Pop Quiz

Quick--what's the Bush doctrine? By now, everybody knows that Sarah Palin couldn't answer that question; clearly, there cannot be too many heartbeats between this hastily tutored hockey mom and the Presidency.

Or so people have said (by 'people', I seem to mean simply 'New York Times Op-Ed columnists'). But why should her performance on this particular question be the dealbreaker? Charlie Gibson quizzed Palin as if he were asking her to define the Monroe Doctrine, or to identify the people responsible for the 9/11 attacks--you know, stuff any well-educated person should know about. But why should we expect her to be able to identify the one policy associated with a term that, so far as I can see, has in fact been associated with a number of differing policies?

I'm not sure George W. Bush would be able to define the Bush doctrine. And that's not because I think he's dumb; I don't. (I think he's unwise.)

So the issue isn't whether Palin can pin the right label on the right policy, but what she thinks of the policy itself. And that's where people should be worried: as Maureen Dowd puts it,

The really scary part of the Palin interview was how much she seemed like W. in 2000, and not just the way she pronounced nu-cue-lar. She had the same flimsy but tenacious adeptness at saying nothing, the same generalities and platitudes, the same restrained resentment at being pressed to be specific, as though specific is the province of silly eggheads, not people who clear brush at the ranch or shoot moose on the tundra.