult to say that she simply is not ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

In a second take, Mr. Klein came away a little bit less judgmental about some of her answers, but said he wasn’t swayed from his evaluation that she wasn’t qualified. Still, he added: “What I am saying is that Palin is in a situation in which she has to field questions on a lot of subjects that she doesn’t know a lot about. Rather than try to spit out rehearsed lines over and over again, she would be better off, as much as possible, to speak in her own words, rooted in her own values, and sense of right and wrong.”

The Times’s David Brooks earlier challenged conservatives who were thrilled by the Palin pick, supporting her “on the grounds that something that feels so good could not possibly be wrong” — even though others have raised serious doubts about her qualifications. In his Sept. 15 column, Mr. Brooks made an argument for the importance of “prudence.” He asked:

“What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight.”

So, does Governor Palin have it? Mr. Brooks wrote: “Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.”

Michael Falcone contributed to this post.