Crummy week. If the post that follows is more dyspeptic than usual, don’t worry; after some retail therapy, I’ll be back to normal. Which is dyspeptic anyway, so forget I brought it up.

So, how about that Sarah Palin? Has she touched a nerve, or what? The last week or so has been nothing if not entertaining. Legions of lefty types had regarded the zeal and fervor of Obama supporters as deeply moving, evidence that government could still inspire and ennoble and bring us all together (for collective action enforced by state power).

And then the very second the public started going cuckoo for Sarah Palin’s Cocoa Puffs, the same lefties were all like, “Zeal and fervor? We HATE zeal and fervor! Politics requires a cool head. Why aren’t people retaining their cool? Besides, who could get zealous and fervent over THAT bitch?!”

Much of the right, for its part, appears to have forgotten just as quickly how scornful it was of the Obama personality cult. Near-religious ecstasies of devotion toward an untested politician have suddenly become perfectly acceptable now that they’re directed at a pro-life Republican.

Palin is the nominee for vice-president, and she’s being pitched as the Washington outsider who hasn’t spent her entire life lusting after and preparing for a position on high from which she can boss us all around; so she has more room to learn on the job. What those of us who haven’t written her off or converted to her priesthood out of hand have to size up is whether she has at least baseline policy knowledge, can project authority and confidence when challenged, and has a learning curve.

I thought Kirsten Powers’s assessment of the Charlie Gibson interview was pretty on-target:

Her responses to Gibson’s cross-examining seemed canned and rehearsed, a little like the answers you might give in a tough college interview. But that may be a result of the ham-fisted editing – which seemed to cut her off mid-thought on many answers. ABC should release the entire, unedited interview, so that Americans can judge her more fairly.

The biggest concern is that she appeared to not know what the Bush Doctrine is. There are, in fact, different definitions of it – but all have had an impact on this nation. One hopes Palin is more up to speed than she seemed.

Of course, she needs to be questioned on many issues – but this interview left us with little new information about her.

Americans already know she lacks foreign-policy experience (as, by the way, did Democrats’ 2004 VP candidate, John Edwards). All we could learn from Gibson’s grilling on that topic was how well she’s memorized McCain’s positions. Why ask her whether Georgia and Ukraine should be admitted to NATO? Her position will match McCain’s, just as Joe Biden’s stands will mirror Barack Obama’s.

Interviewers are supposed to ask tough questions, but Gibson’s contempt was barely disguised, and I think it probably backfired with a lot of viewers by making Palin look more sympathetic. Palin didn’t do all that great, but she didn’t fall flat on her face, and Obama partisans, worrisomely, don’t seem to understand the ways in which they may be helping her. She stayed polite and even-keeled; she appeared under attack without appearing to need protection. And yes, in this country it’s tactically really stupid to mix up praying that we’re acting with God’s blessing with declaring that we’re on a mission from God.

Added later: And sure enough, there was a reason for those jerky cuts; the full transcript of the Gibson interview doesn’t reveal her to be a heretofore-unrecognized geopolitical expert, but her full responses clearly don’t make the loopy points the aired interview wanted them to make (via NewsBusters).