Palin’s “Oops!” (Updated)

Posted on September 12th, 2008 by ecthompson md

No matter what you think of Governor Sarah Palin, no matter if you are a Republican or a Democrat, you have to say that her overall performance in her exclusive ABC interview with Charlie Gibson was adequate until she got to the Bush doctrine question. She had absolutely no idea what the Bush doctrine was. If there is a legacy the Bush presidency, it would probably be this doctrine. President Bush has said that we have the right to preemptively strike any country we deem a “significant” threat.

I thought she was prepped for this interview. The majority of the interview was exactly as we would’ve expected. She was strong and forceful. She was aggressive. She was somewhat demeaning when she said the word “Charlie.”

Political Animal has a few thoughts:

There are more than a few angles to consider, so let’s just take this one at a time. As Hilzoy noted last night, and as the video to the right shows, Palin doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the Bush Doctrine is. Literally, not a clue about the guiding U.S. foreign policy principle of the last seven years. When she tried to fudge it, her ignorance on the issue was even more glaring.

Second, she really didn’t want to answer an important question about U.S. strikes in Pakistan. It’s not like this was a curveball — the issue was in yesterday’s New York Times. Eventually, after trying to wiggle out of the question, Palin eventually seemed to support unilateral strikes, which contradicts the stated McCain policy.

Third, Palin believes Russia was “unprovoked” in its military incursion against Georgia. That’s just wrong. He has more here.

Newshoggers has labeled Governor Palin possibly most dangerous woman in the world (sounds like a James Bond title):

She is a novelty act not a serious candidate. The only question is if the novelty will fade before November.

About a week ago we found out that Gov. Sarah Palin had the ability to read the teleprompter. Last night, we found out that her depth of ignorance on a variety of topics was mind-boggling. I look for the McCain camp to hit ABC News and Charlie Gibson, this morning for his “unfair” questions and disrespectful tone. This is in spite of the fact that Charlie Gibson is the most sympathetic of the major anchors to the Republican party, in my opinion. It appears in fact that he even tried to help Sarah Palin and several of the questions especially on the Bush doctrine.

Update from ThinkProgress.org:

While Gibson did not get the Bush Doctrine wholly correct, he was at least on the right track. In fact, the Bush Doctrine is predicated on “preventive war” not “preemptive war” — a sharp distinction in which the former justifies launching war in an attempt to “prevent” a threat from emerging (i.e. the Iraq war), while in the latter case, the threat has already materialized.

“Preemptive war” is, as Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) once observed, something “the global community is generally tolerant of,” while “preventive attacks” — a policy that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has not rejected — “have generally been condemned.”

Indeed, as Matt Yglesias notes, Bush and McCain agree that the U.S. has “the right to use military force unilaterally even where there isn’t an imminent threat” and that “Palin’s view is sensible, so it would be interesting to learn her opinion of her running mate’s much less sensible view.”

Tags: Election 2008 // 2 Comments »

  • margaret

    She is another Dick Cheney. Mean only cares about her self interests. Salon had some good questions they wanted to ask her. Maybe someone will ask them and publish the answers.

  • Chris

    Doc:

    In the Washington Post today, Charles Krauthammer has a column discussing this very issue. Quoting him:

    There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

    He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?”

    She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?”

    Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”

    Wrong.

    I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,” I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine.

    Krauthammer concludes:

    Yes, Sarah Palin didn’t know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn’t pretend to know — while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and “sounding like an impatient teacher,” as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes’ reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.

    Full Article:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/12/AR2008091202457_pf.html

    How would YOU describe the “Bush Doctrine”, Doc?

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