Two Questions About Sarah Palin

1. How much of the Republican hand-wringing taking place at the moment over Sarah Palin's debate preparedness is actually calculated pre-spin intended to position her as the underdog in Thursday's face-off against Joe Biden? The Wall Street Journal reports that John McCain's top aides are engaging in emergency debate-prep sessions after Palin "flubbed quasi-mock debates" and came off as a dunce in her interviews with Katie Couric. (By the way, can something be both quasi- and mock?)

Without a doubt, the Couric interviews were full of wince-making moments (and Howard Kurtz says there are more to come from footage CBS has in the can). But given the oft-cited importance of winning the "expectations game," why should anyone believe that the Republican strategists who are knocking Palin's performance in blind quotes are doing so in earnest rather than out of the sides of their mouths, strategically? Is there a point at which the perceived benefit of setting low expectations for Palin is outweighed by the way such expectation-lowering irreversibly undermines her standing in the eyes of voters, and have we passed that point yet?

And what's the value of covering the meta-debate spin contest if doing so forces any intelligent reader to second-guess every word of that coverage?

2. Does Palin's odd speaking style derive from too much time spent watching cable news? In interviews, she often wanders into long, verb-averse, gerund-heavy sentences like this, from her impromptu press avail at Ground Zero:

The mission is to take the fight over there, do not let them come over here and attempt again what they have accomplished here, and that was some destruction, terrible destruction on that day. But since Sept. 11, Americans uniting and rebuilding and committing to never letting that happen again.

Or take this snippet from her interview with ABC's Charles Gibson:

We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it's in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.... It doesn't have to lead to war and it doesn't have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.

Compare her speech to the trend of "TV speak" as it was defined by Michael Kinsley in 2001 and explored in this NewsHour segment the following year.

If losing election, Sarah Palin having job waiting for her at Fox News?

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