Sarah Palin has done more than unify and electrify the base. She’s done something I would not have thought possible, were it not happening in front of my nose: Sarah Palin has stolen Barack Obama’s
glamour. She’s stolen his excitement, robbed his electricity, burgled his charisma, purloined his star power, and taken his Hope and Change mantra, woven it into a cold-weather fashion accessory, and wrapped it around her neck.
A candidate who is young, funny, well-spoken, intelligent, charming, drop-dead gorgeous — and
one of ours? Is this actually happening?
I have personally seen
hundreds of crusty, old-school paleocons who
despised McCain now saying “He finally
listened to us.” By picking Palin — instead of Lieberman, who we all know he wanted — he has told conservatives that
he gets it. They’re not holding their noses and voting any more. They want yard signs and bumper stickers — they can’t
wait to vote GOP. And the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, folks:
they are writing checks.
I’ve seen post after post on Hillary forums about how much they love Sarah, how they are energized and lifted out of depression by her (and the sight of an actual Roll Call made some of them weep). They gush about how she reminds them of their hero, how tough and savvy and unafraid she is. And I have seen these women, hard-core, feminist Democrats for 30 years and more, sit in slack-jawed amazement at Palin and at how fiercely Republicans —
Republicans! — are defending her, backing her, and cheering her to the rafters. These
Clinton supporters say they don’t know what to think any more:
The Republicans are behaving like Democrats and the Democrats are behaving like Republicans! If you think that’s an insult, you’ve got it exactly backwards. That is not only a huge compliment from these abandoned, centrist Democrats who bemoan the loss of their party to the radicals, it is an early rumbling of a tectonic shift in American politics which we are only dimly beginning to grasp. Who are the
real feminists? A significant portion of our former hard-core opposition is now rethinking in a fundamental way who it is that actually
does what their former allies only talk about.
That, my long-suffering and now giddy and sleepless friends —
that is the smell of victory.
That is conservatism with a
future. And we started on that path not by nominating a Democrat-lite, but the polar opposite. The nomination of a woman with perfect
conservative credentials is causing some significant number of Democrats to re-examine everything they believe. I say:
Welcome Home. Welcome to the party of
individual achievement, regardless of race or gender.
And, finally . . . what of John McCain? I’ve read many comments about his speech being a disappointment. I don’t know how it looked or played from the floor. But I know how it played from my Los Angeles living room. I believe — and we’ll know soon enough if I’m right — that John McCain did something Thursday night more powerful and astonishing than Sarah Palin did the previous evening. Sarah stole Obama’s glamour. McCain stole his
message. (Granted, that may not be a lot, apart from the glamour, but it was all Obama had left.)
Sarah played to the base, who loved her. McCain played to the middle that we will need to win. Put his rhetorical ticks, the green background, the protestor interruptions — put all that away. No one really cares about that.
We in the opinion trade lose track of how little the American public actually knows about candidates, because they — very sensibly, in my view — have the much more important task of actually getting on with life until right . . . about . . . now. For many Americans, this was their introduction to John McCain.
From the video, we learned that John McCain is a . . . momma’s boy? That was inspired. It was unexpected, charming, and real. And McCain’s great single weakness, his age, gets considerably less worrisome seeing his 96-year-old mother — who is more than spry and lucid, but a veritable firecracker. That’s a subtle move — an elegant and brilliant move.
I knew McCain’s father and grandfather were admirals. I did not know his grandfather was on the USS Missouri, came home, and died the next day after giving everything he had for his country. That’s powerful. And the image of his father standing on the North Vietnamese border, looking out toward his missing son as he orders the bombing of the city where he is being held? McCain reminded us that there are things far more important than politics.
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