Krauthammer's impressive rearguard action

In an interview with Charlie Gibson--her first with a serious journalist since being named to the Republican ticket--Sarah Palin revealed, in painful-to-watch manner, that she did not know what the Bush Doctrine is:



It is difficult to imagine what possible face-saving argument there could be that would explain away her initial failure to answer Gibson's question. However, Charles Krauthammer (who first coined the term "Bush Doctrine") makes an admirable attempt:

There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration -- and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

He asked Palin, "Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?"

She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, "In what respect, Charlie?"

So Krauthammer maintains that she couldn't have answered the question, because it was ambiguous. However, this doesn't hold up, because Gibson disambiguated the question:

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine? PALIN: In what respect, Charlie? GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be? PALIN: His world view. GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.

So Gibson made it clear which "version" of the Bush Doctrine he was talking about. So it could not have been the case that Sarah Palin was knowledgeable about all the various incarnations of the so-called doctrine, and that she merely required some disambiguation from Gibson in order to answer the question.

However, maybe Krauthammer is not trying to argue that she knew about the Bush Doctrine but could not answer the question because it was vague; maybe, instead, he is arguing that it is no big deal that Palin doesn't know what it is because it's an amorphous, unuseful bit of foreign policy jargon. In other words: perhaps she does know her stuff, just not some of the jargon that comes with the territory. However, what argues against this is the fact that Palin actually proceeded to answer Gibson's question, and yet failed to talk about preemption, spreading democracy, unilateralism, or any other key concepts from any of the various versions of the Bush Doctrine that Krauthammer lists:

PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

The "beauty of American elections"? If Sarah Palin had any kind of command of the basics of foreign policy, either she would have had the confidence to ask Gibson what he meant by the term or she would have given an answer that in some way touched upon one of the various concepts that the term could be used to refer to. Instead, Palin treated us to a cringe-inducing tapdance of an answer that began as a generic explanation of "what President Bush has attempted" and morphed, somehow, into a pladitude about civics. Anyone watching could clearly see: she just didn't know what she was talking about.

Even after Gibson finally threw her a bone, her response contradicted McCain's position on the issue:

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.

The position Palin spells out--that a preemptive strike is justified if an attack on the country is imminent--has been the policy of the United States for decades. The Bush Doctrine--which is supported by McCain--is that preemptive war is justified, even absent the imminence of any attack. So for example if we think that country X might attack us five years from now, then according to the Bush Doctrine we are justified in going to war with that country today. It is a radical and dangerous departure from American tradition and, indeed, the norms of Western civilization--and all of it, apparently, is news to Sarah Palin.

Though I think Krauthammer ultimately fails to defend Palin's performance, it looks as though he has succeeded in giving her some much-needed cover in the media. Already there is an article in the Post with the headline "Many Versions of 'Bush Doctrine'" with the life-saving subhed "Palin's Confusion in Interview Understandable, Experts Say". Well. I imagine that Post staff writer Michael Abramowitz shouldn't be too surprised to find a mysterious fruitbasket waiting for him tomorrow from somebody called "S.P."

Also, as Matt Yglesias notes, many journalists seem to be going out of their way to observe that many non-vice-presidential candidates--such as ordinary Americans or they themselves--wouldn't know what "the Bush Doctrine" referred to, and so it is therefore understandable that Sarah Palin--a vice-presidential candidate--doesn't know either. It's all very odd.

In any case, I imagine the net effect will be significant damage to Palin's credibility as a potential head-of-state. YouTube, after all, is a slightly more powerful and visceral medium than Charles Krauthammer op-ed columns.