It’s now officially duck and cover time for the GOP.  Failing to CYA could mean getting slimed with a good dose of the blame that’s getting liberally hurled in these final days.  Sarah Palin’s dreams of West Wing privilege quite possibly have been replaced by worry over how much collateral damage her political future will suffer if the Democrats pull off a landslide.  Speculation is running rampant that the white guys with neckties will close ranks and drop the blame for failure at Caribou Barbie’s doorstep, like an ignited back of you-know-what on Halloween.  But if we’ve learned anything about the Alaskan governor over the past seven weeks (besides the fact that she needed a lot more time than she had to cram for this exam) it’s that she’s shrewd and ruthlessly ambitious - qualities taught in beauty pageant training I’m sure.  That’s what increases the likelihood that Sarah Palin’s next job will be hosting a prime time show on Fox News.  

C’mon, it makes perfect sense.  Fox get what it wants, a foaming-at-the-mouth neocon who looks great in Valentino and Blahniks (which you’ll have full view of thanks to a clear, lucite anchor desk) and Palin gets a pulpit for the next four years from which to slowly remove the stain she’s acquired.  In short, she gets to be Katie Couric instead of Sarah Palin.  Fox is already measuring for the window treatments to go in her corner office because she has the perfect credentials: national notoriety (thanks to The Maverick’s reckless roll of the dice), on-air experience (she was a sports reporter after all) and the ability to wink at the judges….uh… I mean the camera with the best of them.

This will be the opposite path Reagan and Schwartzenegger took - Hollywood first, governor’s mansion second.  I can already see the promos - “The O’Reilly Factor at 8pm followed by the premiere of The Palin Principle at 9pm.”  Go ahead, laugh.  But four years from now after she’s finished her first debate with incumbent Barack Obama, she’ll exit the stage and slide right into her anchor chair to host her own post-debate analysis show.  Don’t think the idea hasn’t crossed their minds.

In the absence of substance, image truly is everything, as the old ad campaign said.  So perhaps that’s why the disclosure that Sarah Palin took $150,000 of Republican Party money and went on a shopping spree for designer clothes (at of all places Neiman Marcus) is such a damaging little news tidbit.  Image and facade are all Sarah Palin have left with the under 50% crowd she still has fooled.  But those people want to see her in their mind’s eye in a furry parka shooting a moose, not in a changing room asking her handlers, “does this Missoni make me look fat?”  

No, it is not an issue of global significance, but how many game changers in recent presidential politics were?  Was Willie Horton on a par with Osama bin Laden?  Was George Bush Sr.’s bewilderment over a supermarket checkout scanner a matter of national importance?  Of course not.  But both incidents created a perception that ultimately proved toxic.

When your party-supplied clothing allowance exceeds Joe The Plumber’s annual salary, you’ve got a PR problem on your hands.  How can Palin now go out and position herself as the champion of the little guy who shops at Wal*Mart when she morphs from Joe Six-Pack into Madame Cliquot.  Most hockey moms I know do not wear Oscar de la Renta.

With less than two weeks to go, and the McCain camp in need of some traction, Palin’s clothing issue represents the black ice newly discovered under the rear tires.  Even if the story struggles to occupy a full news cycle, it’s already been a distraction and compromises the GOP sincerity when they play the empathy card for financially strapped Americans.

Just a few short years ago, explaining my job as a media trainer frequently prompted puzzled looks.  My standard elevator-pitch synopsis of how we coach people to excel in television and print interviews was often met with, “You mean, there’s a profession dedicated just to that?”   Funny though, I haven’t been getting that reaction lately.  Clearly I have Sarah Palin to thank.  Now everybody seems to know exactly what I do (although not for her, I must add).  Regardless of what you think of her politically, the fact that she’s been media coached to within an inch of her life is now about the worst-kept secret in America. 

At dinner parties, people no longer ask what I thought of Palin’s performance; rather, they ask my appraisal of how she was coached.  In-laws e-mail me to find out if I media trained her between the Katie Couric debacle and last Thursday night’s debate.  Even my mailman (a.k.a. Joe Six-Pack) seems to know about “key messages” as well as the difference between “deflecting” a question and “bridging” off one. Was her winking scripted? Why did she always start scribbling notes when her opponent was on the attack?  Is she leaving the “g” off the ends of her gerunds on purpose?  Perhaps because we’re all focused on the execution of the content, rather than the content itself, candidate misinformation has become so pervasive that it’s difficult for even a fact checker to sort out what’s true or not. Face it, the style scorecard has become far easier for most of us to keep track of than the one for substance.

But just because the public is now aware of media training’s role in communications doesn’t mean its implementation needs to be clumsy and obvious.  The goal of good media training is not about scripting a set of talking points for trainees and getting them to memorize them like lines in a school play.  To bring an authentic and organic feel to the content, an accomplished media trainer needs to listen extensively to his/her client, constantly on the lookout for conversational material that can serve as the cornerstone of that person’s talking points as well as the visual anecdotes that help illustrate them.  If a person sounds media trained in the wake of the coaching, then the session has been a failure.  The fact that Sarah Palin emerged from her Sedona spin class sounding coached may say more about her limitations as a knowledgeable candidate than the caliber of her training.  After all, it would be nearly impossible to tutor someone to pass the bar exam when all they’ve ever taken is the LSAT’s.

Until Sarah Palin’s emergence, we media trainers have primarily existed in the background, allowing our clients to bask in the spotlight of our eloquence.. um.. I mean their eloquence.  In a modern-day media sense, we are like Cyrano de Bergerac, whispering the profound and poignant lines from behind the bushes so our clients can get the girl.  But for those coaching Sarah Palin, there’s no shrub big enough to hide behind.  The Charlie Gibson, and, to a much greater extent, Katie Couric interviews exposed the Alaska governor as a political tabula rasa, who over the course of five weeks had time to cover only part of the Vice Presidential 101 syllabus.  The Bush Doctrine, Supreme Court decisions, McCain regulatory crusades and the names of newspapers she reads must have been slated for future lesson plans.  The dramatic disparity between her convention and debate performances with her network interviews has revealed a simple and obvious truth: when the rules of engagement do not allow her to be totally in control, she’s completely out of control.

Palin’s convention speech was scripted, telepromptered and did not hold any room for error.  The public was impressed and she rose to overnight political stardom.  The rigid structure of last week’s debate was also kind to her.  More than 50% of the moderator’s questions were asked well before Palin was required to answer them, allowing her plenty of time to recall the messaging from the coaching session.  A good media training session teaches the trainee how to listen to the question in such a way as to identify the topic of the question 7-10 seconds before they must begin their answer.  Thursday night, Palin often had a full 1-2 minutes of time to prepare her answer, which the moderator could not follow up on.  This allowed her to frequently give a stump speech that masqueraded as an answer. In her network news interviews, however, vague and disjointed answers were challenged.  It wasn’t long before Couric found Palin’s Achilles’ Heel: specifics.  With all the time in the world and plenty of videotape to burn, Couric kept asking for the name of that one Supreme Court case, that one McCain regulatory effort, that one newspaper she reads.  None was offered.  No wonder the McCain camp tried to keep her shielded from those “gotcha journalists.”

If Sarah Palin’s is perplexed by the short duration of her honeymoon with the American people, she need not blame the media.  She has robotically held firm to a half dozen message points like a novice swimmer clings to the sides of a swimming pool.  She has failed to demonstrate what ultimately resonates with viewers: spontaneity, authenticity and thoughtfulness.  It’s painfully obvious that others have been telling her what to say from behind the bushes.  Now with that illusion shattered, her quest for acceptance and approval could end up unrequited.

Last week Bill O’Reilly interviewed me on his program about what Sarah Palin needs to do to “up her game” in media interviews.  My main point was that if she’s going to continue to dodge and evade reporter’s specific questions, she needs to develop more finesse in doing so, because right now she’s not fooling anybody.

O’Reilly went on to predict that Palin’s upcoming interview with Katie Couric would not be as tough as the one with Charlie Gibson.  In O’Reilly’s words, it was going to be more “a couple of gals chatting” and that Couric would not want to come across as someone “battering a sister.”  I disagreed and warned that if Palin was walking into the CBS interview expecting it to be easy by comparison to the Gibson sit down, she was leading with her chin and begging to get clocked.  Give Katie credit, she treated Palin about as gently as one of the moose the Governor has supposedly shot and gutted.  She took Palin’s underestimation of her and knocked her silly with it.  On more than one occasion, the Alaska governor’s brain appeared to be in a deep freeze, completely at a loss to formulate a coherent thought.

Palin Interviewed by Couric

Now after two network interviews, Palin’s most glaring Achilles Heel has been exposed: specifics.  Couric was unrelenting in asking Palin to cite specific examples to support her positions.  She couldn’t do it. So don’t be surprised if Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric receive lovely gifts this week from Joe Biden, who really should thank them both for showing him where Palin’s weaknesses lie.  You think just maybe he’s tucked this scouting report away with the intent on exploiting it Thursday night?    For Palin it could be a longer night than the winter solstice in Anchorage.

I call it the Blue Book Syndrome.  Remember in school when you crammed for an exam and maybe you knew less than half the material?  Then the essay questions come and you find the one you can BS your way through and proceed to fill the whole damn book to create that illusion that you know what you’re talking about?  That seemed to be Sarah Palin last night with Charlie Gibson on ABC’s World News Tonight.  

It was pretty clear that she had rehearsed the names of the Georgian and Iranian presidents because she couldn’t wait to showcase how fluidly the pronunciations rolled off her tongue.  But The Bush Doctrine must not have come up in any of her all-nighter, crash prep courses, because the normally smooth Alaskan Governor looked like a Caribou in the headlights when Gibson asked her about it.   Palin tried wiggling out of the corner she was boxed into by stalling for time and asking “Charlie” (as she unctuously referred to him no fewer than ten times) to elaborate.  Hand it to Gibson.  He was smart enough not to throw her the life preserver.  Instead he asked her what she knew about the doctrine.  That was not one of her finer moments. Nor was her clumsy “bridging” of Gibson’s question on national security to an answer that was all about energy independence, a perceived safe-haven subject for her.  Because she didn’t handle the topic switcheroo deftly, Gibson instinctively decided to “drill, baby drill,”  delving deeper into just how much this woman with the nearly blank passport pages knows.

For his part, Gibson did an extraordinary job with a tough assignment.  Rough her up too much, and you open yourself up to making a martyr out of her with all those who have disdain for the media (which is only about 88% of all Americans).  Go too easy on her, and you get blamed for not educating the American public on her true readiness for the job - not to mention youl kiss your hero’s welcome back in the newsroom goodbye.  Gibson managed the delicate balancing act by lowering his voice to a soothing and calming mode that took the tone of attack out of his sharp and probing questions.  Gibson seemed intent on not looking charmed by Palin.  In fact, at times he seemed to be conducting a job interview with someone he had already deemed unqualified, but was forced to hire because she had connections.  It was as if he was saying, “I know I can’t make you go away, but let me at least have the pleasure of watching you squirm a bit.”

No matter what you think of Sarah Palin, her coming out party with the media is great mano a mano political theater.  I can’t wait to see if tonight’s installment brings us her version of a “Potatoes” moment… or is that “Potatos?”  

In this season of “political red meat,” it’s the “other white meat” that seems to be getting all the attention.

Pigs certainly are taking front and center stage in this Presidential campaign.  First we had heightened attention around Sarah Palin’s stance on the Alaskan ”Bridge to Nowhere,” a blatant piece of “pork” courtesy of the federal government.  Now, coincidentally or not, Barack Obama utters the line, “you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.”  Yes, this phrase is a common political expression (McCain used it himself this year in talking about Hillary Clinton’s health care plan).  And yes, the Palin camp is jumping on every possible opportunity to play the “you’re persecuting me” card, a card that has a limited number of uses before it expires and makes her sound like a thin-skinned cry baby not ready to play with the big boys.  

But in politics, there’s no such thing as coincidence.  Every word and phrase, especially in criticism or attack mode is poured over, scrutinized and vetted to death.    Of course the Obama camp was fully aware that voters would immediately connect the dots  between his remarks and Palin’s own reference to “lipstick” in her convention speech.  Putting the suddenly popular Alaska governor in their crosshairs is indeed a risky decision, but Obama’s advisors are being told they can’t sit on their hands the way John Kerry did with the Swiftboaters.  They had to take at least a practice shot at her.  If there is lasting outcry, they can disavow intent and realize that the risk outweighs the reward in going after her.  If they sense a tolerance out there for taking the fight to her, then they can ramp up that get-tough strategy and take a few more shots.

Only the sharpness of Obama and Biden’s future criticisms of Palin will reveal what the political fallout is when pig remarks fly.

Years ago, during an acute drought in New York City, Mayor Ed Koch uttered a memorable warning on how our bathroom habits could help alleviate the crisis: “If it’s yellow, let it mellow.  If it’s brown, flush it down.” Koch had a playful earthiness to his communication style, so this line seemed very much in keeping with his persona.

Last week, another scatological reference made the news, only this one was shockingly ill-advised. Tucker Eskew, a senior adviser to Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin was explaining the campaign’s decision to reveal all the possible controversies surrounding the Palin family all at once over the Labor Day weekend.  But rather than say, “we’re going to start this campaign by being a completely open book so we can move on to what’s truly important…. our plans to (blah, blah, blah),”  he conjured up a rather unfortunate image in saying, “We are going to flush the toilet.” 

Now listen, I’m as big a champion of a clever, well-placed analogy as you’ll ever find.  We often suggest effective ones for our clients during media training sessions.  But to liken the Palin family problems with human excrement?  What the heck was Eskew thinking?  The goal of an effective analogy is to compare yourself or your company to something that generates an immediate favorable reaction.  I don’t think this one got the job done.