“Sarah Palin showed herself as steely and supremely confident” in her first network interview, with ABC’s Charles Gibson, said Lynn Sweet in the Chicago Sun-Times, even though Gibson “at times seemed exasperated at Palin’s rehearsed patter.” Palin “kept herself out of major trouble,” with a minor stumble when Gibson asked her about the Bush Doctrine, and she argued that her unblinking sense of “mission” should compensate for any “resume gaps.”
With the Bush Doctrine question especially, said Blake Hounshell in Foreign Policy, she looked “lost,” like a panicked student who’d crammed for the wrong question on an exam. But when she finally answered Gibson’s question, after he explained the doctrine, her answer was “eminently sensible”—just not in line with her party. “Time to hit the books some more, Sarah.”
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