Thursday, September 11, 2008

The Sarah Palin interview

 

I just watched Charlie Gibson's interview with Sarah Palin. My prediction is that those who like her will think she did very well and those who don't will think she was awful. And those who don't already have a strong opinion will think she did reasonably well and that Charlie Gibson didn't do all that great.

Here are excerpts from ABC.

Gibson went after her lack of experience and she defended her experience as best she could. It's obviously her weak spot and there's not much she can do to augment it and so she needs to spin it as best she can. She talked about her experience dealing with energy and connected energy to our national security which is exactly correct, but doesn't replace experience with foreign policy. Gibson asks her about whether she had traveled abroad and she hadn't except going to Mexico and Canada except for her trip to visit the Alaskan National Guard serving in Kuwait. I just wonder how any one's opinion of her would be changed if she had backpacked through Europe 20 years ago or toured Asia or Africa. Would those who despise her as a provincial then cut her some slack? I doubt it.

He asks her if she had any self doubts when John McCain asked her to run with him. She denied it. There are those who will find that hubristic. I wonder if Charlie Gibson ever asked Barack Obama if he had any self doubts when he declared for the presidency after just a couple of years in the Senate. Besides, that wasn't the point when she would have had doubts. I would imagine that the moment for the doubts is when she's asked to fill out the information for the vetting that the McCain committee did on her. Or when she was interviewed or when she was asked to fly out to Arizona for that talk with McCain. At those earlier points she had to decide if she really felt she was up to being vice president. And then once she answered that question, she would go forward. Maybe there are some who would criticize her for not continuing to torment herself over this, but most politicians have a monumental confidence in themselves. That's why they run for election to begin with.

What is really shameful is the way that Charlie Gibson deliberately truncated her words in this exchange.

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God." Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN: You know, I don't know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON: Exact words.

Nope, those weren't her exact words. Allahpundit points out how Gibson left out the key words that change the whole meaning of what she said. Here is what she actually said:

“Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God,” she exhorted the congregants. “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.”

It is clear when you read the whole quote is that the predicate for the part Gibson quoted is her exhortation to pray that this was so. In the interview she corrects Gibson and points out that she was modeling her prayer on what Abraham Lincoln had once said.

PALIN: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln's words when he said -- first, he suggested never presume to know what God's will is, and I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words.

But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that's a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side.

That's what that comment was all about, Charlie.

But then Gibson continues with his deliberate truncation of her words.

GIBSON: I take your point about Lincoln's words, but you went on and said, "There is a plan and it is God's plan."

As Allahpundit demonstrated, the Associated Press was the first to play this little game. Either Gibson didn't do his own research and just relied on the AP or he chose to mislead the nation by distorting her words to make it seem as if she thinnks that she knows God's plans and that the war in Iraq is part of that plan. Just the perception of religiosity that gives so many people the heebie jeebies. I tend to think it was a deliberate distortion since, in the interview, they even showed that her words were on youtube so obviously someone had had to listen to the full context. Shame on Charlie Gibson for that.

Here is the Lincoln quote that she referenced.

“Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right”

Sounds good to me.

The weakest point for her was I thought when she didn't seem to know what the term "Bush Doctrine" refers to. She asked Gibson what he meant and he just said that it was what Bush had said in 2002. She then spoke about Bush's worldview but Gibson was , of course, getting at Bush's statement that we had the right to take preemptive military action to protect our security from the threat of terrorism.

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?

PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?

GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be?

PALIN: His world view.

GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.

PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.

He then goes on to press her about crossing into Pakistan

GIBSON: Do we have the right to be making cross-border attacks into Pakistan from Afghanistan, with or without the approval of the Pakistani government?

PALIN: Now, as for our right to invade, we're going to work with these countries, building new relationships, working with existing allies, but forging new, also, in order to, Charlie, get to a point in this world where war is not going to be a first option. In fact, war has got to be, a military strike, a last option.

GIBSON: But, Governor, I'm asking you: We have the right, in your mind, to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government.

PALIN: In order to stop Islamic extremists, those terrorists who would seek to destroy America and our allies, we must do whatever it takes and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.

GIBSON: And let me finish with this. I got lost in a blizzard of words there. Is that a yes? That you think we have the right to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government, to go after terrorists who are in the Waziristan area?

PALIN: I believe that America has to exercise all options in order to stop the terrorists who are hell bent on destroying America and our allies. We have got to have all options out there on the table.

"Blizzard of words?" Gibson better not interview Joe Biden if he gets loss in a one-sentence blizzard.

The other news coming out of the interview is that she supports bringing both Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. Gibson then asks her if the U.S. would then have to go to war to defend Georgia if Russia attacked them.

GIBSON: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn't we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?

PALIN: Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.

But NATO, I think, should include Ukraine, definitely, at this point and I think that we need to -- especially with new leadership coming in on January 20, being sworn on, on either ticket, we have got to make sure that we strengthen our allies, our ties with each one of those NATO members.

We have got to make sure that that is the group that can be counted upon to defend one another in a very dangerous world today.

GIBSON: And you think it would be worth it to the United States, Georgia is worth it to the United States to go to war if Russia were to invade.

PALIN: What I think is that smaller democratic countries that are invaded by a larger power is something for us to be vigilant against. We have got to be cognizant of what the consequences are if a larger power is able to take over smaller democratic countries.

And we have got to be vigilant. We have got to show the support, in this case, for Georgia. The support that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to.

It doesn't have to lead to war and it doesn't have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.

His mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming from and through Russia, that's a dangerous position for our world to be in, if we were to allow that to happen.

That is what being in NATO means. It's a defensive alliance. She's exactly right there. It doesn't mean that the only reaction would be war, but that that would be an option. Tom Maguire has the specific words from the NATO treaty. And Mark Hemingway points out that both Obama and Biden support bringing Georgia into NATO. Biden even co-authored an editorial with Senator Lugar criticizing the NATO members who blocked extending Member Action Plans to begin to admit Georgia and Ukraine into the treaty organization.

The trans-Atlantic community must understand that Russia's actions are not directed solely at Georgia. They are also aimed squarely at NATO itself, whose peaceful expansion Russia has long opposed. Russia hopes to instigate confrontational responses and prolong the territorial crisis to further complicate Georgia's NATO aspirations.

America and its allies must not fall into this trap. Georgia has done its part by refusing to overreact and continues to seek a diplomatic solution. The time has come for the trans-Atlantic community to show unity and commitment. The administration should seek and our NATO allies should provide commitments to offer MAPs to Georgia and Ukraine at the next NATO meeting in December.

So all four candidates for the national offices agree on this. I don't see any big news that Palin agrees with them. Of course, ABC first hyped her remarks to make it seem that she has jumped right away to saying that she's willing to go to war over Georgia.

Overall, I think she did just fine, especially considering that this was her first such interview on foreign relations. She actually comes across smoother than Obama does in some of his interviews. But I'm sure that people's reactions will be totally colored by the opinions they had already formed of her.

This interview was interesting becaues it was the first. If she starts doing them regularly, it will all seem rather unimportant a few weeks from now.

One more note on this whole experience debate over Governor Palin's experience in foreign policy. Perhaps the McCain campaign would like to dig out this 2007 quote from Senator Barack Obama about his experience compared to senators who have been much longer on the Foreign Relations Committee.

I'm on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where I serve with a number of Senators who are widely regarded as leading experts on foreign policy -- and I can tell you that I know as much about foreign policy at this point as most of them.

If he could get up to speed and know more than senators who had been on the committee so much longer, including Joe Biden, after just the short time he'd been in the Senate for only a short time before he decided to run for the president, I would guess that any intelligent person can get up to speed.

UPDATE: Katharine Q. Seelye in the New York Times notes that ABC misled us about what Palin had said.

The network teased the interview on its Web site this afternoon with this eye-popping bulletin: “Exclusive: Gov. Sarah Palin warns war may be necessary if Russia invades another country.”

But the transcript showed that she was merely repeating Mr. McCain’s position and had not used provocative language. And we’re wondering if the McCain camp is reconsidering its selection of ABC, since it hyped the teaser to sound like Ms. Palin was ready to press the button.

H/t Jennifer Rubin

And John Podhoretz points out that, despite his time for preparation, Gibson did make a mistake about when Bush enunciated the doctrine of preemption.

For the record, when a distressed friend called to say he was made nervous by her failure to identify the Bush Doctrine off the bat, I had to stop for a moment and think about it because I wasn’t instantly sure whether the Bush Doctrine was the policy of preemption or the democratization of Arab lands. And I wrote an entire book about the Bush presidency. She answered it, after a pause, by assuming it was the “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” line Bush promulgated right after 9/11.

It turns out Charlie Gibson meant the preemption doctrine — but then, he didn’t know what he was talking about either, since he told her in the weirdly patronizing voice in which he interviewed her that it was enunciated in September 2002.

The doctrine of preemption was, in fact, enunciated in June 2002 at West Point; September 2002 was when Bush declared Saddam Hussein in violation of 16 U.N. resolutions and declared that it was the responsibility of the U.N. to unseat him.

But Gibson is not running for vice president, Palin is, and her difficulty in fielding the question was her first moment of uncertainty in nearly two weeks.

UPDATE II: Andrew McCarthy is also not worried that she wasn't sure what Gibson was referring to when he asked about the Bush Doctrine since he believes that people who immerse themselves in this subject can disagree about what it actually is.

Peanut gallery denizens like me, who don't have states to run and who follow this stuff very closely, disagree intensely among ourselves about what the Bush Doctrine is.

To take just one example, the eminent Norman Podhoretz and I have strongly disagreed about it: Norman says the promotion of democracy has always been an essential element; I think it's been at best a subordinate element and that the real Bush Doctrine simply holds that terror sponsoring states will be treated exactly as terrorists (i.e., open themselves up to attack) if they don't convincingly foreswear terrorism. Norman may very well be right — he backs his argument up with lots of statements by the president. But the point is that reasonable, informed minds can differ.

Gibson homed in on preemptive attacks — in the tone of "Oh, you didn't know the Bush Doctrine was all about the right to attack preemptively." I would dispute the premise that the Bush Doctrine is necessarily about preemptive attacks. The right of preemptive attack is an element of the right of self-defense, which is a natural right of states and was a bedrock of international law before there ever was a Bush Doctrine. News Flash for you Democrats and media types out there: About 40 years before there was a Bush Doctrine, JFK was relying on the self-defense right of preemptive attack during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Bush Doctrine, technically, is not asserting a right of preemptive attack. It is saying that if Country A facilitates terror, it is responsible for that terrorist organization's strikes, and therefore we can attack Country A. That is not preemptive; it is retributive.

It was utterly reasonable for Gov. Palin to press Charlie Gibson on what Gibson meant by the Bush Doctrine. Everyone does not mean the same thing by the term, there is lots of good faith argument about what it means, and — because the administration itself has only half-heartedly adhered to it — there is also the confusion between theory and practice.

When in doubt - go to Wikipedia which right in the first sentence says that it refers to "various related foreign policy principles." So it doesn't seem so outlandish that she would ask him for clarification of what he had in mind when he asked the question.

Labels: Media, Sarah Palin

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