definitions

I wonder if there is anything the McCain campaign can do to pull Sarah Palin out of the “brainless twit” category at this point… This skit was hilarious, and I totally agree that she came off terribly in that interview, but I’ve seen other interviews with her, before she was in the national spotlight, where she had her act more together – usually about oil, where she knew her schtick better, I guess. Still, clearly she’s able to pull together the right sentences under some conditions, so her inability to get things right in the few occasions where she’s had a national interview seem like partly nervousness, partly inexperience, partly poor preparation, but perhaps overall placing so much importance on so few appearances… As The Daily Show pointed out the other day, Joe Biden has been making his standard blunders, but no one’s paid any attention to it recently… he’s off the front page ’cause there’s bigger fish to fry.

But once things are defined as a joke, it can be hard to change the meaning. That line about Alaska’s proximity to Russia has been completely defined in the media, for instance, and there’s no use in anyone in the Palin camp trying to defend it at this point; it’s marked out as a joke, and there really isn’t any hope for them of reclaiming it, I don’t think. That ship has sailed. And I’m not interested in defending her on it, myself. I don’t think Sarah Palin has foreign policy experience or would make a good president, as must be obvious from previous entries. But it’s not as if the claim were as silly as saying that her name begins with the same letter as Putin’s, or something.

Politics is based on geography, even in the 21st century. Europe is more tentative and concerned about the middle east because it’s right there, for them. America ignores much of what happens on the other side of the planet because it is physically distant. No matter how much we rely on virtual space and immediate contact through technology, physical proximity is still a primary component of our interactions, and nowhere more so than in the boundaries between nations.

Now, this doesn’t mean that someone dealing with the simple issues of border patrol between countries is going to know anything about complicated negotiations of heads of state. In this sense, it’s a little like a carpenter claiming that she does have training in geometry – in one sense, sure, there’s a basic understanding of lines and angles, and perhaps a stronger, more direct and material understanding at that, but in another, the complex logic and understanding of mathematical principles is not reached.

In the same sense that a carpenter is not a sophisticated geometer, so an executive of a state that shares borders with foreign nations is not a sophisticated foreign policy expert. They must be familiar with certain basics to do their job, but they needn’t be aware of deeper analyses. But Palin would occasionally have to deal with the borders of her state, and these were shared by foreign nations, so mocking the very idea that this had any meaning at all just sort of irks me. It reminds me a bit of when the Daily Show made fun of the line about the internet being “a series of tubes” as if it were just the silliest thing ever, and then some weeks later they had to run a cable between the daily show and colbert report, and they apparently saw the 3-block line themselves, and were sort of amazed how the connection between them was just this… tube…

Anyway. It will be interesting to see what happens in the debate on Thursday, if preconceptions are matched or altered at all.

Tags: foreign policy biden, palin, politics, preconceptions