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The cost of cramming

Thursday, October 2, 2008

TO RECALL AN OMINOUS augury, the last time I was in St Louis, venue for tonight’s Vice-Presidential Media Orgy (or “Debate”), the streets appeared to be running with blood.

It was a time, then as now, of intense election coverage (albeit purely Congressional, almost exactly two years ago) but it coincided with the St Louis Cardinals winning the World Series … and the water in Keiner Plaza’s fountains had been dyed cardinal red.

 

The memory underlines for me how gleefully a Thursday night massacre is now anticipated by so many of the commentariat. They are expecting, indeed hoping, that Sarah Palin (above left) will be led to a sanguinary slaughter.

 

It certainly won’t be pretty. Her long briefing sessions over the last week or so, first hunkered down in a Philadelphia hotel and more lately at one of John McCain’s Arizona homes, have been - if the verbal and visual evidence of her public showings is any guide - an uphill struggle for her performance coaches. Her team comes, notably, from the Karl Rove Memorial Coaching Bench, since Nicolle Wallace, her husband Mark Wallace, Steve Beigun and Tucker Eskew have all played spinning roles in George W Bush’s administrations and campaigns.

 

I happen to have spent many days (maybe far too many) in such pre-broadcast briefing rooms - usually briefing a program host or being briefed myself, but quite oftentimes briefing a politician - and I can reflect that it’s an infinitely variable process. Some minds adapt well to the fieldcraft involved, and others simply don’t.

 

Away from the teleprompter (where she does have some mastery, unlike McCain) Palin displays the kind of mind that’s hardest to brief. I’ve never really known, with others like her, whether it’s innate or the outcome of their particular form of education, but it seems that such minds can often soak up information - and may well incorporate a good memory - but still fail, especially when under stress or in fear, to organize the information in ways that produce relevant retrieval and purposeful application.

 

It's well-nigh inevitable that the outcome, in an interview or debate, should be what Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, and Palin’s one-time opponent during Alaskan gubernatorial debates, the Independent candidate Andrew Halcro, have both bluntly identified as “gibberish”.

   

 

NEVER WANTING TO APPEAR SEXIST, I’M DECLINING to post with this column the notorious video of Miss South Carolina (above right) in last year’s "Miss Teen USA" contest. However, merely parsing her sentence structure demonstrates something of what I’m talking about.

 

Here’s her much-circulated answer to one of those tiresome pageant questions, about why a fifth of Americans can’t place the USA on a global map:

 

Miss South Carolina: “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps, and I believe that our education, like such as in South Africa and the Iraq, everywhere like such as -  and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. Or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future.”

 

This panicky reaching into a grab-bag for prefabricated turns of phrase, and then retailing them in a directionless flurry, chimes closely with the jerky, terrified delivery evident in Palin’s (now also notorious) response to Katie Couric on CBS News this week:

 

Governor Palin: “We have trade missions back and forth. We -- we do -- it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where -- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to, to our state.”

 

Such a communications disaster-scene is the result, I believe (along with Palin’s own intellectual make-up, of course) of the Wallaces’ and the others’ cramming sessions. When you open a messy, over-crammed closet it’s no surprise that stuff, not always from the top shelf first, comes tumbling out messily.

 

It may be too late, but if I were briefing Palin, I would be insisting she simply abandon her desperate efforts to remember specifics … and rely instead upon generalities – even more than has been her general wont. Respond along the lines of putting down any well-pressed, pointed question with the likes of “Well we know where so-called expert opinion has gotten us with that” … “Just like the vast majority of everyday working Americans, I know what rings true and what works …" You get the picture.

 

Every piece of prep work for a television appearance, after all, revolves around the same simple, regrettably effective tactic. “Don’t answer the question – give the answer you want to give.”

   

  

 

**A RADIO DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN AIRS EVERY WEEK ON CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.

   

   

 

OBSERVERS BOTH PARTISAN AND OBJECTIVE ARE SAYING that a big responsibility lies upon moderator Gwen Ifill’s shoulders tonight.

 

When the PBS host and I talked over lunch once, the conversation inevitably turned to interviewing technique. The only other journalist at the table was the Washington Post’s legendary editor Ben Bradlee, who as a notepad-only reporter gruffly maintained that there was no such thing.

 

But when I heard that the McCain-Palin Campaign had gotten their way in negotiations - and that under tonight’s ground-rules, the time for follow-up discussion after any of Ifill’s opening questions will be strictly limited compared with how much was agreed for follow-up in the Presidential encounters - one of her sharp lunchtime observations came back to mind.

 

I had asked what she thought was the most effective kind of question to put to a politician. “The second one”, she said.

 

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