Bill O’Reilly gives Sarah Palin a rough ride on Fox

With little ado, Sarah Palin made her first appearance on Fox News last night under her new contributor contract and must have wondered what had hit her. She was supposed to be among friends, with right-wing hosts such as Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly welcoming the ultra-conservative former Alaskan governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate to their lair.

Instead, when she made her debut as a "news analyst" on the O'Reilly Factor, he gave her a far harder time than commentators - or she - had been expecting.  

"You know, governor, the perception of you is that you're not that smart?" said O'Reilly, after screening a montage of video clips of rival TV pundits guffawing over her Fox appointment. "How can she be a pundit?" screached Chris Matthews of MSNBC. "She doesn't know anything!"

O'Reilly even picked up on the much-broadcast anecdote from Game Change, the new book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin about the 2008 presidential campaign. The authors tell the story of how, before her TV debate with opposite number Joe Biden, she simply couldn't remember his name and kept calling him O'Biden during the run-through with John McCain's aides.

With the clock ticking, someone came up with a solution: at the start of the debate, she should shake Biden's hand and say: "Can I call you Joe?". That way she would never need to remember his surname.

This she did. But even then she managed to slip up and refer to him as "O'Biden" at one point in the debate.

O'Reilly couldn't resist reminding her of the incident. "You did very well against [Joe] Biden in that debate," he said. And while Palin was still grinning, he added: "Although you did call him O'Biden at one point."

Perhaps Glenn Beck, the host famous for calling Barack Obama a racist and losing Fox millions in advertising revenue as a result, will be kinder to her when she guests on his show.

In the meantime, Palin has to live down further anecdotes and revelations as reviewers and political columnists pick through Game Change, published yesterday... For instance, that when she was first chosen as McCain's running-mate it turned out her current affairs knowledge was so desultory that she blamed Saddam Hussein for 9/11 and had no idea who her soldier son would be fighting when he was deployed to Iraq.

Reviewing Game Change this week, John Nichols, Washington correspondent of the Nation suggested that instead of questioning Sarah Palin's "mean-spirited and ridiculously partisan statements" and criticising her missteps and misstatements "as if they are evidence of a cavalier approach to politics and governing" perhaps American liberals need to recognise that she is simply doing the best she can.

"Maybe the woman who has just signed on as a Fox News contributor is not quite the bright star her supporters imagine and her critics fear," wrote Nichols. "Maybe she is just a little bit dimmer than we thought."

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