Lloyd Garver: Sarah Again

by Lloyd Garver [courtesy of Politics on HuffingtonPost.com]

Sarah Palin is the hired gun for John McCain. Seems like she'll go anywhere to be the "attack dog" as they say in politics. Some of the things that she says are pretty startling. The rest are just ridiculous.

She was quoted the other day in the New York Times as saying, "I was reading my copy of today's New York Times and I was interested to read about Barack's friends from Chicago." Right there, we've got a credibility problem. First of all, she was quoted as saying "reading," not "readin'." Next you'll notice that she was quoted as saying, "my" 'New York Times.'" Do you really think that Sarah Palin gets the "New York Times?"

If she did, don't you think that would've been one of the newspapers she could've come up with when Katie Couric asked her what she reads? You betcha it wouldda been.

So now, she's leading the attack, talking about a '60s radical who performed his terrorist acts when Barack Obama was eight years old. Seem like a bit of a stretch to you?

But I have a theory about what Governor Palin says and how she says it: she's doing it on purpose. Ever since her debate with Joe Biden come up the networks have been rerunning it, much like Law and Order or Wings." For me, it's like seeing an accident on the highway. I know I shouldn't look, but I can't help looking for a moment.

Now that I've seen her performance in rerun, it seems even more extreme, more exaggerated than it did on Debate Night. Her poor grammar, her poor diction, and her poor sentence structure are just too over the top. Here's the suspicious aspect of that: she had a great deal of time to prepare for her debate, she had some very smart people helping her, and she clearly practiced her lines. Don't you think, if they wanted to, those people could have told her the proper way to pronounce "nuclear?" Don't you think they could have told her how to say words that end in "ing?" You're gosh-darn right they could have.

So, here's my theory: they want her to sound like that -- not just like you and me, but dumber than you and me! They think this will endear her to voters.

Does this kind of thing really work in politics? Well, it worked for George W. Bush for six or seven years.

Now, some of you might think I'm being partisan in all this. Absolutely not! Believe me, the next time that Joe Biden attacks John McCain because of somebody that he knows or the next time Biden talks in a way that's a poor example for America's schoolchildren, I'll criticize the Republicans, too.

In addition to writing television shows and columns, Lloyd Garver has read many books, some of them in hardcover. He can be reached at lloydgarver@gmail.com. Check out his website at lloydgarver.comand his podcasts at iTunes.