I've now seen much of the Katie Couric / Sarah Palin interview...

James Fallows
Atlantic
26 Sep 2008

... and I genuinely feel sorry for Palin. This really is pathetic. Again it's not a mass/elite matter. Anyone who has been to high school immediately recognizes the terror of facing a pop quiz or an oral exam when you just have no idea what you're talking about.

One hour after her pick was announced, I wrote here:

Let's assume that Sarah Palin is exactly as smart and disciplined as Barack Obama. But instead of the year and a half of nonstop campaigning he has behind him, and Joe Biden's even longer toughening-up process, she comes into the most intense period of the highest stakes campaign with absolutely zero warmup or preparation. If she has ever addressed an international issue, there's no evidence of it in internet-land.

The smartest person in the world could not prepare quickly enough to know the pitfalls, and to sound confident while doing so, on all the issues she will be forced to address...

So the prediction is: unavoidable gaffes. The challenge for the McCain-Palin campaign is to find some way to defuse them ahead of time, since Socrates, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz reincarnated would themselves make errors in her situation. And the challenge for Democrats is to lead people to think, What if she were in charge?, without being bullies about it.

My for-the-sake-of-argument assumption was unwarranted. She is not as smart or disciplined as Barack Obama. If she were, she would sound better than she does at this point. And the McCain team has done absolutely nothing to defuse these problems -- nor, to be honest, has Palin herself apparently learned the first thing about successfully finessing questions she is not ready to handle. (Hint: the approach is not the one she has tried to apply with Katie Couric, that of repeating verbatim the answer that did not do the job the first time around.)

(Continued here.)