Holy Buck, Fatman!

Back when I was in High school, my love of politics (yep, it’s always been an obsession) brought me to the debate team. After a crash course, we were given time to practice with our team mates for our first match. I wrote my response to the statement and thought I was going to own the podium. I was confident and ready to take on my opponent with my well researched and thought out responses.

When it was my turn, I stood there, reading the lines from my index cards with little animation and little interaction. Our team moderator gave me pointers for the match: maintain eye contact, don’t look like I’m forcing the answers, don’t read them verbatim and pull on my own knowledge of the issue. He told me that I knew a lot about the issue and I needed to rely on my ability to draw on that knowledge. I needed to inject the speaking with passion and own the issue as if my life depended on it.

Truth be told, I had NO IDEA what he was talking about. I was pretty certain that I was doing fine. The day of the match came and I stood on the stage with my topic. I did try to  apply  some of his advice , trying to grasp an understanding of what he meant. I began my speech with the same rote memorization with a tiny bit of smiles added for extra credit. When my oppenent began her side, I suddenly realized I had lost. She was mezmorizing. She didn’t read anything. She had cue cards with key words and phrases, but nothing written out. She used her hands, looked over at me and the moderators and called upon the knowledge and passion she had for the topic. I looked like an automoton.

I knew what my coach meant at that very moment. I finally understood what it was to be a good public speaker. I had to lose to win. It was a defining moment for me. last night, I watched in horror and embarssasment while Sarah Palin made similar mistakes to my own when I was in high school. She was like the cheerleader on the debate team who thought that because she was pretty and popular, that’s all it was going to take to win. Sadly, it wasn’t.

The right wing pundits wanted her to exceed their expectations. The left wing blogosphere (are there any pundits other than Olbermann and Maddow?) wanted her to crash and burn. She kinda landed in bteween the two. While she wasnt exactly a pile of smoldering cluelesness, she wasn’t a brilliant master of public speaking. The words Maverick, Durn, You betcha, Hockey Mom, Durn tootin, joe six pack, etc..are still ringing in my ears. I lost IQ points when she “gave a shout out” and winked at the cameras. I started to realize today that this was that cheerleader who joined the debate team for extra credit so she could get into a better college. She has no real passion for issues that those in the lower 48 states are dealing with. She said, “never again” will the american people be duped by unscrupulous mortgage brokers and greedy wall street investors while simoltainously telling us to NOT live above our means and we need to accept responsibility for our actions. Oh, man…Tell that to someone who has cancer and no health insurance. Tell that to the  worker that lost their job to offshoring or bad decisions by CEO’s. Sarah wants to Drill, Baby Drill, because that is the livelyhood that propelled her success. The rest of us can go and find ourselves jobs in a shitty job market. Screw it. It was all our faults anyway.

Being cute and filling her answers with “folksy” words won’t solve the rpoblems brought on by the current administration. Those who actually believe that it will are living in a utopian dream world or wating for the rapture to happen. If I had lost my house, my job and my healthcare and some politican winked at me after telling me I needed to take more responsibilty, I would punch them.

I didn’t want to punch my TeeVee….