Giving Couric Credit- UPDATED As Conservatives Turn Tail on Palin

TW: Jim Fallows from the Atlantic gives a calm but devastating critique of the Couric Palin interview while rightly crediting Couric for a very strong interview approach. I think Couric was
very tough but so subtly and fairly that no one can legitimately criticize her approach. I have added other critiques as the Couric impact settles in. The right-wingers like Parker have been very slow on the uptake but now they are running for the hills.

From Kathleen Parker (probably one of my least favorite conservatives):
"It was fun while it lasted...[the interviews] have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League. No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted. Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there...If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself...Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons"
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDZiMDhjYTU1NmI5Y2MwZjg2MWNiMWMyYTUxZDkwNTE=#more

Fallows:
"She is not as smart or disciplined as Barack Obama. If she were, she would sound better than she does at this point. And the McCain team has done absolutely nothing to defuse these problems -- nor, to be honest, has Palin herself apparently learned the first thing about successfully finessing questions she is not ready to handle. (Hint: the approach is not the one she has tried to apply with Katie Couric, that of repeating verbatim the answer that did not do the job the first time around.)"
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/ive_now_seen_much_of_the_katie.php

From Economist:
"IT'S too ghastly to laugh at: you almost (not quite, but almost) feel some pity for her. A drama-critic friend of mine made a good point: I think what we're seeing is someone who thought she knew everything discover how little she actually knows, and it terrifies her. Compare her demeanor in the Gibson interview to this one. In the first, she was poised and confident. Sure, she spat out talking points and opaque answers, but she stuck to her script, until Mr Gibson rattled her with the Bush doctrine question. With Ms Couric, conversely, she rambled, she edited her own sentences recursively, she looked away from time to time, and her answers did not make sense—and I don't mean political sense; I mean they made no grammatical or logical sense. Vladimir Putin rearing his head and floating into American air space, tax relief needing to accompany tax reductions, one in five jobs coming in "the trade sector": these are the words of someone who's rattled. She's politically savvy, so she has a modicum of self-awareness and, as she's said before, she knows she can't blink; she knows she has to seem confident in what she's saying. But I'm also willing to bet she's just smart enough to know how truly out of her depth she is."