Over on the Ace of Spades, Ace has formulated a policy directly opposite of mine: what a politician puts into writing matters less than what they say in speeches and interviews. He said that Governor Palin had to “demonstrate that she’s smart”; I posted several very intelligent paragraphs from her writings; he responded that she has to “TALK like that”.

I’ve written before about how little faith I put into debates, and how I’d rather have good policy positions written “in stone”, so to speak, that we can hold politicians to.¹ I don’t watch TV; I don’t have cable and I don’t even have one of those broadcast converters for my non-HD TV set. Watching video or listening to audio takes far more time than reading the same words, so I generally don’t do it. So I didn’t have any spoken examples I could pull from.

But since I was recently in that discussion, I thought I’d listen to the India Today Conclave Q&A. And right up in the first question (about 2:35), Palin answered, about bailouts, that:

I will always err on the side of the free market and allowing the marketplace to decide who fails and who would succeed. And, when a business fails, perhaps this sounds harsh, but that leaves room, then, for a business to come in and prove itself with ultimate success.

This, I think, is the first time I’ve heard a politician say that. So, thanks to Ace, I have an even more favorable impression of Palin’s intelligence, because she agrees with me on an issue that people don’t like to talk about.² I’ve been saying for a while now that this is what the bailouts of GM and Chrysler did: they killed innovative new companies. When the government subsidizes a company, they drive out other companies who might have been able to compete if they didn’t have to fight not only for the business of consumers but also against the might of the federal government.