Nancy Pfotenhauer Prefers The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations To Actual Bigotry

The McCain campaign, led by Nancy Pfotenhauer Pfuckingsucks, started its war of expectation management today by attacking the moderator of this Thursday's VP debate, PBS' Gwen Ifill. Pfuckingsucks told Fox & Friends Steve Doocy that "normally, in Vice Presidential debates, you see a more even-handed approach" to picking questions about foreign and domestic policy. Oh really? Let's check that out.

Gwen Ifill moderated the 2004 debate between Vice President Dick Cheney and Senator John Edwards, asking a total of 20 questions. Ten of those questions were specifically about foreign policy — including the first 9 — while Cheney brought up foreign policy in two addition domestic policy questions and Edwards snuck it into one of his domestic policy answers. In the latter three cases, Edwards and Cheney responded to the other's foreign policy forays in kind. That means that foreign policy discussions comprised two-thirds of the last Vice Presidential debate.

Unlike the two Vice Presidential debates (Lieberman-Cheney and Gore-Kemp) before that, in 2008, this country has troops stationed abroad fighting in conflicts that we started — i.e., we're in the midst of two foreign wars— much as it did in 2004. During the Cheney-Edwards debate, the foreign policy questions were about Iraq, Afghanistan, the use of intelligence, Iran and Israel — gosh, it kind of seems like those might be ongoing and relevant issues, right? (Let alone that Sarah Palin has suggested that we go to war with Russia, attack Pakistan and has tried to burnish her foreign policy credentials by getting photo ops with world leaders might be relevant.) But Nancy Pfuckingsucks and Doocy think that it would totally be unfair to ask Sarah Palin too much about it.

Doocy said, "it seems like they're stacking the deck against" Palin by asking too much about foreign policy — not that Gwen Ifill has released her list of questions or anything — and added "the average person is more concerned with domestic stuff than foreign stuff anyway." Presumably he meant "the average person that doesn't have loved ones in imminent danger fighting one of the two wars abroad in which we are currently embroiled." Pfuckingsucks agreed, says " "Exactly! I think the moderator will have some serious questions to answer if they do go so heavily on foreign policy," and defined "heavy" as sixty percent of the questions — which is, as I pointed out, less than the percentage of the Cheney-Edwards debate that centered in foreign policy. I guess it's only fair to focus on foreign policy questions when it's the Democrat without a whole lot of experience.

In much the same way that the Obama-Biden campaign is seeking to lower expectations of Biden by talking Palin up, the McCain-Palin campaign is seeking to mitigate her expected trouncing by blaming Gwen Ifill. They're literally going on the airwaves and trashing Ifill and her journalistic credentials in advance of a single question being asked in the hopes that she won't ask too much about foreign policy and to garner sympathy for Palin if she does. How long do you think until Pfuckingsucks takes to the air again to suggest that Ifill is "in the tank" for Obama because they have so much in common? Tuesday? Wednesday?

McCain Camp to Ifill: Go Easy on Palin [Talking Points Memo]
The Cheney-Edwards Vice Presidential Debate [The Commission on Presidential Debates]
Palin: U.S. Might Have To Go To War With Russia [Chicago Tribune]
McCain Retracts Palin's Pakistan Comments [CNN]
Sarah Palin Meets World Leaders [Huffington Post]
Obama-Biden Camp Hypes Palin’s Debating Skills [CNN]

Send an email to Megan Carpentier, the author of this post, at askalobbyist@gmail.com.

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