Latest Palin Gaffe: Can't Name Supreme Court Case Other Than Roe V. Wade

The Huffington Post | Rachel Weiner | September 29, 2008 06:30 PM

Today, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reported on potentially embarrassing clips of Sarah Palin being interviewed by Katie Couric that haven't yet been aired. The Politico has more information on one in particular:

Of concern to McCain's campaign, however, is a remaining and still-undisclosed clip from Palin's interview with Couric last week that has the political world buzzing.

The Palin aide, after first noting how "infuriating" it was for CBS to purportedly leak word about the gaffe, revealed that it came in response to a question about Supreme Court decisions.

After noting Roe vs. Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases.

There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather silence.

CBS: More Palin Footage Coming
There is some buzz stirring among the politically obsessed that CBS News is sitting on embarrassing segments from its interview with Gov. Sarah Palin and that the station would trot out those segments sometime this week.

The Washington Post's media reporter Howard Kurtz stoked the flames this morning when the reported in his Media Notes column:

"And the worst may be yet to come for Palin; sources say CBS has two more responses on tape that will likely prove embarrassing."
In the end, it seems, there are no saved tapes. A spokesperson for CBS, says that the station has released all of the footage from last week's interview -- in which Palin provided increasingly unsteady answers to a series of foreign policy and economic questions.

The source clarified that what Kurtz was referring to is part of the Vice Presidential Questions series with Palin and Joseph Biden which was always scheduled to air in the days before the vice presidential debate.

"The series is based on the Presidential Questions series," the source says, "in which Couric asks the candidates the same set of questions on wide range of topics from policy to character to leadership."

In addition, CBS has some new Palin content coming this evening. The cameras will be following the Alaska Governor and John McCain on the campaign trail in Ohio Monday.

Under-fire Palin preps for key debate

by Sebastian Smith
NEW YORK (AFP) - Sarah Palin spent Tuesday in Republican "boot camp" cramming for this week's vice presidential debate amid mounting concern over whether she is ready for a White House post and calls for her to quit the ticket.

The first-term governor of Alaska will face off in St Louis, Missouri, on Thursday against the Democratic vice presidential pick, veteran Senator Joseph Biden, in their sole clash ahead of the November 4 election.

With some Republicans fearing a fiasco, the telegenic but inexperienced Palin is undergoing several days of intensive debate training at the Arizona ranch of presidential nominee John McCain.

In a time-honored tradition of the White House race, Biden was also spending time off the campaign trail preparing for the key debate.

What US media dub Palin's "boot camp" will continue right through Wednesday, with senior McCain aides and former White House operatives coaching her and cramming her with facts.

McCain, 72, also sought to help Palin navigate the media minefield, chaperoning her in a new CBS interview and indicating that Palin, 44, could emulate past presidents Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.

In a joint appearance on CBS television on Monday, McCain and Palin aimed to reverse the damage done by earlier Palin interviews, widely lampooned by the popular US comedian Tina Fey on the Saturday Night Live television show.

Interviewed jointly by Katie Couric, who questioned Palin alone in the earlier sessions, McCain intervened during a difficult question about whether his running-mate had contradicted the party's platform on Pakistan.

Palin had been criticized for telling a voter at a rally that the United States should be free to launch raids inside Pakistan in search of insurgents, after McCain rebuked his Democratic opponent Barack Obama for saying the same thing, warning that it was wrong to give notice of such attacks.

But McCain blamed the controversy on what he called aggressive "gotcha" journalism and interrupted when Couric asked Palin if she was sorry for having created such a stir.

The Arizona senator pointed to other state governors who had had limited national exposure when launching their bids for the White House, yet went on to become heavyweight presidents.

"I remember that Ronald Reagan was a 'cowboy.' President Clinton was a governor of a very small state that had 'no experience'," McCain said.

Palin, a political unknown before she was picked by McCain on August 29 to be his running mate, has on the whole been kept shielded from the national media.

A devout Christian and mother-of-five who is fiercely anti-abortion and a paid-up member of the National Rifle Association, Palin electrified McCain's campaign after being plucked from the obscurity of the far north.

She became the poster girl of the Republican right at the party's convention in early September and stole Obama's thunder as the freshest face on the political landscape.

But in recent days she has faced widespread ridicule for the few interviews she has given, including for citing Alaska's proximity to Canada and Russia as giving her a solid grounding in foreign policy.

She was also unable to give a coherent answer on how to resolve the financial crisis, and her reply, almost unaltered, was mimicked by Fey in a clip that has gone viral on the Internet.

Democrats and much of the media have assailed not only Palin's alleged lack of readiness for White House duty, but McCain's lack of judgement in choosing her.

More worrying for McCain is that noted conservative figures are now joining the barrage of attacks.

Writing in the conservative National Review, columnist Kathleen Parker said Palin should step down.

"Palin's recent interviews with Charles Gibson (ABC News), Sean Hannity (Fox News) and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League," Parker wrote.

"As we've seen and heard more from John McCain's running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem," she added.

Must be moose huntin' season...

From The Huffington Post:

As the New York Times reported before Friday night's debate, Sarah Palin would not be providing post-debate spin for John McCain on the major TV networks:

After Barack Obama and John McCain stop talking on the debate stage Friday night, their surrogates will start spinning. But one high-profile supporter of Mr. McCain will be missing: his running mate Sarah Palin.[...]


Ms. Palin is scheduled to be at a debate-viewing event in Philadelphia, covered by a limited group of reporters, and she is not listed by any networks as a post-debate guest. On NBC and CBS, the former Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani will be commenting on the debate performances.


As The New Republic's Michael Crowley noted during the post-debate coverage, Palin's absence looked particularly awkward given the fact that Joe Biden was appearing all over the place:

Amusing moment on CNN just now. Wolf Blitzer, coming out of a commercial:


"We've been getting some emails from views out there wondering why we spent some time interviewing Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee and not Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee. We would have loved to interview--we'd still love to interview Sarah Palin. Unfortunately we asked, we didn't get that interview...We're hoping that Sarah Palin will join us at some point down the road."

I'm told that Biden appeared on every major network tonight except ABC (which only turned him down because Palin wasn't available, on an equal-time sort of basis).

It's pretty strange when a candidate can't trust his own running mate to be out there spinning on his behalf.

I wouldn't want her speaking on my behalf either.

well it certainly does... really??? it does?

and, is it just me, or does Katie Couric look like Dave England from "jackass"?

Ground rules set for vice presidential debate

By Robert G. Kaiser
Washington Post
Monday, September 22, 2008
Washington —- Negotiators for the campaigns of Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama agreed over the weekend on a format for the Oct. 2 debate between Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Joe Biden, resolving an issue left open in August after the campaigns settled on the structure of the three presidential debates.

Under the plan agreed to Saturday, Palin and Biden will have less time than McCain and Obama to reply to moderators’ questions and discuss each other’s answers. And Gwen Ifill of PBS, moderator of the vice presidential debate, will be given no guidelines as to subject matter, allowing her to mix in questions about foreign and domestic matters.

Both sides were reported to be satisfied with the final agreement.

The Commission on Presidential Debates, the independent nonprofit organization that manages these quadrennial events, had hoped the campaigns would agree to the same longer segments for the vice presidential aspirants that were adopted in August for the presidential debates.

But in the negotiations, the Republicans wanted to limit the amount of time available for their neophyte candidate, Palin, to be questioned on a single topic.

Democrats, meanwhile, wanted to be sure Biden and Palin spoke from lecterns rather than sitting at a table the way Vice President Dick Cheney and his rivals in 2000 (Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut) and 2004 (Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina) did.

Both sides got what they wanted. Palin and Biden will each have 90 seconds to respond to questions, with a two-minute period for discussion between the candidates to follow.

The Democrats’ desire to put the vice presidential candidates behind lecterns grew out of the 2000 and 2004 vice presidential debates, when the candidates sat close to each other behind the same table. Cheney had the upper hand in both debates, said several Democrats involved in the debate process, in part because the setting made it difficult if not impossible for Lieberman and Edwards to go after Cheney aggressively.

Whether that was because of the setting or because the two Democrats wanted to avoid confrontation is a matter still disputed by participants.

Women Against Sarah Palin Speak Out

added September 11, 2008

ABC News' Julia Hoppock reports: With recent polls suggesting that women are flocking to the McCain/Palin ticket, there is a growing chorus of female voices who want to put a stop to this trend, and fast.

Two women in New York felt so strongly that Palin was the wrong choice they created a blog called "Women Against Sarah Palin" and are using the site to post emails from women who write in from all over the country about why they think Palin is the wrong choice as for Vice President and the wrong choice for American women.

"We felt as though McCain's choice was this kind of way to automatically grab female voters and we found that assumption was very insulting to our intelligence as female voters in America," said Lyra Kilston, a 31 year old art magazine editor in New York who helped create the blog.

Shortly after Palin's selection, Kilston and her co-worker Quinn Latimer, citing what they saw as 'mounting disbelief, fury and dread' among their female friends over the selection of Sarah Palin, sent out an email to forty of their friends soliciting reaction the Alaska Governor's nomination for their blog. The women also asked the recipients to forward the email to everyone they knew so that others could do the same.

Within a week they received up to 80,000 responses from women from Alaska to Florida, and now estimate they are receiving response emails at a rate of three per second.

"I don't think either of us thought it would get this large or it would reach this many people," said Latimer.

While the Kilston's and Latimer's blog has gained a lot of traction, polls reflect that Palin is viewed favorably by those in her peer group. A recent ABC News Washington Post poll found that 67 percent of white women viewed Palin favorably.

The two women take issue with Palin's stance on abortion rights, (she is anti-abortion rights) her and views on climate change, (Palin has said she does not believe that global warming is man made) and what they perceive as a lack of experience.

Consider the source...

Is Sarah Palin the new Dick Cheney?
Dick Cheney: 'no reason' Sarah Palin can't be vice president

Dick Cheney, arguably the most powerful vice president in history, told reporters today that he "loved" Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's speech to the GOP last week, especially the line about how a hockey mom (oops...we called her a soccer mom in an earlier version) is a pit bull with lipstick.

During a stop in Rome on his return from a trip to Georgia and Europe that took him out of the country during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., Cheney called Palin's appearance there "superb." Asked if she could handle the vice presidency in a John McCain administration, Cheney said:

Everybody brings a different set of experiences to the office and also has a different kind of understanding with whoever the president is. Each administration is different. And there's no reason why Sarah Palin can't be a successful vice president in a McCain administration.

Although it wouldn't look like other recent Republican administrations -- Cheney cited his own under George W. Bush, Dan Quayle's under George H.W. Bush and Nelson Rockefeller's under Gerald R. Ford -- the current vice president said a Palin term would be "relatively unique to this president and this time that they're in office."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was more circumspect. In an interview with CNN over the weekend after her trip to Libya, Rice said Palin "gave a terrific speech." But the secretary declined to play when it came to questions concerning the Alaska governor's experience in foreign affairs. "These are decisions that Sen. McCain has made," she said. "I have great confidence in him."

Rice said it would not be appropriate for her, as secretary of State, to get involved in the election, and that she would be "the last" person to advise Palin as she prepares for her debate against Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Pressed on the experience question, Rice added, "There are different kinds of experience in life that help one to deal with matters of foreign policy."
-- Johanna Neuman