Palin TelePrompter Story Doesn't Hold Up

Welcome back to The Palin Machine.

There's a story going around that Sarah Palin, during Wednesday night's speech, had to fly blind from about halfway through the speech on. The teleprompter supposedly sped through the applause lines, and Palin had to channel her inner Robin Williams to ad-lib her way through it.

Not so, say Politico's Jonathan Martin and a commenter at Yes to Democracy. From Politico:

Perhaps there were moments where it scrolled slightly past her exact point in the speech. But I was sitting in the press section next to the stage, within easy eyeshot of the teleprompter. I frequently looked up at the machine, and there was no serious malfunction. A top convention planner confirms this morning that there were no major problems.

Bob Schlesinger from US News corroborates Martin almost exactly. Then, from AB at Yes to Democracy, who did an analysis of the speech as written versus as delivered:

Some superficial differences show up because the text is formatted slightly differently in both versions, and there are a very few extremely minor differences such as they're/they are, but guess what?

The only real difference is that in the speech delivered, she ad-libbed the pitbull/lipstick joke she's used before.

Of course, this whole debate misses the point, which is that we are debating the merits of a Vice Presidential candidate based on her level of skill relative to Ron Burgundy. Come to think of it, that's not a bad comparison. "I'm the Vice President?"

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