Press Peaved@ Palin-Just Pics w/ 4N Pres

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Registered: 09-08-2008
Press Peaved@ Palin-Just Pics w/ 4N Pres
1
Wed, 09-24-2008 - 1:28am

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/23/AR2008092303152.html?sid=ST2008092300033&s_pos=

Palin Sits Down With 2 Foreign Leaders

Nominee Talks to Afghan, Colombian Presidents, Also Confers With Kissinger

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 24, 2008; Page A08

NEW YORK, Sept. 23 -- Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin made her diplomatic debut Tuesday, meeting with two heads of state who traveled to New York for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly.

Palin, who met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, engaged in small talk and policy discussions as part of her effort to augment her foreign policy credentials. Palin, who has traveled outside North America once, also met with former secretary of state Henry Kissinger at his New York office.

The campaign of Sen. John McCain sought to highlight the sessions with several photo ops, though they limited the news media's access, at one point barring print reporters from observing Palin's initial exchange with Karzai.

Shuttling from one meeting to another, Palin traveled across New York with the buzz of a high-profile personality. Her motorcade shut down traffic, and for a time police barred entry to her Midtown hotel. Tourists pulled out video cameras to film the Alaska governor, prompting several police vehicles to drive onto the sidewalk to protect the SUV in which she was riding. Traffic backed up, crowds gathered behind the barricades and a supporter yelled, "We love you, Sarah!"

Palin also received her first national security briefing on Tuesday from the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, and several of his aides -- a standard practice for the two parties' nominees.

In a briefing with reporters, Palin's senior foreign policy adviser, Stephen E. Biegun, said the governor did not issue policy pronouncements during the sessions with Karzai and Uribe, each of which lasted about half an hour. Biegun said her goals were "to establish a relationship and to listen." Meetings with foreign leaders, he added, "are a very important part of her being prepared on Day One."

Biegun and McCain's senior foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, accompanied Palin to Tuesday's sessions.

Palin will continue to meet with foreign leaders Wednesday when she sits down with some of the United States' closest allies in the developing world -- including Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh -- several of whom are personally friendly with McCain.

Pakistan's U.S. ambassador, Husain Haqqani (President Asif Ali Zardari will meet Palin on Wednesday), said officials from his country are eager to discuss the fight against terrorism with members of both the GOP and Democratic tickets.

"President Zardari is engaging with all candidates as part of his effort to strengthen the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, which is central to stabilizing a very dangerous region of the world," Haqqani said. "We would be interested in Governor Palin's thoughts, and we would happily answer her questions."

Palin's talks with the foreign leaders resemble the trip Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama took over the summer, when the first-term senator from Illinois met with military and foreign leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan, Britain, France and Germany. At the end of a trip designed to bolster his foreign policy credentials, Obama said: "The value to me of this trip is, hopefully, it gives voters a sense that I can in fact -- and do -- operate effectively on the international stage."

The Senate office of Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday released a "partial list" showing that the senator from Delaware has met the leaders of nearly 60 countries, territories and international organizations. The list ran to 150 names and included nine Israeli prime ministers, four Soviet leaders and two Russian presidents, Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama.
Foreign diplomats said they knew little about Palin, especially compared with Biden, who serves as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In the brief moments when Palin was visible to the media -- after reporters protested, her aides allowed one print journalist to watch the first minute of her afternoon sessions -- she sought to forge a personal bond with Karzai.

The Afghan president told Palin about his young son, who was born in January 2007. With both of them smiling, and with Palin patting her heart at one point, Karzai told the governor that his son's name is "Mirwais, which means 'The Light of the House.' "

"Oh, nice," Palin replied.

"He is the only one we have," Karzai said.

Speaking later at the Asia Society, Karzai described his meeting with the vice presidential nominee as "very good. I found her quite a capable woman. She asked the right questions on Afghanistan." He added, "She was concerned and she said how can she help, so I'm very pleased with that meeting."

Karzai and Uribe each discussed the topic of energy with Palin, Biegun said, with both of them describing it as "a national security issue."

Palin also visited the offices of Kissinger, with whom she met for more than an hour. She talked with the former secretary of state about some of the United States' most sensitive international relationships, Biegun said, with countries such as Russia, Iran and China.

While Palin may not be well known overseas, she has captured the attention of many foreign leaders. British member of Parliament Hazel Blears, for instance, included Palin in remarks about how politics are turning off voters, made at a recent Labor Party conference in Manchester.

"I just think there is so much anti-politics -- not just in this country but around the world," Blears said. "One of the reasons why Sarah Palin has been such a phenomenon is because she's anti-politics, anti-Washington. Her politics are horrendous, but actually she's struck a chord with people -- 'I'm a maverick, I'm not part of those powerful people' -- and people identified with that."

A senior British official said that Richard Grenell, spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, protested Blears's remarks in a note to Britain's U.N. ambassador, John Sawers. But Grenell denied that, saying he merely sent a lighthearted e-mail to Britain's U.N. spokesman, Michael Hoare. "Mikey and I are very good friends and we talk politics all the time," he said.

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-08-2008
Thu, 09-25-2008 - 4:45am

This cat and mouse game that the McCain camp is playing only shows how secretive, distrustful, and chaotic a Palin/McCain...or McCain/Palin win would be. They make Bush43 look like honest Abe Lincoln. lol.

http://news.aol.com/political-machine/2008/09/24/the-palin-treatment/

The Palin Treatment

By David Knowles
Sep 24th 2008 9:43AM
Filed Under:eJohn McCain, Featured Stories, Scandal, Media, Sarah Palin

Many Americans, including the mainstream press, have patiently given Sarah Palin the benefit of the doubt. They've waited, and waited for her to answer questions about her governing philosophy. They've searched for any written opinions she may have authored on subjects like (her supposed expertise) energy independence. While skeptics have looked over her record as Mayor of Wasilla and Governor of Alaska for evidence of who this woman really is, many in the Republican party seem content to cite what they consider her two greatest attributes (besides her gender and age): that she's staunchly anti-abortion, and that she wants to drill for oil in Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge. The reward for staking out these two relatively old-school conservative positions, is that Palin has been catapulted into "Rock Star" fame. She now commands huge crowds at rallies, where, for more than two weeks running, she has delivered a nearly identical stump speech littered with distortions and even outright lies about her own record.

For the fantasy to work, of course, for Palin to remain "hot" and not suddenly morph into just another Mitt Romney (who, at last check,happens to share both of Palin's policy positions), she must play a game of rope-a-dope with the media. A little taste here and there, but keep most of the coverage limited to campaign rallies--no questions, please.

But by controlling Palin's availability to the press, giving only two interviews so far (one of them more of a bio-pic ), John McCain has been showing himself for what he is: a sexist. Doesn't he think a woman can handle the rigors of a press conference? And why did McCain's campaign fight to make the VP debate rules more static, so as to avoid a free-flowing exchange of ideas and a back and forth between the candidates? Isn't Palin's nickname "barracuda"? I guess they think she can't handle the heat. Here's how CNN's Campbell Brown put it:

"Tonight I call on the McCain campaign to stop treating Sarah Palin like she is a delicate flower that will wilt at any moment," said Brown. "This woman is from Alaska for crying out loud. She is strong. She is tough. She is confident. And you claim she is ready to be one heart beat away from the presidency. If that is the case, then end this chauvinistic treatment of her now. Allow her to show her stuff. Allow her to face down those pesky reporters... Let her have a real news conference with real questions. By treating Sarah Palin different from the other candidates in this race, you are not showing her the respect she deserves. Free Sarah Palin. Free her from the chauvinistic chain you are binding her with. Sexism in this campaign must come to an end. Sarah Palin has just as much right ao be a real candidate in this race as men do. So let her act like one.

You see, the new Palin/McCain strategy is to bite the press hand that feeds you. As Politico put it today, "Palin courts cameras, but dodges press." She has become like some Hollywood starlet, a Britney or Paris, who thrives on media attention, but then complains when there's a photographer snapping a picture of her getting out of a car.Yesterday, when the McCain campaign barred reporters from Palin's meeting with Hamid Karzai, the backlash was swift. Enough is enough. Limiting the press presence to a 29-second, no-questions-asked, taste of pool footage was the last straw form many in the media who had been suspending their disbelief.

McCain's campaign was ready for this inevitable turn, and pivoted, yet again, to go all in on it's "media in the tank for Obama" strategy. You see, if you have questions about Palin, you're pro-Obama. If you want to hear how she'd handle a room full of reporters actually doing what reporters are supposed to do, then you were biased against McCain from the start. Worse, if you point out all the many lies and discrepancies of the Palin myth put forth by Camp McCain, you're the one who is sexist.

Well, that list of lies and discrepancies seems to grow every day. And sooner or later, hopefully before November (but don't hold your breath), Palin will be forced to answer for some of them. Here's Andrew Sullivan's current tally, what he calls, "The Twelve Lies of Sarah Palin."

If this all sounds like a partisan witch hunt, then how do you explain McCain's actions in Alaska? Where his campaign is orchestrating a Cheney-esque cover up and smear campaign as we speak. Is that Cheney/McCain comparison unfair? Perhaps. In fact, maybe we should use Andrea Mitchell's. She recently likened McCain's media strategy to those of the governments of North Korea and Syria.

Go ahead, Sarah, answer some questions. Make a fool of yourself like Joe Biden did yesterday. It's not the end of the world. You see, what makes many of us queasy, is that you and your boss are walking a very un-American path. Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter, do you think that if any of them had gotten the VP nod they'd be avoiding speaking to the press? Not a chance. Romney's answering questions today as a McCain surrogate, and he's not even on the bill. Dan Qualye even gave a press conference the day after he was nominated. Palin has now gone 27 days. Hell, even President Bush will tell you that a healthy democracy benefits from an inquiring, vigilant press corps (not to be confused with "corpse"). If we simply believed everything our presumptive leaders said, just because they said it, then what kind of shape would this country be in? Oh, right, question already answered.

Lastly, the words of Thomas Jefferson, recently invoked by The Washington Times:

"If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."