Hunh.

[yendi]

Patrick Nielsen Hayden (channeling sleigh) notes the anti-Semitic code dropped in Palin's acceptance speech.

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

My guess would be that her speech writer may or may not have read the original source, or might have had it in a quote file somewhere (but why say "a writer" rather than attribute it in a speech? it's so vague, like, "they say that"), and that Palin has no clue where it might have come from.

[yendi]

Whether Palin knew is definitely up in the air. I don't have the slightest doubt that the speechwriter knew, however. No way did s/he just come across the quote and not find an attribution. And the general tactic (which coming across such a quote) would be to say, "a writer named . . ." Saying just "a writer" is tantamount to, "a great man said," or other lines in which it's expected that the quote and source should be recognized.

Further, I can't imagine any speechwriter (certainly not one who expects to ever be employed again) searching for a relevant quote, finding it, and then not researching the quotee. Especially in this case, where finding good quotes about how wonderful small-town life can be is basically like shooting fish in a barrel.

[asim.livejournal.com]

Actually, given the time constraints, I can imagine it. Most of the speech was written prior to her picking. Once she was chosen -- and it's been made clear that only a very few people knew, and that did exclude the speechwriters -- they had just days to rewrite and get her up to speed on it. Moreover, this part of the speech could only have come after she was chosen, given it's topic.

So I suspect they might have "known", but not have had any time to do more than take it and run with it. NOT that it makes it better...

[amokk]

Maybe not a good speechwriter... but even the NYT hired a plagiarist. So, they search google for good quotes, slap them in, and away they go.

[davidlubar.livejournal.com]

Of course,this is the same team that put up a picture of Walter Reed Middle School, so perhaps their Internet skills aren't awesome. (Though I suspect a speech writer might know Peggler.) Your post inspired me to run a poll to see who knew about this, and whether it makes a difference. I'd seen it mentioned before, but then lost track of it in the general growing mountain of scary Palin tidbits.

[yendi]

I'd missed it in the initial mountain, but given the every-growing size of that mountain, it's getting very hard to keep up.

[windswept.livejournal.com]

"code"? gimme a break. these people aren't smart enough. they just didn't check their footnotes.

[windswept.livejournal.com]

What you said.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

Allow me to repeat my concerns about a presidential candidate who can't hire competent staff. One of the things a president does that has the most impact is hire people to fill Very Important Jobs. Our current president isn't good at the hiring game, and it looks like another way in which McCain is trying to be part of the Bush family of fine products.

[tnh.livejournal.com]

That wouldn't be the direction of my guess. Palin got handed a top-notch convention speech writer -- possibly Matthew Scully, an experienced speechwriter for George W. Bush -- who turned out a better speech than McCain got. The campaign would also have researchers and factcheckers on staff. I can't imagine they wouldn't check, because indiscriminately quoting the wrong source is a sure way to get yourself into trouble. Finally, the odds that no one on McCain's campaign staff recognized Westbrook Pegler's name should be so low that missing that fact should be worth a news story all by itself.

[asim.livejournal.com]

Teresa, you have my greatest respect; I enjoy your work immensely, even if I don't comment at ML. (and my sympathies on your recent situation; my mother went through a similar situation a few years back.)

But put bluntly, I look at everything McCain has done to date, and say that this is not a team I see as even marginally competent in this regard. Look at the Pain selection, and how last-minute and utterly un-vetted it was. Hell, look at the Walter Reed screw-up during McCain's speech. And most of all, look at how they have conducted the last couple of weeks, the lies and distortions, the evasion of media -- even accusing Mika Brzezinski of Morning Joe of being a shill for Obama!

It's clear the fact checkers are on a Douglas Adams-sized lunch break in the McCain campaign.

I simply think that the weight of evidence is that they heard the phrase, might have some vague idea who it was, and simply didn't give a damn about it. I'm taking what I'd see as Occam's Razor on this, or, more precisely, not attributing to malice that which you can attribute to stupidity.

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

You're probably right. After all, the Republican observers at the DNC described themselves as the "Ministry of Truth" - suggesting that they either didn't know the source of the quote, or they're really bad at telling jokes.

[yendi]

I find that to be a dangerous assumption. Republicans are often (almost always) incompetent when it comes to running the country, but I find them to be, more often than not, very, very shrewd when it comes to speechwriting and campaigning in general. That's part of what makes the Walter Reed screw-up so unusual; I'd normally expect them to get everything right in these situations (and coded messages towards the racist end of the base have been a part of their policy since Nixon, more overtly so since '88).

Relying on them to be incompetent not only serves to underestimate them, it also then establishes "competency" as a mark for them to hit; it's what allowed folks to look at Bush in the '00 debates and say that he did a great job, for example. It's not a stance I like to take.

(That's not to say that I think Palin was a smart or well-thought-out selection; but Scully remains a damned talented speechwriter, and he knew what he was doing.)