Some highlights from last night’s speech. Clive Davis couldn’t stop cringing. I thought she did a pretty good job. Then again, when you’ve had a start like the one she’s just had, it would have been difficult to do much worse. I think Alex Massie says it best:
The best bits of the speech—and the parts that showed how she might be able to reach out beyond the evangelical base—came when she stressed her small town credentials. Ezra Klein, who has the best liberal response I’ve seen, is right to say that even here there were missed opportunities: she should have talked more, not less about the lessons she had learnt about the government that matters most to people (and the limitations of government) and about how she would take those lessons with her to Washington.
Still, presumably this can be developed in due course. This was, to my mind, the most important part of the speech:
I grew up with those people. They’re the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food, and run our factories, and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America.
I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town. I was just your average hockey mom and signed up for the PTA.
I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.
So I signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my kids’ public education even better. And when I ran for city council, I didn’t need focus groups and voter profiles because I knew those voters, and I knew their families, too.
This is where she must make her stand. Other people can do the foreign policy stuff and the big picture theorising the punditocracy loves and uses to measure a candidate’s worth. Her Unique Selling Point is her ordinaryness. Ordinaryness laced with sass and confidence for sure, but the ordinary values and interests of small town America nonetheless. She is the first Vice-Presidential nominee in more than 30 years who’s not served in - or, if you prefer, been corrupted by - Washington. That should be a strength, not a weakness. (The hockey mom line was ad-libbed incidentally. It’s not in the prepared script.)
It’s precisely because she was sitting on the PTA a handful of years ago that she can talk to “ordinary” voters in terms they can understand. It’s precisely because she’s not rich that she can claim, with more plausibility than, say, a Hillary Clinton, that she gets it. She gets it because, you know, her sister Heather runs a gas station and Sarah Palin knows the pressures ordinary folks are struggling with, understands their concerns about the costs of health care or college tuition and all the other things that matter most to people. It’s not the quantity of experience that matters but the quality.
As a former Hillary supporter, I have to gleefully say, Palin gave Obama a whooping with her speech last night! It was absolutely stunning. Of course I am dismayed on Palin’s views on choice, which make it difficult for me to support her. However, she is fresh and truly not a Washington insider (or a Chicago insider for that matter). Obama and Biden will have a tough time with her sincerity and I was especially impressed that she called Obama out on “the emperor’s new clothing”. Hah.
Just because Palin is pro-life, it doesn’t mean she and McCain are going to try to change it. I also am pro choice with the exception of partial birth abortion, to me, it is infanticide.
Oh, but she’s anti-choice even with rape! Just too extreme for me.