Palin's soundbite strategy

Palin grasps that concept intuitively and has spent much of the past year — via Facebook — dropping all sorts of soundbite hits on an Obama Administration that has repeatedly tried to explain their own policy proposals with a nuance and subtlety lost on many Americans.

There is, of course, a limit to how far a soundbite strategy will get you. While Palin’s pithy one-liners win her applause from like-minded crowds and help influence the debate, she remains poorly regarded by major swaths of the population who believe she is not adequately equipped to serve as president. (In a Bloomberg poll conducted late last year, just 25 percent said Palin was qualified to be president while a whopping 67 percent said she was not.)

Palin’s refusal to give any interviews to members of the media or offer any sort of detailed policy proposals of her own speak to a glaring weakness in her overall strategy.

Soundbites — even when delivered with the skill Palin displays — are not, in the long run, a substitute for substance and won’t persuade those who have doubts about her that they misjudged her abilities.