For the Media

There’s been a running joke in my family for years that the real Bush Doctrine is not preemptive/preventive force, as it’s popularly defined. Nor certainly is it his “worldview,” as Sarah Palin mistakenly answered to Charlie Gibson. The real Bush Doctrine is lowered expectations.

In 2000, the Bush Campaign mastered the expectations game. Indeed, our expectations of Bush’s debating skills and world knowledge were so successfully lowered that he managed to win the debates against Gore while losing on points. Part of this was Gore’s unattractive presentations style (recall the sighs and invasion of Bush’s space), but Bush also benefited from his assiduous promotion of Gore’s reputation as a strong debating policy wonk. The fact that the affable neophyte was not eaten by the big bad wonk was itself a victory for Bush. The 2004 Bush Campaign tried to repeat this strategy, even playing up John Kerry’s pedigree on the Yale debate team.

The White House has also learned from their violations of the Bush Doctrine of lowered expectations in the foreign policy realm. After raising the country’s expectations that we’d get bin Laden “dead or alive” and that we’d be greeted as liberators in Iraq, they’ve changed the goal posts just a bit. The expectations are in fact now so low in Iraq that success is touted by the mere prospect of a quasi stable county. The Bush Doctrine of lowered expectations at its finest.

It’s ironic, then, that Sarah Palin has come under some criticism for not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is. For, if the real Bush Doctrine is lowered expectations, she seems to get it perfectly. You’d think that a vice presidential candidate not knowing about America’s biggest foreign policy shift since the Truman Doctrine (that was containment on the slim chance Sarah Palin is reading and needs the definition) might be a bigger cause for concern. Not so, though, when our expectations are so low of her that proximity to Russia and her initiative in sucking oil from a petro rich state are said to be foreign policy qualifications.

Poor Joe Biden; he doesn’t stand a chance in the upcoming debate. All Palin has to do is repeat the talking points robotically crammed into her head like “Israel is our friend and we won’t second guess her” and she’ll win. After all, we don’t really expect the affable neophyte to be able to match the big bad wonk on points do we?

Ah, the Palin Doctrine at its finest.

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Palin knows all about the real Bush Doctrine--lowered expectations

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