As Biden would say:  "God love ya' Jon Chait!"

Was it just me, or did she quote Reagan a lot? I don't remember any candidate recalling a former president quite that much in a debate.

She also credited Reagan with calling America a "city on a hill." When I'm emperor, anyone who doesn't know that phrase actually comes from John Winthrop, and that he meant pretty much the opposite of what Reagan was talking about, would not be eligible to vote.

Plus it was just weird, and completely disconnected from anything that had previously been discussed in the debate.

Yes, and your liberals' precious "universal health care" is just one more step on the frog-march to totalitarianism!  It all fits, dammit!  IT ALL FITS!

Yes, she 'quoted' Reagan, but still summoned the lady balls to chastise Biden for living in the past when he dared mention George W. Bush.

She's a weirdo. And the idea that complex problems don't take a complex mind, naive and arrogant. I hope professional women who have earned their place at the table speak up, loudly, about how using your gender as a credential is insulting.

Channels Reagan? Nonsense. Reagan was impressive. I disagreed with him 99% of the time, but he was a brilliant communicator. This was Phyllis Schlafly channeling Rush Limbaugh. Hannity must be wetting his pants with delight. I felt like I was watching "Idiocracy".

Biden? Brilliant. Presidential. What an impressive ticket.

Also, the "there you go again" quip was pure Reagan. And it fell flat... mostly, I think, because she weirdly paired it with "Say it ain't so Joe." She must've practiced that 100 times and even made a pre-debate point of asking Biden if she could call him Joe -- precisely for the purpose of using that "comeback."

It was as contrived and ineffectual as her campaign for VP.

Rhubarbs:

I actually shouted at the television, "But John Winthrop said that!"

But no one yet has mentioned her most flagrant, and I think worst, attempt to xerox Reagan:  her attempt to use his 'There you go again" line. What worked about that line is that it seemed off the cuff. But anyone who uses it now uses it knowingly. Hell, I used it, sarcastically, the other night responding to t Lib Ref. Here's how Palin used it:

PALIN: Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education and I'm glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving.

Huh? Say what?

This after Biden had been explaining what he and Obama would do. Her reply here also illustrates her weird stragegy--er, I mean tactic--of changing the topic as quickly as possible whenever Ifill asked her a remotely difficult question.  

Has anyone else noticed how utterly absurd and ridiculous Palin's comments look when you simply trascribe them? I mean, I thought some of them were bad watching the debate but they take on a whole new level of incoherence when read.

She is indeed a weirdo. That sums it up as well as anything. Some people will love it. Others, hopefully many more, will find it extremely disturbing. This idiot shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the White House.

Rhubarbs please share with us your version of Winthrop's "City upon a Hill"  and how it was opposite of Reagan's.  The Puritans were an elitist lot, who felt superior to all, especially those dreadful Anglicans.  I'd like to hear your spin.

Also in City on a Hill news, on a Presidential level JFK used it in his farewell to the Massachusetts State House when he was inaugurated.  Besides, the most important evocation of "City Upon a Hill" in the Reagan Era was Mario Cuomo's  famed 1984 DNC Keynote on "A Tale of Two Cities."

JFK: millercenter.org/.../3364

Cuomo: www.americanrhetoric.com/.../mariocuomo1984dnc.htm

You guys just wait for Tep. He'll tell y'all why she's brilliant and why you're liberal sexist smarty-pants.

No she didn't CHANNEL Reagan; she said "Reagan" a lot, hoping some of the "win" would rub off on her.

No, she channels Suzanne Maretto, Nicole Kidman's character in "To Die For", a shallow, narcissistic weirdo who will do anything to get ahead - and does.

You find these arrogant, supremely self-confident white trash populists on school boards and city councils all over America, who do their homework by listening to Talk Radio.

Thanks, John, nice pick.

CONTEXT MATTERS.... In her closing statement last night, Palin relied on a pleasant sounding quote from Reagan: "It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don't pass it to our children...

Another REagan quote "There you go again", as she tried to reuse zinger (couldn't come up with her own evidently). For someone who complained her opponent kept looking backwards, she sure reused a lot of rhetoric. "For it before you were against it" for instance. That's all she has up there, que cards, and not even original ones.

cal, if you're not familiar with Winthrop's sermon, you should take a moment to read it for yourself:

religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/.../charity.html

When Reagan talked about America being a "shining city on a hill," he meant, essentially, "America is number one." He used it as a metaphor for the potential (and actual) greatness of America. To Winthrop, the idea of being a "city on a hill" was just the opposite: It was about the dangers of moral failure, and the degree to which such failure in the New World would discredit both the Christian religion and self-government in the eyes of the Old World:

"For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world."

Reagan's evocation of that metaphor to mean the opposite was actually a beautiful sentiment, possibly his finest public address, but in the long run if we can remember only one man's understanding of the "city on a hill," I would hope for Winthrop's.

Cal: You were veering off your speaking points and channelling the Palin.  There are three basic rules of life I always try to remember: never, ever, start a land war in Russia; don't engage in a philosphical discussion with a rabid dog; and don't question Rhub's authority on Presidential history.

Game, set and match to Rhubs; cal's snark gets as much mileage as the Palin's winks.

Winthrop was, of course, evoking the much maligned and much misunderstood "chosen people" point of the Torah: not that the Jews were selected for special favour by Yahweh, but that they had a select obligation to follow His laws.  To all of us who grew up in Third World countries, who bought and devoured the biographies of Jefferson and Washington and Roosevelt, who memorised much of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettyburg Address and Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" speech by the time we were 16, Winthrop's "city on the hill" was and remains highly evocative.  

Reagan's "shining city" was not, for us, a beautiful sentiment, but an immoral inversion bred out of arrogance and bluster; a sentiment we have been living with in the last eight years, bred out of the same arrogance and bluster; a sentiment we saw in Technicolor and Cinerama against last night in the Palin's Performance.

It's part of the GOP mythology - What Would Reagan Do?  I too noted with satisfaction that her "There you go again" fell flat.   She also  paraphrased another famous Reagan bromide "Government isn't the solution to the problem, Government is the problem"  Say what?  If Govt. isn't the solution then why is Government bailing out Wall Street to the tune of 1 trillion dollars?  

You would think that the past 8 years would lay to rest all of the wacko theories of Reaganism - laissez-faire, Laffer curves, trickle down, privatization of essential Government functions.  Republicans act like the past 8 years haven't been an orgy of tax cutting, of dismantling of government.  As one wit on the pages noted, they campaign like Adlai Stevenson has been running the Government since 2001.     The GOP is still convinced that cutting taxes leads to balanced budgets and keep trotting out the Laffer curves.    Trying the same thing and expecting different results - a sign of insanity.  One would think the current meltdown would at last lay to rest enthusiasm for privatizing Social Security, but give 'em time.

The Obama campaign really needs to make an ad of this one - that the terror that Reagan spoke of was not Communism (which I assumed), nor terrorism,  but the Darkness at Noon totalitarian nightmare  that is Medicare.

icarusr, to defend Reagan a bit, something I'm not normally apt to do -- man committed treason in the White House, and was the greatest appeaser of terrorists in world history -- here is how he closed his Farewell Address:

"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still."

"And how stands the city on this winter night? ... She's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home."

Maybe it's the old-fashioned jingoist patriot in me, but I think that vision for America is a compelling one. The problem is that it bore little relation to the agenda Reagan followed in office, and even less to that his party has brought to the country since he left office nine days after speaking these words. (Then again, it's also very similar to the sentiments expressed in Neil Diamond's song "Amerca." Love that song.) And whether you take Winthrop's original prophetic meaning, or Reagan's later gauzy exceptionalist meaning, the sentiment is a lot closer to Bill Clinton's stirring formulation that "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power."

Reagan (starts at 3:40):

www.youtube.com/watch

Diamond:

www.youtube.com/watch

Clinton:

www.youtube.com/watch

blogs.tnr.com/.../palin-channels-re...

Rhubs: Peggy Noonan used to be able to write well; now she's all dotty.  A compelling vision, but I keep getting distracted by "the agenda Reagan followed in office".  As you have said many times here, and as I have agreed many times, I look at what Leaders do, not what their speechwriters write.  "The shining city on the hill" meant that America to serve as not only *an* example, but *the only* example, to the world, and not just a beacon; he is the son of Goldwater and father of "US against Them" Shrub mentality.

Palin's Reagan's "city on a hill" reference made me wince, not just because I knew it wasn't really attributable with any degree of historical integrity to Reagan, but because even thought I thought I was sure it was from Winthrop's Mayflower address, I'm now far enough removed from my undergraduate English major to be willing to second-guess myself...  Anyway, qualming my intellectual anxieties by way of google, I stumbled upon this site:

www.worldfuturefund.org/.../John%20Winthrop.htm

If Palin's reference was the patriotic pablum of a political dilettante, she wouldn't be the first one guilty of exploiting a familiar soundbite to make herself appear smarter.