Everyone was wondering: Now that we’ve entered the PC (post-Couric) era of Campaign 2008, who was going to be the next person to score an interview with Sarah Palin–the woman who’s quickly becoming the J.D. Salinger of presidential politics?
Well, today, we have our answer: The next tete-a-tete with the reclusive elusive vice presidential candidate takes place with…Carl Cameron! From Fox News!
The Cameron-Palin interview will air in installments next week; in the meantime, Cameron has made a teaser video to get us extra-curious about what new revelations his interview will bring. (Probably very few: The interview seems, from what I can tell at this point, to have been largely about Palin-Getting-a-Mulligan after the Couric debacle. With Cameron, she got to re-answer the questions about the Supreme Court and What She Reads, among others.)
Anyway, a few of the takeaways:
1. Palin, in the days between the final Couric-quisition and this First Friday in Ordinary Time, studied her Supreme Court history. Or at least memorized stuff to say about it. She now discusses the cases she disagrees with with authority, if not much plausibility.
2. Apparently, the reason Palin flubbed the Couric interview, she tells Cameron, is that she was “annoyed.” It’s unclear, from Cameron’s description, whether she was annoyed at Couric, in particular, or at the mainstream media more generally–or at the weather, or at McCain, or at fate, or whatever. Cameron’s summary suggests that the source of the chagrin was the combo of Couric and the MSM working in tandem to irk the governor:
She said the reason that some of her answers to many seemed inadequate was not that she didn’t know the answers, it was that she was annoyed. And she apologized for that annoyance and said that in the future she’d make a better effort to try to not be too impatient with the mainstream media.
3. Palin, annoyance-at-the-MSM notwithstanding, apparently doesn’t get so annoyed at stuffy, snobby, liberal-elitist-and-possibly-socialist media types that she doesn’t read their work. Cameron reveals that Palin does occasionally whittle down her infamous “vast variety of sources” to a few choice publications. These being The New York Times (wow: elite!), the Wall Street Journal (wow: effete!), and “a host of others,” including The Economist (wow: British, therefore elite and effete at the same time!).
Though, as Mike Allen pointed out (h/t: Michael Calderone) on last night’s pre-debate episode of Hardball, “Everybody lies about reading The Economist.”
Which, you know: It’s funny because it’s true.
Watch Cameron’s teaser, via TPM, below.
