Narrative

I had one thought in advance of the much anticipated VP debate tomorrow night.

Rightly or wrongly, public figures often end up being defined by an idea or narrative, and the meme gets so deeply embedded in popular consciousness that it's hard to shake regardless of what the person does from that point on. More often than not the meme becomes the subject of a joke that's told repeatedly, in many different forms by many different people.

In some cases the narrative is a distortion (Al Gore - serial exaggerator who claimed to have invented the Internet), in other cases it's self inflicted (Dan Quayle's intelligence and "potatoe").

I think Sarah Palin's moment is the "I know foreign policy because I can see Russia from Alaska" claim. I've now seen this joke told in different ways by so many people, that it may become the defining moment regardless of how she does in the debate or the campaign trail going forward!

Poor Sarah. Must have sounded like a good idea when some smart operative in the campaign came up with it ...

Incidentally, I thought this column about Palin by Fareed Zakaria at Newsweek, who writes extremely perceptively about foreign affairs, was unusually blunt and on point.