Conor Friedersdorf notes the irony that Palin’s fans are thrilling over a single appearance on television (just as they thrilled to her earlier convention speech when it was broadcast on television), even though their main charge against him was that he put too much store by her appearances on television when making his claim that she was unqualified.  Of course, this charge, which has also been directed against Rod and Ross for their criticisms, is ridiculous on its face.  Now we are supposed to believe that after one debate outing Palin has changed her image, but what this means is that it is only a superficial change of this kind that was possible and confirms that no substantive improvement has occurred.  The view that her critics are judging her hastily and superficially is quite pervasive, though, so it needs to be put to rest once and for all.  Most of Palin’s conservative critics, including Conor, Rod and Ross, are fundamentally sympathetic to what she was supposed to represent on the ticket.  They very much wished she could have risen to the occasion and I think to some degree they were all rooting for her to succeed.  Then she failed, and they could not simply pretend that this had not happened.  The word that was used to describe Palin early on was promising, and so she was, and then the appropriate word to describe her later was disappointing, because it was inescapable that she was also that. 

The counterargument against them is essentially this: 1) her sympathetic critics have put too much store by superficial television appearances (as opposed to deeply serious convention speeches!) and 2) they have ignored her “record of accomplishment.”  What is amazing is that the debate last night, which supposedly vindicates Palin fans, confirmed that the best she can muster are heavily scripted, cliche-ridden, talking point-rich performances with the occasional zinger thrown in.  The debate format was deliberately crafted by the campaign to ensure that her weaknesses in handling challenging questions and follow-up questions, which I noted earlier, were concealed.  Even so, she evaded many questions (Politico counted ten) and turned to her rehearsed attacks at random moments.  She cannot be blamed for not knowing that civilian casualties from NATO airstrikes have been a major political problem in the Afghan war or that this reliance on air power stems directly from our lack of ground forces in the country, because I’m sure her handlers were never going to brief her on the existence of civilian casualties in a war zone.  For the Scheunemanns and Bieguns of the world, these casualties either don’t exist or are irrelevant.  Regardless, her clear lack of knowledge about a critical detail concerning one of the two combat theaters where American soldiers are fighting today would, were she not a Republican, be considered among conservatives automatically disqualifying and a cause for ridicule from now until eternity.  Obviously, had Biden made an error of this magnitude he would be attacked as unfit–and rightly so.  It can be no less disqualifying with Palin.

Now let’s go back and revisit her record that makes her fans so proud.  She left Wasilla under a staggering debt of $20 million and badly mishandled the construction of the athletic facility that the city took on this debt to build.  Her main accomplishments in her short tenure as governor have been to raise taxes on oil companies, which was more likely to discourage development and thus directly contradicted her fantastical claim of facilitating chimerical energy independence, and to negotiate a pipeline that cannot be built without the cooperation of the same oil companies that she has deliberately antagonized.  Under her administration Alaska now takes fewer federal dollars for earmark projects than under Murkowski, but it is still the highest per capita recipient of earmarked funds in the country.  She “killed” the so-called Bridge to Nowhere after she had supported it during her campaign and only when it had become an unworkable project after federal money was no longer earmarked for it.  On her watch, she has increased spending considerably, as I suppose you might expect from a petro-state flush with revenues, and she had bought the love of the people with rebates from the revenues raised by that new tax, but she is not really much of the reformer that she has been made out to be.  Of course, it is hard to know whether she could have accomplished more had she not been taken from her job after just a year and a half, but her actual record as of now is both thin and unremarkable. 

I rehash all of this not to dwell on Palin’s problems, which are increasingly irrelevant as McCain heads towards defeat, but to implore conservatives to stop ignoring reality just because they happen to like a candidate’s personality and biography.  Besides being bad for the quality of conservative thought, it embraces the caricature that conservatives are indifferent to knowledge and have no use for expertise, which has become an all too legitimate critique of how conservatives have responded to the misrule of the Bush administration.  That was not always the case, but if conservatives insist on making elaborate arguments that understanding and knowledge are not significant criteria when choosing our top elected officials they will lose whatever credibility they may still have.  More than that, they will be crippled by their embrace of cheerful ignorance when it comes time to oppose the policies of the Democratic administration that is surely about to be elected.