September 11, 2008

Charlie Gibson Interviews Barack Obama

Here is the transcript of Charlie Gibson's interview of Barack Obama after his nomination. If you watched his interview of Sarah Palin this evening (her first interview after her nomination), you'll be quite interested in comparing her answers to those of Barack Obama. But -- Oh... shoot, he didn't ask Barack Obama one foreign policy question other than, "Do you have plans to visit Iraq?" Almost every question had to do with Senator Obama's "feelings" about being nominated, how he felt, how is wife felt, how is children felt, how is grandma felt, how historic it was, has he taken joy from it. First three questions?

GIBSON: Senator, I'm curious about your feelings last night. It was an historic moment. Has it sunk in yet?

GIBSON: Public moments are not your own. There's a million people pulling you in a million different directions, but when everybody clears out, the staff is gone, you're in your hotel room at night and you're alone -- do you say to yourself: "Son of a gun, I've done this?"

GIBSON: (inaudible) when you announced, did you truly, in your gut, think that a black man could win the nomination of a major party to be president of the United States?


Geez... give me a break. Compare that to Gibson's condescending, earplug fueled questions to Governor Palin this evening:

Question 1: Charles Gibson, the interviewer, asked her if she didn’t hesitate and question whether she was experienced enough. (and then he said she displayed hubris (pride) by being confident in herself and her abilities).

Her also asked her questions about whether Georgia and Ukraine should be allowed into NATO on fear that we'd have to protect them by treaty. Now, Obama believes the same as McCain, that Georgia and Ukraine should be allowed to be members -- where was that question for Obama?

Gibson asked her about "The Bush Doctrine" which was the doctrine Bush laid out in his first state of the union address after 9/11 (you know, the one where Tom Daschle and all the Democrats rushed in afterward to give Bush hugs).

Gibson moves on to ask her about her religion, misquoting her prayer in her church to make it seem like she's saying we're in a holy war and maintaining that he didn't misquote her when she calls him on it. The things on youtube for crying out loud, everyone's seen it and he misquotes her badly.

There wasn't one question (so far) anywhere near the fawning examples he served up to Senator Obama... perhaps we should be happy of that, in the long run.

And the media doesn't understand why people think they're biased. Gibson made a mistake tonight in not leading with at least one "soft" question recognizing the first nomination of a female VP for the Republicans... by not leading with such a question he shows his failure to recognize quite a large part of his audience.


1 comment:

Memnoch said...

problem with your analysis is that a) the burden of proof was not on Obama, as he's been in the national eye for 4 years and was just nominated after a long campaign and b) the interview was edited, so we have no idea if he led with a softball question