I’m trying really hard to figure out why certain left-wing blogs are treating this picture of Sarah Palin reading notes off her hand as some kind of major coup. The notes she had written are “Energy,” “[illegible],” Taxes,” and “Lift America’s spirits.” That’s some cheat sheet.
I get that it’s a sort of “turnabout is fair play” from the set that must be very annoyed by now at all the prompter jokes. But it misses the point of why the prompter jokes have caught on. A prompter feeds your remarks to you word for word. The idea that you would need such a device to talk to a room full of sixth graders or a meeting of your own staff is funny.
On another level, the prompter jokes took off because they reinforce the substantive argument that Obama is in over his head, because they indicate that he can’t perform the the presidency’s basic public-speaking duties without a major safety net. I’m not sure what substantive argument Palin’s hand-notes are supposed to underline, and I suspect it’s not an argument so much as an attitude. The attitude would be that writing on your hand is dumb and low-class. On the left, where this opinion of Palin already prevails, anything which reinforces it will be picked up and cheerfully passed around. And, to the extent that anyone not on the left notices this giddy snobbery, it will play to Palin’s strengths.
For example, one might say: “Unlike the guy who needs a three thousand dollar teleprompter to get out of bed in the morning, Palin speaks from concise notes like everybody else. And, like other busy moms, she sometimes writes notes on her hand.” The comeback is so obvious that, again, I really can’t figure out why Palin’s detractors are bringing this up at all.
UPDATE: Within minutes of posting I received this e-mail:
What Republican needs a crib sheet to remember “Tax Cuts”? And who crosses out a mistake on their palm crib sheet?
The woman is a dunce.
And teleprompters are widely used. Reagan used them. Bush used them. It was always a brain dead criticism.
Score! And isn’t it amazing how annoyed they are about the prompter jokes? Thank you, kind sir, for illustrating vividly everything I just wrote.
UPDATE II: A reader writes:
Hi Mr. Spruiell,
I think the “illegible” part you referred to in your post, as best I can tell, originally said “Corpsman.”
Ha!