When it comes to Palin’s record, I am more inclined to believe now that McCain isn’t distorting what he knows to be the truth–he simply has no idea what she did when she was governor and so invents a record for her that is consistent with his own obsession with eliminating earmarks.  That is how you get this:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Friday running mate Sarah Palin has never asked for money for lawmakers’ pet projects as Alaska governor when in fact she has sought nearly $200 million in earmarks this year.

—–

When pressed about Palin’s record of requesting and accepting such money for Alaska, McCain ignored the record and said: “Not as governor she didn’t.”

Perhaps McCain was simply referring to one of those “underlying truths” about her record–those are the truths that need not square with the facts. 

This is what happens when a campaign makes opposition to earmarks the measure of political purity, defines the VP nominee as a reformer based almost entirely on her supposed hatred of earmarks and tries to make an anti-earmark crusade a major theme of the election.  Since almost no politician at the state or federal level has entirely “clean” hands when it comes to this sort of spending, there was no way McCain’s VP nominee would have the kind of anti-earmark record that he clearly wants Palin to have, so it had to be invented.  Having scrutinized Palin’s record for all of five seconds, McCain probably had no idea just how mismatched his chosen obsession and his running mate really are.  Maybe he still doesn’t, but we can be sure that he won’t care when he finds out.

This is getting out of hand.  Andy McCarthy objects to reporting that Palin didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was, making the ridiculous argument that this can’t be true because there are technical disputes among Bush supporters about how many policies the Bush Doctrine encompasses.  In other words, despite Palin’s obvious ignorance of any part of the Doctrine, she must know what it is because many people who do know generally what it is disagree among themselves about its precise definition.  According to her defenders, disagreements over the interpretation of an overarching foreign policy doctrine are no different from complete ignorance about the overarching foreign policy doctrine.  This is like saying that someone who cannot give a rudimentary definition of what the Bill of Rights is knows just as much about it as the constitutional scholars who spend their lives arguing about the finer points of the equal protection clause. 

Palin wasn’t “pressing” Gibson so that she could deliver her own nuanced take that she had pondered for a long time–it was as if she had never heard the phrase before, which is why she asked if Gibson meant Bush’s worldview.  Palin knew what the word doctrine meant, but using it in a foreign policy context was clearly something she had not encountered before.  I wish her apologists would just go back to saying that being from Alaska gives her foreign policy experience–at least that was amusing.

P.S.  This interview reminded me earlier of the “pop quiz” that a reporter gave to then-Gov. Bush back in ’99.  Here was the priceless spin from his communications director at the time, Karen Hughes, when he couldn’t provide the answers:

The person who is running for president is seeking to be the leader of the free world, not a Jeopardy contestant.

How long before someone says something like this to justify Palin’s lack of knowledge?

And it was eerily reminiscent of watching George W. Bush, circa 2000. ~Steve Benen

How could she not know this? For the same reason I don’t know anything about European football/soccer standings, player trades, or intrigue. I am not interested enough. And she evidently has not been interested enough even to follow the news of foreign affairs during the Bush era. ~James Fallows

Both of these assessments are right, but they point to a more serious danger for Palin and for us than mere lack of interest or ignorance would pose.  Worse than being simply uninterested and uninformed about foreign affairs, Palin is now in a position where she will have to be utterly dependent on the “expertise” of McCain foreign policy advisors for her understanding of these matters, and these just happen to be some of the most irresponsible and dangerous advisors she could have.  As I said at the start of the month:

Folksy governors with little acquaintance with foreign affairs unfortunately seem to make for easy targets for interventionist advisors; their own non-Washington credentials persuade them that they need to listen to “experts.” The “experts,” of course, have their own agenda.    

Benen’s observation confirms my Bush/Cheney-in-reverse interpretation of this ticket, so it is worth revisiting Candidate Bush, the Texan governor who talked about Grecians and was vaguely aware of some general running Pakistan, to remember the laughable arguments made by Bush’s defenders about why his lack of preparation was irrelevant.  Rather like Kagan’s claim that foreign policy elites and completely uninformed people have equally good judgement in guiding foreign policy (a proposition that Kagan and his colleagues do seem to want to vindicate through their own incompetence), Bush’s defenders usually argued that, yes, Bush was ignorant about much of the world, but he would have a team of top advisors who would guide him along the way.  They kept insisting that the important thing was to have someone who could make decisions.  I don’t recall whether they made a point of stressing the need for good decisions or not.  Given the record of the last seven years, my guess would be that they overlooked that part.

This brings us back to the question of experience, or more properly the question of preparation.  Time-serving in Washington may or may not result in acquiring knowledge about policy issues (McCain has been there for decades and has managed to avoid this so far), and this time-serving may often be a very poor sort of experience, since it reinforces all of the worst establishment instincts when it comes to foreign policy.  The necessary preparation for handling foreign affairs can come in many different forms.  Someone whose career and responsibilities are in an entirely different field can take an active interest in foreign affairs and become familiar with the debates, so that he would at least be able to identify the different kinds of arguments he encounters.  What is most important about this preparation is not the paradigm that one adopts or the area of foreign policy that one knows the most about, but having enough knowledge and a critical mind to be able to make one’s own judgements.  The real problem with Palin’s lack of preparation is that she is exceedingly vulnerable to misinformation and ideological agendas because she has no grounded perspective of her own concerning foreign affairs.    

On a related note, it is worth revisiting then-Gov. Bush’s promise of a “humble” foreign policy.  This was the sort of language that originally made McCain the neocons’ favorite in the primaries and misled many conservatives to expect a sane and responsible Bush administration, and it is the promise that many antiwar conservatives cite when they make their own arguments against foreign intervention.  What should have given us all much greater pause then was that Bush argued for the “humble” foreign policy mainly because this was what the realist advisors around him were telling him to say.  This humility was also an obvious complement to Bush’s lack of knowledge, which allowed him to avoid discussing things in detail on the grounds that America should not be as involved in as many foreign crises.  Instead of being reassured by Bush’s reliance on many old Bush administration “realist” hands, we should have seen that as much more of a red flag that he would go in whichever direction the people around him recommended.  The most dangerous thing about an unprepared President is how malleable he is.  What is worrisome about Palin is that if she were to become President she would succeed to the office already in the grip of reckless, jingoistic advisors.  What Bush became in 2002 and afterwards, Palin would likely be from her first day as President.

You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska. ~Sarah Palin

That settles it, doesn’t it?  You have to be impressed, in a chilling, unnerving way, by how she avoided the question about restoring Georgian sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and how she insisted that the Russian incursion was unprovoked.  She made sure that she reiterated support for Saakashvili, which is apparently now fundamental to U.S. foreign policy.  Palin also came fairly close to saying that the 9/11 attacks occurred because the hijackers hated us for our freedom.  Also, we must not blink.

Josh Marshall isn’t helping:

Wow, going to war with Russia might be necessary if Russia invades another one of the former states of the Soviet Union. So says Sarah Palin. War with Russia over Armenia [bold mine-DL]? If Russia and Georgia go at it again?

Unfortunately, this misses the point that Palin was talking about going to war to defend NATO members, which she thinks should include Georgia and Ukraine, as people at The Corner are only too happy to point out.  Instead of ridiculing the notion of expanding NATO into the Caucasus, Marshall blows it.  Hemingway is also glad to remind Marshall that Obama and Biden support exactly the same thing for Georgia and Ukraine, which happens to be true and it also happens to be something I have been talking about for months. 

I would make the additional point that anyone with much understanding of the geopolitics of the Caucasus would know that Armenia is Russia’s most faithful ally in the region and there is no chance whatever of a Russo-Armenian conflict, not least because Russia and Armenia do not border on one another and landlocked Armenia is even more heavily dependent on Russian energy and trade than Georgia.  For that matter, while Russia regards Karabakh as quite distinct from the cases of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and even though it also has important trade relations with Azerbaijan, the likeliest scenario would be Russia coming to the aid of Armenia in the event of any Azeri attempt to retake Karabakh.

Sarah Palin endorses anticipatory self-defense preventive war, but seemingly without knowing what she is talking about.  She was not as bewildered as Philip Klein makes her sound in this post, but take his reaction as some indication of how underwhelming hawks are finding Palin to be:

But overall, she looked so rehearsed and scripted, and just kept repeating catch phrases without displaying any depth of understanding about the complexity of the national security issues being discussed. She came off very nervous, like a student who had crammed for an exam and was speaking in generalities becuase she doesn’t have an understanding of the specifics [bold mine-DL]. 

In other words, she did just about as well as McCain usually does.

P.S.  Palin also thinks we “must not blink” when it comes to sending forces into Pakistan without Islamabad’s permission.  In other words, she thinks Obama’s position on launching raids into Pakistan without their government’s permission is acceptable, while McCain thinks it is reckless and dangerous.  In this case, McCain is right and Palin is clueless.

Yet these assets are pushing a campaign that’s shorter on substance than it has to be. In place of a detailed contrast between the GOP’s shortcomings and failures and the real change that’s promised, the McCain campaign seems content with zingers and chants. Those things are fine and natural ornaments for the election-year tree — but they do require a tree.
 
McCain and Palin have nothing to lose and everything to gain from being honest with America’s Republicans about where Bush and Congress have erred. All of them already know. None of them are about to run to the Democrats. And the central message of the McCain-Palin campaign — this year, true reform truly puts country first — can only really soar on the back on an honest reckoning. ~James Poulos

James understandably wants an honest reckoning of Republican failures, but as I’m sure James can see there is actually a lot to be lost electorally by emphasizing how many things the GOP did wrong and failed to do during the period of unified government.  One of the reasons why the McCain/Palin ticket seems to stand for little aside from the trinity of War-Drill-No Earmarks is that there is essentially nothing else that the candidates can say that is deeply critical of the Bush administration or the old GOP majority in specific terms without implicating one or both of the nominees in the GOP’s errors.  Hence the need for vague general statements about reform and accountability–to hold the GOP accountable for its failures would obviously mean voting against McCain, or at the very least not voting for him.  Did the administration abuse its power, break the law and trample on the Constitution?  McCain was there backing them up almost every step of the way.  Did the federal government impose new unfunded mandates on local school districts through NLCB?  John McCain voted for NLCB and still supports it.  When McCain has not gone along with the administration, he has since backtracked (on tax cuts) or he has not mentioned his opposition (he opposed Medicare Part D) because he assumes it will be an electoral liability.        

This is not helped by the divergent views of the GOP nominees in certain areas (e.g., stem-cell research, ANWR, climate change) that end up blunting different aspects of the ticket’s appeal to certain Republican and independent constituencies.  For that matter, as we have been discussing, the anti-earmark message is contradicted in important ways by Palin’s record, in addition to being an incredibly trivial thing to make a major part of the campaign.  The lack of substance in the campaign is a function of McCain’s own aversion to detailed policy knowledge (if Palin is the candidate of the gut-level connection, McCain is the candidate of gut-level policymaking), but it is also an expression of the complete inability to recognize other Republican errors and missed opportunities and to focus instead on a crusade against pork on the profoundly mistaken assumption that pork was a principal reason why the GOP lost control of Congress.  They cannot present an honest reckoning to the public because they have yet to make such a reckoning themselves. 

Even in their tacit Gustav-induced acknowledgement of failure at the federal level concerning the response to Hurricane Katrina there was no reason to think that similar cronyism and incompetence would not prevail in a McCain administration, except that we are all supposed to believe that McCain is significantly different from the man whose policies he backs almost all of the time.  At the heart of all of this are McCain’s positions on immigration and Iraq, which have been such powerful drags on the reputation of McCain and the GOP respectively.  McCain now plays down his “comprehensive reform” position, and he talks obsessively about the “surge,” but he has no intention of running against the Bush administration on these matters.  Thus we are necessarily left with a McCain/Palin message that is either trivial (earmarks are bad!), insufficient (we should drill more!) or crazy (fight the Russians!).  What should trouble us all the more is that McCain and Palin are clearly being rewarded for running this kind of campaign, and McCain has gained considerably the more he and his supporters have embraced symbolism and vacuous attack ads as the keys to Republican success.

“I don’t take this elite foreign policy view that only this anointed class knows everything about the world,” he [Kagan] said. “I’m not generally impressed that they are better judges of American foreign policy experience than those who have Palin’s experience.” ~The Politico

On the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, Gov. Sarah Palin took a hard-line approach on national security and said that war with Russia may be necessary if that nation invades another country [bold mine-DL]. ~ABC News

To the extent that you have the likes of Kagan in the foreign policy elite and they also hold insane views with respect to confronting Russia over anything and everything, Kagan may be right that Palin’s judgement is no worse than theirs, since his judgement on relations with Russia is atrocious and so is hers.  Of course, her horrendous view is almost certainly a direct result of listening to McCain advisors, including Kagan, who probably forgot to mention that threatening WWIII is not a good way to start reassuring voters that Palin is ready to be President.  

P.S. Palin gets hegemonist bonus points for this:

The Governor advocated the accession of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO.

With respect to Dr. Trifkovic, I think his hope that “The Weekly Standard cabal and their ilk will be hard-pressed to make President Palin obey a bunch of Manhattanite intellectual pseuds, let alone to internalize their foreign policy schemes that are evil, stupid, and harmful to our troops’ safety” was misplaced.  She has already embraced these schemes, and I see no reason why she would reject them were she one day to become President. 

Update: Palin also said, “We will not repeat a Cold War,” but seems to have no clue that she is proposing to do just that.  To be fair, I should add that her statement about a war with Russia was tied to NATO membership for these countries, so her remarks are no worse than the standard McCain view that these countries should be incorporated into NATO, but that still makes them quite awful.

Reihan asks:

So will we stop hearing that Palin “lied” about the Bridge to Nowhere? I’m guessing we won’t.

Well, Reihan, we will keep hearing about it because she has been lying. 

The relevant facts concerning Palin and her false “Bridge to Nowhere” claim are these.  As a gubernatorial candidate in 2006, she supported the project and objected to the derisive name that she now uses to score points.  At the time that she was a candidate, she said:

OK, you’ve got Valley trash standing here in the middle of nowhere…I think we’re going to make a good team as we progress that bridge project. 

In reaction to public criticism about the project, Congress still allocated the money to Alaska but not for the purposes of building the dreaded bridge.  Palin accepted the infusion of federal dollars for use on other projects.  When she said, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the bridge, the feds had already pulled the money for that project, which means that she decided, abent federal pork, she would not go ahead with the project using only state money.  So her later rejection of the bridge project was a concession to political reality, and not the high-minded opposition to wasteful pork that she wants you to think that it was, since she was quite glad to take the money.  Here’s the main thing: no one would care whether she supported the bridge project or not, except that she and McCain have made her opposition to the bridge project the centerpiece of her public persona as a great reformer and fighter of government waste, and McCain insists that all earmark spending is inherently wasteful and wrong.  By McCain’s own standard, Palin’s eventual opposition to the bridge project is beside the point–it is federal pork as such that he finds offensive and which he now claims  Palin has combated as part of his effort to make Palin into a credible reformer of Washington.  It is hardly inspiring that she has to make false statements in order to make this central claim, and it is deeply troubling that the “reform” ticket is daily making claims about Palin’s record that only the most generous partisan could accept as honest. 

To hear her tell it, she was some bright-eyed champion of halting earmark spending who wanted nothing to do with that ridiculous “Bridge to Nowhere.”  The reality was that she very artfully changed her position to fit the new political circumstances.  Meanwhile, the people in Ketchikan (a.k.a., Nowhere) remember how she exploited Alaskan resentment at the national derision of their area to win support for her bid for governor, only to turn around on the national stage and use the same derision to put herself on the same page with McCain.  From the Reuters report:

During her first speech after being named as McCain’s surprise pick as a running mate, Palin said she had told Congress “‘thanks but no thanks’ on that bridge to nowhere.”

In the city Ketchikan, the planned site of the so-called “Bridge to Nowhere,” political leaders of both parties said the claim was false and a betrayal of their community, because she had supported the bridge and the earmark for it secured by Alaska’s Congressional delegation during her run for governor. The bridge, a span from the city to Gravina Island, home to only a few dozen people, secured a $223 million earmark in 2005. The pricey designation raised a furor and critics, including McCain, used the bridge as an example of wasteful federal spending on politicians’ pet projects. When she was running for governor in 2006, Palin said she was insulted by the term “bridge to nowhere,” according to Ketchikan Mayor Bob Weinstein, a Democrat, and Mike Elerding, a Republican who was Palin’s campaign coordinator in the southeast Alaska city. “People are learning that she pandered to us by saying, I’m for this’ … and then when she found it was politically advantageous for her nationally, abruptly she starts using the very term that she said was insulting,” Weinstein said.

The story goes on:

The state, however, never gave back any of the money that was originally earmarked for the Gravina Island bridge, said Weinstein and Elerding.

In fact, the Palin administration has spent “tens of millions of dollars” in federal funds to start building a road on Gravina Island that is supposed to link up to the yet-to-be-built bridge [bold mine-DL], Weinstein said.

“She said ‘thanks but no thanks,’ but they kept the money,” said Elerding about her applause line. Former state House Speaker Gail Phillips, a Republican who represented the Kenai Peninsula city of Homer, is also critical about Palin’s reversal on the bridge issue. “You don’t tell a group of Alaskans you support something and then go to someplace else and say you oppose it,” said Phillips, who supported Palin’s opponent, Democrat Tony Knowles, in the 2006 gubernatorial race.

A press release issued by the governor on September 21, 2007 said she decided to cancel state work on the project because of rising cost estimates. “It’s clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island,” Palin said in the news release. “Much of the public’s attitude toward Alaska bridges is based on inaccurate portrayals of the projects here.”

Perhaps the most damning part of this lie is that it shows that Palin has engaged in the same sort of derision of Ketchikan when she is on the national stage that she correctly identified in Obama’s San Francisco comments on small-town Americans.  You can say that this is simply the way of things, or you can say that this is just what politicians do, but you cannot say that she represents some burgeoning new reformism when she has not done the very things she is claiming as proof of her reform credentials. 

More to the point, if she has actually worked to reduce other earmark requests for Alaska, that is the sort of claim she ought to be making publicly.  Palin “stopped” the bridge after a significant component of its funding had been denied by Congress; she “stopped” the bridge when it had become a national symbol of wasteful pork and a target of derision.  In other words, right up until the project became politically radioactive her instinct and her public position was to support it.  It is true that Alaska Republicans supported the bridge and in zeroing out state funding Palin eventually broke with them, but it is equally true that she broke with her old position on the bridge, which had been identical with the position taken by the Alaska Congressional delegation.  Indeed, as she said during her race for governor, she supported state funding for the project and thought it important to get the federal funding while Alaska’s Republican representatives in Congress were still in the majority:

I would like to see Alaska’s infrastructure projects built sooner rather than later. The window is now – while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist. 

Give her credit for good political instincts, but please stop trying to say that she is being honest with the public about this issue.   

P.S.  Here is Factcheck.org’s assessment of Palin’s claims, including this important point:

Palin accepted non-earmarked money from Congress that could have been used for the bridge if she so desired. That she opted to use it for other state transportation purposes doesn’t qualify as standing up to Congress.

Of course, that doesn’t even begin to touch her remarkable success in securing earmarked spending for Wasilla, which she has very wisely avoided discussing since being named to the ticket. 

Update: One more thing.  As part of her announcement and convention speeches, Palin has said about the bridge project:

If we wanted that bridge, we’d build it ourselves.

But she did want that bridge (see the above quote), and given the choice of “building it ourselves” or not building it, she opted for not building it.  So even this little rationalization at the end is false.

Second Update: Reihan has a follow-up post.  I would still say that Palin and McCain have been lying about this, but I am glad to see Reihan say this much:

Palin’s approach to the Bridge to Nowhere smacks of rank opportunism, not unlike the use by some basically pro-trade candidates of harsh anti-trade rhetoric.

That’s not a bad comparison, but I think a better comparison would be Obama’s claims about his record on welfare reform.  His pandering on trade was pure primary gimmickry, which he abandoned as soon as necessary, but what Palin is doing is to take something imposed on her by political necessity and attempting to make it appear to be the result of her virtuous reformism.  Like Palin with the bridge, Obama can claim he technically supported it at some point despite his vociferous opposition to the substance of the legislation he was helping to authorize.  Obama supported “moving people from welfare to work” in just about the same way that Palin “stopped” the bridge project–he came around to supporting it after there was no other viable option.  There is some shred of truth to both claims wrapped up in giant balls of distortions and misrepresentations.  However, contra the good Prof. Ramey, her claim about stopping the bridge was not “entirely true” and not even close to it.  She said something that was much, much closer to being entirely false, and she had to know that this is what she was doing.  If that isn’t saying something that you know not to be true, I’m not sure what it is.