Does Sarah Palin really understand the "Sputnik Moment" ?

There's been a lot of talk about Sarah Palin's response to the Sputnik moment Obama referenced in the State of the Union address. I suppose we might as well get a proper thread on it.

She said "He needs to remember that what happened back then with the former communist USSR and their victory in that race to space. Yeah, they won, but they also incurred so much debt at the time, that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union, so I listen to that Sputnik talk over and over again, and I think we don’t need one of those."

Now, from what I can tell, I think this is what she meant: the Soviets won the race to get into space. Now, as for the economic collapse thing, I do think she didn't understand that she was incorrect.

Of course, its possible she mispoke, but I really don't think that's likely. If you want to say she doesn't understand the moment at all, you're hating on her. If you want to say she was right, or mispoke completely, you're blindly following her, IMO.

How come there isn't an option for " is she just stupid" ?

Resist the gov. said:

How come there isn't an option for " is she just stupid" ?

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She isn't stupid, but she is quite ignornant. She should just sit down, shut up, watch and learn. With a little schooling and study, she might be a formidable candidate in 2028.

upsideguy said:

She isn't stupid, but she is quite ignornant. She should just sit down, shut up, watch and learn. With a little schooling and study, she might be a formidable candidate in 2028.

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If she was ever going to do that, she would have done it right after the 2008 election. She hasn't and probably won't.

repeter said:

If she was ever going to do that, she would have done it right after the 2008 election. She hasn't and probably won't.

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I agree, you would think that if she was going to go on Fox News bashing Obama's talk about " our Sputnik moment " she would have done some research. Sputnik took place in 1957, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 so I highly doubt that the Sputnik program caused it to collapsed.

I don't really care about this too much. She should have looked it up, but I bet there are several generations of Americans who had no idea what it meant.

Ikari said:

I don't really care about this too much. She should have looked it up, but I bet there are several generations of Americans who had no idea what it meant.

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Those were people who lived right after it happened and were very low middle class or plain poor. For a former governor, vice-presidential candidate and more than that a potential 2012 presidential candidate...she should know about this.

Ikari said:

I don't really care about this too much. She should have looked it up, but I bet there are several generations of Americans who had no idea what it meant.

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Then several generations of Americans are stupid... lol. Most adults today were alive during the Cold War. Having a little bit of knowledge about that history shouldn't be too much to expect from the general populace.

Being a bit unfamiliar with history does not equal being stupid. That said, making routine public comments about things you seemingly have little knowledge of would be suggest is unwise.

"The Space Race" is an ambiguous term. If you mean simply to get INTO space, then she'd be right. If you mean it how its often used in America, IE to get to the moon, then she's wrong. This is a matter of opinion though.

However, Sarah Palin can't have the second part both ways. Conservatives routinely point out that it is the Cold War strategies of Reagan which helped usher in the economic collapse of the USSR due to an attempt to keep pace with us militarily. This was decades after "Sputnik". While in the most literal sense you could suggest "Sputnik" helped cause the collapse simply because it spent money and spending money is what caused it to happen. However, this is like suggesting that that Nintendo Virtual Boy you wasted allowance money buying in the 90's contributed to you going bankrupt in 2011 because it was you spending money which eventually was the cause of your demise. Its just non-sensical.

Zyphlin said:

However, Sarah Palin can't have the second part both ways. Conservatives routinely point out that it is the Cold War strategies of Reagan which helped usher in the economic collapse of the USSR due to an attempt to keep pace with us militarily. This was decades after "Sputnik". While in the most literal sense you could suggest "Sputnik" helped cause the collapse simply because it spent money and spending money is what caused it to happen. However, this is like suggesting that that Nintendo Virtual Boy you wasted allowance money buying in the 90's contributed to you going bankrupt in 2011 because it was you spending money which eventually was the cause of your demise. Its just non-sensical.

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To take that a bit further, if Reagan's cold war strategy is what caused the collapse of the Soviet Union(debatable), then what caused the collapse was a large amount of debt spending on the part of the US.

What did not cause the collapse of the Soviet Union was their space program. She is wrong about that, and it is comments like that that cause people to see her as less than smart. Further, while I am sure she meant "race into space", she was less than clear, and again it's those types of unclear statements that hurt her.

Palin is not dumb. She did to get where she is by being dumb. But any politician realizes that perception is important, and by her all too frequent statements of this type, she creates an impression that does not serve her politically.

Redress said:

Further, while I am sure she meant "race into space", she was less than clear, and again it's those types of unclear statements that hurt her.

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How could she have been any more clear really without it seeming redunant:

"He needs to remember that what happened back then with the former communist USSR and their victory in that race to space."

She even classified it as the race to space and not the more generic "space race". I think its pretty clear what she insinuated victory in the race to space was since she stated the USSR won it and its historic fact they got into space first.

Dumb political move, sure. But to critique some are doing of her intelligence on the race to space comment seems a bit of a reach.

To Sarah the presidential election is just another beauty pageant and she is campaigning accordingly. For anyone that didn't know it, she IS running for president.

Zyphlin said:

How could she have been any more clear really without it seeming redunant:

"He needs to remember that what happened back then with the former communist USSR and their victory in that race to space."

She even classified it as the race to space and not the more generic "space race". I think its pretty clear what she insinuated victory in the race to space was since she stated the USSR won it and its historic fact they got into space first.

Dumb political move, sure. But to critique some are doing of her intelligence on the race to space comment seems a bit of a reach.

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The problem is in using "race" and "space" as part of a 3 word phrase. It creates the (false) impression of the "space race", which we think of as us winning by reaching the moon. If she would have said "He needs to remember that what happened back then with the former communist USSR and the cost of reaching space first" she would have bypassed any chance of misunderstanding.

I find it extremely disappointing that it takes Sarah Palin commenting on it for most people to even remember Sputnik happened, let alone understand the impact it had on not only Cold War history, but human history. It after all, was a great achievement in human history.

It was a propaganda coup at the time. The actual satellite was little more than a metal basketball with an electronic beep, (which deliberately broadcast at a frequency accessible to any radio) but it was all the more shocking for being completely unexpected. From the Soviet pov it didn't hurt that cold war America was left pondering what other USSR ironmongery might be orbiting over their heads.

"US Rep. Clare Boothe Luce referred to Sputnik's beeps as "an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our national superiority.""
Sputnik crisis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia