Of course I taped this interview with Charlie earlier, but if you've ever been interviewed you know that it is just a *blur*. When I saw it there was so much I didn't remember! Todd and I decided to go out to watch it somewhere and kind of make a night of it, so we called around a bunch of restaurants to see who might be showing it and ended up at the bar at an Applebee's downtown (side note: they have all you can eat riblets right now, Todd was in seventh heaven).
I guess this is the part of the interview that everyone is talking about
You know what? I think that was pretty darn good! OK, I admit I didn't know what the "Bush Doctrine" was. I kept hearing it as "Bush doctor in," that's why I said "in what?", because it seemed like Charlie had just trailed off. Also did he mean a Bush doctor like for the President or a bush doctor like a voodoo guy? I had to stall and think fast. For the record, YES, now I know what Bush Doctrine means, they told me as soon as I got back (it's how we explain that we're going to fight bad countries before it's totally sure that they're up to no good, just to be safe).
I guess I understand why people are making a big deal out of this part of the interview, but guess what, there are literally HUNDREDS of things Charlie could have asked me about, it's just not possible to be an expert on all of them. Ask any politician, a huge huge part of the job is pretending you know what somebody else is talking about until you can turn it around into something you feel more comfortable with (ie taxes, God, etc). This usually works really well, frankly I think Charlie was being kind of impolite/sexist and trying to make me look bad. But overall I got through it and that's what counts.
I did use a couple of tricks to keep my cool though.
1. You know how they say to picture people naked or as a moose? Well I'm not that comfortable doing that, and Charlie has those glasses that slide so low on his nose, so I tried to just picture him as Dumbledore! (I know I wrote about how the Harry Potter books are wrong the other day, and I still believe that and will not read them. But we've been watching a lot of movies while we travel around (Todd has downloaded a TON onto his new laptop), and the Harry Potter movies have been some of them, and they seem OK) So anyway I tried to picture Charlie as Dumbledore who seems very kind (although Charlie seemed more like Dumbledore from after the first movie, when he got sort of mean).
2. This one was hard to learn, but Steve taught me that every time I want to say "um" I should say "Charlie" instead. I'm pretty good at it now, but I don't know how many other interviews with reporters named Charlie they're going to be able to line up before I have to go back to square one.
3. Sometimes I get frustrated when I'm answering a question, a little trick for that is to sort of punch at the air (I was picturing Mike's stupid fat face). You can see I start to do that a lot near the end of the Youtube.
#1 ended up not helping that much, but the other two worked a trick!