A Pilgrim’s Digression

Sarah Palin gave a good speech last.  It was a brilliant piece of rhetoric, without a doubt, and probably powerfully persuasive in her favor for a lot of people.  She revealed herself to be not the unlikely draftee I thought her yesterday, but a mercenary to John McCain’s citizen soldier.

For the Republicans, she is right where she needs to be in this election, and if McCain wins it will be largely because of her.

Her performance was stunning.  But it was a performance, let there be no doubt.  The tip-off was the whole Hockey Moms charade.  Throughout the beginning of the speech, the Fox cameraman kept flashing to these women holding hand-made Hockey Mom signs; it was only a matter of time before Palin delivered her rehearsed joke about them.

I’ve always thought the whole “<insert sport> Mom” thing is a disgustingly calculated political ploy to even further divide the electorate into an even smaller constituency, but “Hockey Moms?”  How many could there possibly be?  As far as I know, no one even plays Hockey in my part of Virginia.  Kids certainly don’t play hockey in my home state of West Virginia; when I was a kid, even soccer was looked down upon as a sport for wimps.

What I took away from the Palin speech is that where John McCain has failed to deliver the goods, in terms of recreating himself as an exciting candidate, Sarah Palin is going to pick up the slack.  She’s dangerous, and I have some advice for the Obama team about dealing with her (not that anyone is listening to me).

First of all, I think if the Obama campaign are going to respond at all, they should focus on the unparalleled negativity in her speech.  Both she and Rudy Guiliani were delivering ad hominem attacks and one liners all night.  Palin’s rhetorical specialty (or that of her speech writer) seems to be antithesis.

“But listening to [Obama] speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or even a reform, not even in the state senate.”

“This is a man [Obama] who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting and never use the word “victory” — except when he’s talking about his own campaign.”

“In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change.”

I listen to this rhetorical swill for Republican pigs, and it makes me angry, as I think it should make any thinking person angry.  No doubt it makes Obama angry–and I haven’t even cited the worst of her personal attacks.  Both Giuliani and Palin mocked Obama’s résumé, Palin stating that “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”

Obama and his campaign have never mocked Palin’s job as mayor; in fact I think he has hardly even mentioned her at all, yet.  When her experience has been discussed or ridiculed in the media, no one ridicules the fact that she was a mayor, only the idea that being a mayor of a small town somehow qualifies her to be the Vice-President and potentially the President of the United States!

Equally ridiculous, though, were some of the techniques she used to inflate her own résumé.  I don’t know if anyone caught this, but she compared herself to Harry Truman at one point when she said, “Long ago, a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri, he followed an unlikely path — (cheers) — he followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency.”  Despite the irony of Republicans cheering the mention of Harry Truman (he would have rolled in his grave!), here you have this Republican who believes being the leader of the PTA belongs on her list of qualifications to the Vice Presidency equating her experience with that of Harry Truman!

Here’s a reminder for Palin: Truman was an officer in World War I; he was a clothing store owner for a couple of years, roughly 1919 to 1921, until his store went bankrupt in the recession of ‘21 (he blamed Republican policy); after that he decided to try politics and joined the political machine of Democrat party boss Tom Pendergast and was elected a judge in 1925; in 1934 he was elected to the Senate where he served until being chosen as Roosevelt’s Vice President in 1944.

This is the President to whom Sarah Palin is comparing herself?  It just makes me sick.  It ought to make any reasonable person sick that this kind of blatant exaggerated comparison is passed off as a valid analogy by these Republicans.  But that’s the point, what we saw last night was rhetoric, not reason.  That speech was intended to persuade by any means necessary, not inform or enlighten.

The exaggerations, outright lies, and negativity was appalling and infuriating, but Democrats can’t let that provoke them to respond in kind.  Instead, point out how so much of the Republican convention so far has been a concerted attack on Obama, rather than proposing solutions to America’s problems.  Keep the debate as impersonal as possible.

Indeed, I’d say ignore Palin entirely, and lay the blame on McCain.  It’s McCain’s convention; he’s the one running for President, not Palin.  If we become distracted with fighting this battle as if Palin is the nominee on the Republican side, Obama will lose.  Bring the debate back to McCain and ignore Palin.

The reason I say that is because Republicans are using her to reframe the election; don’t let them do it!  It was getting to the point where McCain’s wealth, his homes, his heiress wife, his being out of touch, were becoming the “story” about him.

Now, Republicans have found their George W. Bush in Sarah Palin.  By that, I mean she is the “Every Woman” people can relate to.  When she is attacked for being a hick, people will bristle and dig in their heels and vote for her anyway.  Twice, despite being perhaps the most ignorant, foolish man ever to sit in the Oval Office, Americans elected George W. Bush because he portrayed himself as the ordinary man against the nefarious, unpatriotic Democrats and their liberal media surrogates.

If Republicans are allowed to create this story of the middle-America wife and mother, mayor of Wassila and governor of “the great state of Alaska”–who is demeaned and mocked by Democrats and the liberal media, Obama will lose.  Never mind that Republicans engage in their own brand of mean-spirited mockery.  I know it’s frustrating, but that’s how it works.  Republicans mastered that kind of political warfare in the 2000 and 2004 elections, and Democrats haven’t found a strategy for beating it.

Part of the problem is that people can’t make the distinction between the media and the Democrats, and therein lies the danger for Obama.  Anything negative the media reports is going to reflect badly on Obama, but Obama has no control over the media.  The National Enquirer right now is up in Alaska researching a story that Palin had an affair with her husband’s business partner.  Whatever becomes of that story, Republicans are going to tack it onto Obama’s back like a “kick me” sign.  Never mind that he had nothing to do with it!  The story will be that Obama and the liberal media (joined at the hip in Republican rhetoric) are smearing this poor woman.

I was struck last night listening to Hannity just before the Palin speech, how he consistently brought up the “fact” that the media was hammering Palin over her husband’s DUI 22 years ago.  Now if you don’t pay attention, you might take Hannity at his word, but no one has been hammering the DUI issue.  It has been mentioned in various articles, usually in the course of discussing what McCain knew about the Palins and what he did not know at the time he chose her.

Yet Republicans will turn this into a case of Obama and the liberal media making a huge issue of a 22 year old offense.

This is a warning to Obama, not that he needs it since he has very good people around him: Republicans are back to their old playbook with Palin as stand-in quarterback for George W. Bush.  Obama had better come up with a good strategy for getting around her and scoring.  My feeling is that she is meant to be a distraction from McCain’s weaknesses.  Democrats are going to rush to tackle her while she blithely passes and McCain runs the ball in.

McCain’s where the focus needs to be.  Ignore Palin and take down McCain.