Sarah Palin: The Morning After
This entirely misses the point. The issue isn’t that Palin has speechwriters, because clearly they all do. The issue is that Republicans (and some parts of the media) are expecting this single, individual speech to do astonishing amounts of heavy lifting for McCain and Palin, as if her ability to “execute” on this speech somehow counters all the concerns about her inexperience, lack of foreign policy point of view and utterly wacko viewpoints on most domestic issues. The point of pointing out that she had a speechwriter is simply to concretize what last night’s “accomplishment” really was - she read a speech. She read it well, but the notion that by itself this speech somehow blows away all the reasons people think she’s unqualified or crazy is really quite silly.It’s absolutely amazing to read how many people want to denigrate Sarah Palin’s performance last night by noting that she didn’t write her speech. Anyone who says this must be terribly, terribly ignorant of the last several decades of political speech making. We’ve not had one nominee of a political party who didn’t employ speech writers for at least two generations.
Speech writer Jon Favreau writes Barack Obama’s speeches, including that famous speech on race that many people found so inspiring. Joe Biden has writers. John McCain has writers. Every major presidential hopeful, with the exception of Pat Buchanan, has used speech writers.
Feel free to decry the rise of professionally written speeches if you like. Bemoan the ubiquitous use of teleprompters. But doing so only in relation to Palin smacks of pretext. When you’re grasping for a way to insult the woman for doing something that everyone else does, you are implicitly admitting that this isn’t what bothers you at all. It’s simply a convenient way to attack her without getting explicit about what really bothers you.
I’ll note that it’s politically unwise for those who aren’t looking forward to a John McCain presidency to resort to pretextual attacks on the process that produced last night. It looks petty and deceptive. In the end it will only help the McCain-Palin ticket.
