The McCain-Palin team is taking some heat this week and the back-and-forth with the media during Palin's meetings with foreign leaders yesterday really didn't help matters. Today's buzz: Is anyone buying the Palin-foreign policy crash course?
Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic blasts the media for not taking a hard-line on what he dubs sexist treatment of Sarah Palin by the McCain campaign. Every presidential candidate should be open to taking questions from the press. Take-away: "Fight back, you hacks!"
And a quick take-away from Jimmy Orr in the Christian Science Monitor about the media stonewalling and subsequent standoff: "It was like the Old West. Just like the scene from Tombstone when Doc Holliday meets Johnny Ringo."
Palin has sort of answered to the media, writes Ruth Marcus in the WaPo, but she floundered then too. During an interview with Hannity on Fox Palin was like a polar bear "jumping from rhetorical ice floe to ice floe," she writes. Take-away: "There's no Palin interview I've listened to ... that gave me the sense that she had anything but a millimeter-thin understanding of the issues."
The NYT's Maureen Dowd isn't buying Palin's foreign-policy-via-osmosis either, especially her sit-down with Kissinger. Take-away: "The two made an odd couple: the last impure Rockerfeller Republican and the first pure Rovian Republican, grown totally in the petri dish of cultural crusaderism."
John Baer in the Philly Daily News disagrees. He writes that the candidates have taken campaigning more seriously in the wake of the economic crisis. Take-away: "Voters, even mainstream media, seem (for the first time) focused on the actual issues."
Palin has more in common with the old guard in D.C. than she thinks, editorializes USA Today. The resistance by Washington to the investigation into the firing of U.S. attorneys is not unlike the stonewalling lawmakers face in the Troopergate probe. Take-away: "Citizens in Alaska and elsewhere deserve to learn them to determine whether there was any misconduct."
McCain has a problem telling the truth, writes Jonathan Chait in The New Republic. Take-away: "[T]he defining trait of his candidacy turns out to be a postmodern disdain for truth."
And last, the Economist invites the world to vote.
