Palin's Pageantry Strategery

As I have been chatting with friends about the latest Palin interviewing debacle, it occurred to me that Palin's answering strategy is right out of PAGEANTRY training. Note the famous Miss South Carolina meltdown, below, and compare to my favorite section from the Katie Couric interview on CBS. Because in fact Palin has that deer trapped in the headlights faux concentration expression that Delegates have as they watch the host or the reigning Queen pull the paper from the fishbowl. Miss Alaska, we have a question from the Delegate from Iowa, Katie Couric. And she has the catch-phrase that she has memorized and must insert into her answer no matter what, even if it has nothing to do with the question. The platitudes, the hesitation, the halting phrases that are never concluded. She has it all!

I don't know what I love most: 

-the incoherent phrases

-the repetitive phrases that are clearly the talking points she has been given (such as her blurb at Ground Zero today "bring the war to their soil") 

-her inability to articulate the word "caricature" at which point Couric helps her with the simpler, monosyllabic "mock" - a meta-moment if there ever was one since this interview itself seemed like something out of the ONION, The Colbert Report or Jon Stewart!

-seeing uber light-weight Couric appear to be as tough of a questioner as Tim Russert or Dan Rather (I would pay to see what Gerald Rivers does with her, ugh, no, maybe not - and speaking of, the term one would use -assuming one thought this which DISGUSTS me -not a MILF, a colleague pointed out, technically it would be a GILF - grandmother)