Couric Interviews Palin II: Ramble On

You can view part I here. As I watched this I was wondering if perhaps McCain had made a bet with Palin about how many prepared talking points she could squeeze into an answer regardless of the question asked; see if you can decipher her answer for why we're bailing out the corporate financial lenders but not average Americans who have gotten themselves into the same predicament (you can read my take on this situation from last April when we first started to see signs of this impending disaster):

The consensus around the blogosphere seems to be that Palin is getting progressively worse at answering basic policy questions as the race continues. My theory is that she's been pumped so full of information and facts by the McCain campaign over the past several weeks that she is now having trouble dredging up the correct talking points in a coherent and timely manner, making her seem as if she's searching for an answer while talking about anything at all to fill time. Rod Dreher at Beliefnet.com, an enthusiastic Palin supporter as recently as last week, sums up Palin's performance in her second real interview thusly:

Couric's questions are straightforward and responsible. Palin is mediocre, again, regurgitating talking points mechanically, not thinking. Palin's just babbling. She makes George W. Bush sound like Cicero.

Another thought (and this is the one that makes me feel some sympathy for her) is that she's obviously in over her head here and she knows it. She's finding herself surrounded by foreign leaders and seasoned political figures all while under a media microscope that pales in comparison to anything she's experienced in Alaska, and it's becoming more apparent to her how unprepared she is for this job every time she has to answer questions, hence the continued lack of an unstructured press conference a full four weeks after her debut. A smarter politician would have thought of these things beforehand and not agreed to something that put them so obviously out of their depth but the blame for this irresponsible choice ultimately lies with John McCain. He took a huge gamble by tapping Palin as his running mate and now it seems that the odds are clearly stacked against them both.