Scarborough: It Was ‘A Tragedy’ To See Sarah Palin’s Disjointed Iowa Speech

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough said on Monday morning that Sarah Palin’s rambling speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit was “a tragedy,” marveling at how far the former Republican vice presidential nominee had fallen from her 2008 heyday.

Scarborough made his remarks after Washington Examiner columnist Byron York panned the former Alaska governor’s “long and disjointed” address. That led Nicolle Wallace, the former Palin aide who has long since been one of her biggest detractors, to recall that York was once one of her “staunchest supporters.”

“I think it’s a tragedy, too,” Scarborough chimed in. “We all remember that night she spoke in 2008 at the [Republican national] convention. I will say, it remains one of the most electrifying performances I’ve seen in the last four or five conventions I’ve been to. Nobody expected her to do well. She delivered the lines well; she hit it out of the park.”

“We will let history decide how she got from that point to this point,” Scarborough said.

h/t Mediaite

Latest Livewire

Notable Replies

  1. Wasn’t Palin actually a reformer at one point? Didn’t she actually clean up some of the corruption of the Oil Soaked Alaskan government? I think I remember that she did.

    If so, the real tragedy is not slipping from a reciting a speech well to reciting one badly. It’s moving from serving the people to serving her own outsized ego.

  2. Not a tragedy, an inevitability. She was always going to fall flat on her face. Surprised it took this long.

  3. I think her “reform” was mostly just a change of players.

  4. Hey Joe, she hit this one out of the park too.

    The trailer park.

  5. The narrative is interesting here – tragedy implies a fall. So she used to be competent, something happened, and now she’s giving these rambling, incoherent speeches.

    They can’t admit the truth, that this is always who she was, and many of these folks had been pushing hard for her to have political power.

Continue the discussion at forums.talkingpointsmemo.com

233 more replies

Participants

Avatar for doremus_jessup Avatar for slbinva Avatar for jamesstill Avatar for pluckyinky Avatar for srfromgr Avatar for littlegirlblue Avatar for matthew1961 Avatar for mattinpa Avatar for mcnett Avatar for deckbose Avatar for randyabraham Avatar for sandyh Avatar for frankly_my_dear Avatar for daveyjones64 Avatar for ignoreland Avatar for barblzz Avatar for serendipitoussomnambulist Avatar for sufi66 Avatar for manyamile1 Avatar for dnl Avatar for darrtown Avatar for nerfherder Avatar for antisachetdethe Avatar for Psykho

Continue Discussion
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Deputy Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: