This sounds familiar...

I think there is a scandal in the works with the McCain campaign botching around with CBS' Katie Couric. Here is one part of the interview:



There are two primary points to make here:

• Everyone is waiting to see what McCain does? Where did she get this idea? It's laughable that she can't back it up either.
  
• She has no idea what contributions McCain has made towards corporate/finance de/regulation.
  

I think Shakes is right when she says that Palin "just doesn't know policy at all" because "she's never had to be a doctrinaire Republican. Until now." And it's proving to make her look like an idiot (I don't agree with Shakes that she isn't stupid, as you can see).

Here's the next train wreck:


Watch CBS Videos Online

So she still doesn't know how being able to see Russia from her backyard counts as foreign policy experience. We aren't surprised.

Defenders don't think it matters, or try to distract us elsewhere. For example, another of the videos of this interview is titled as "Sarah Palin interview with Katie Couric (liberal activist) on CBS Evening News," as if being a liberal activist makes this interview unimportant or irrelevant. But, regardless of whether or not Couric is liberal, her questions are perfectly softball. "Isn't that a conflict of interest?", "Explain what you meant by being able to see Russia from Alaska is foreign policy experience," "What is an example of McCain leading the way with regulation?" - they're all pretty simple. The same was true with the ABC Charles Gibson interview. And expecting a straight answer, even a simple yes or no, is not being liberal - I should hope that Fox News would expect the same straight answers. But the reason Palin couldn't answer simple questions well is that the simplest answer would have to be an honest one, and being honest is not what McCain's campaign is about. Being honest would mean that Palin would have had to say, yes, that is a conflict of interest, I don't have any other foreign policy experience, there are no examples of McCain leading the way against deregulation. But that would not be politically expedient, of course, and so that means she needs to talk herself through it, and she certainly does not do that with the veteranship that McCain speaks with when asked these types of uncomfortable questions.

After this fiasco, McCain was supposed to appear with on the Late Show with David Letterman (also a CBS show), but he canceled at the very last second, saying that he had to jump a plane to DC to help with the economic crisis. That's fine, I suppose, but Letterman did point out, in his show, that in this sort of a situation, shouldn't it be Palin's job to continue to campaign while McCain is serving the Senate, particularly since she isn't a member of Congress? But from interviews like the above, it's pretty easy to see why McCain campaign staff practically barricade her from reporters.

But here comes the twist: McCain appeared on Katie Couric's show at the same scheduled time he was supposed to appear with Letterman, and he didn't leave for Washington DC until the next morning. Poor Mr. Letterman. Some are speculating that this interview was meant as damage control, and it certainly went a lot better than Palin's interview with Couric. It's too bad he nominated a VP that needs so much babysitting.

Now, compare those videos to this one, as commenter dannybauder pointed out in this MyDD story about the latter video:



I guess Palin's former beauty queen is shining brighter than her future vice president.