I do feel as if I am learning something, I myself had never heard this term before the interview with Palin made it popular and I didn't ever see it described so well untill just now.
I don't think I am severely isolated , but I would have been at a loss to express an opinion on the term "Bush Doctrine" yesterday.
Perhaps it was being used a lot in circles I am not privvy to , or perhaps you overestimate the spread of the term as it was at the time.
Perhaps both , but if it is Historians that produce these phrases, how is a canadate responsible to know them?
That Palin failed to know the inside ball of Washington chatter doesn't offend me so much as attract me. There is much more to how the world works than what happens inside the city limits of Washington D.C..
Well, as to usage, I cannot explain why someone who uses this board wasn't familiar with it. I certainly knew it. I cringed when I heard she had flubbed it. It had been used numerous times - was kind of a buzz word for a while in fact. I certainly heard people on TV news shows, talk radio and the newspapers using it. I was actually kind of proud of it, as I thought it was nice to see it given the same sort of status the Monroe Doctrine was given. Like any buzzword, though, it wasn't coined by historians, but by pundits. If Neil Croates is indeed the originator of the phrase, it would be a political scientist in the academic world that coined it - but he did so within three weeks of 9-11. By the time Palin came along, it was well known.
As to whether a governor or a candidate should know it, yeah, I think they should. Palin was catching hell about not being up on foreign policy. She famously claimed her state's proximity to Russia gave her foreign policy experience. For her to be unaware of the phrase describing the major foreign policy of her parties incumbent President was a gaffe as big as a moose.
Your darn right a candidate needs to be aware of what the current buzzwords are because the lack of such knowledge makes her look stupid - or worse - uninformed. If Sarah Palin is nominated for President next election, I will vote for her because I want the Republican party to win. But the Democrats will have as much success vilifying her to independents as the Republicans did with HRC. Hillary was a lock for the nomination until the Dems figured out that she could easily lose the independent vote and Obama was both unknown (and therefore undiscovered - except for his admirable pseudobipartisan address in 2004) and sexier than Hillary (including his minority status). If somebody sexy comes along Sarah becomes an instant has-been. Sarah is sexy in appearance only. Obama looked good, politically, in his 2004 speech. He even had me thinking, Wow, this guy could be something. He was. A liberal in moderate clothing. But Sarah has baggage coming out of the box in 2012.
