Palin the Sportscaster

The VP debate was a pretty drab, empty affair for me, all I got from it was the body-language, and I'm not the only one; Roger Ebert:

"Listening to her voice, you could also sense when she felt she'd survived the deep waters of improvisation and was climbing onto the shore of talking points. When she was on familiar ground, she perked up, winked at the audience two or three times, and settled with relief into the folksiness that reminds me strangely of the characters in "Fargo.""

And Jonathan Raban:

"Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all as familiar and well-worn as old pennies. Given any question, she reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile. In the televised game shows that pass for political debates in the US, it’s a winning technique: told that she has 15 seconds in which to answer, Palin invariably beats the clock, and her concision and fluency more than compensate for her unrelenting triteness."

I couldnt get the image of Palin the Sportscaster out of my mind. Trained in that infuriating American TV habit of addressing the camera rather than the human-being they are ostensibly talking to. A dead-eyed, condescending and phoney habit I've loathed since I watched British presenters struggle with it during our coverage there of American football.

Palin treated the debate as she would a sportscast, her at-hand clutch of empty sporting cliches replaced with a clutch of empty, trite soundbites about the 'media' or 'hockey-moms' or 'mavericks'.