Looking at the old Palin debate clip Conor linked to, I think it’s clear that the folksiness she displayed in the recent debate is a recent addition to her public persona. And I think it’s reasonable to infer that, as with most every development in a major campaign like these, these tics were added intentionally, layered on like an actor building a character — and, most importantly, that they are products of campaign-trail training.

What that says, to me at least, is that Palin was pushed into this. Maybe she went along willingly, but I just can’t believe that this dramatic shift in her persona was primarily her idea. She’s been surrounded by McCain advisers since accepting the VP nomination — the same advisers who’ve been running a sleazy, stupid, below-the-belt campaign focused entirely on issues of perception and personality. Running Palin entirely on her faux outsider cred, playing up the folksy rhetoric, ignoring substantive policy and heaping abuse on the coastal media rather than focusing on issues — all of this smacks of the sort of slimy tactics the McCain campaign has specialized in over the last few months. Palin, I suspect, was simply told by McCain’s people that this was how she’d run her campaign, and she, as someone with little experience or clout on the national stage, went along. Perhaps she bears some culpability for going along with the charade, but I’m increasingly convinced that Palin’s failures are, by and large, failures of McCain and his campaign staff.

UPDATE: Fixed a few grammatical errors. Never post in haste, kids.

Posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Media, Politics.