Category Archives: Sarah Palin

Gallup shows McCain leading

This morning I see that, while Nielsen sees Obama and McCain tied in "buzz" (whatever that means), Gallup sees McCain leading by 5 points. A week ago, after the Democratic Convention and before the Republican, Obama had led by 7 points in the same poll.

From the USAToday story:

WASHINGTON — The Republican National Convention has given John McCain and his party a significant boost, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken over the weekend shows, as running mate Sarah Palin helps close an "enthusiasm gap" that has dogged the GOP all year.

McCain leads Democrat Barack Obama by 50%-46% among registered voters, the Republican’s biggest advantage since January and a turnaround from the USA TODAY poll taken just before the convention opened in St. Paul. Then, he lagged by 7 percentage points.

More on that "enthusiasm gap:"

Before the convention, Republicans by 47%-39% were less enthusiastic than usual about voting. Now, they are more enthusiastic by 60%-24%, a sweeping change that narrows a key Democratic advantage. Democrats report being more enthusiastic by 67%-19%

Discuss amongst yourselves.

All of you whiny partisans: Get over it!

A normally sober fellow blogger helped me crystallize something when he posted this on a recent post of mine:

C’mon, Brad, after devoting a whole column to how disappointing you
found Obama’s speech, and your conviction that McCain is The One Who
Can Reach Across The Aisle, I want to hear what you have to say about
the hatred that filled that room last night. Forget the hug.

"The hatred?" You know, I never know when you guys are kidding. You are kidding, right?

Because if you Dems are serious about the stuff I’ve seen about
"hate" (a verb that I believe, translated from the Democratese, means
"to disagree with me"), and you Repubs are serious about the… well, I
don’t even remember the words, but there were a lot of stupid ones
about how mean and nasty "the media" was supposedly being to your
precious Sarah (come on, Dems, remind me of some of the dumb words they
used), then I think all of y’all need to take a chill pill.

Dems, the woman delivered a boilerplate veep speech. I’ve tried to
think back and remember what she said that y’all might think was so
mean, and all I remember was something about a mayor being like a
community organizer but with responsibility, and a candidate who’s
authored two memoirs but no major legislation, both of which seemed
like solid, above-the-belt shots to me. This is what veep candidates
do, people — they criticize the opposition. The question about Palin
was whether she could do it. She could.

And you whiny Repubs, give me a freaking break with your Spiro Agnew
Revisited hyperventilation about the fact that the "media" — which,
although you don’t believe it, is a plural word, and does not refer to
a monolithic beast — was so terrible and awful to this woman. Come on.
She sprang from McCain’s brow like Minerva from Zeus. Nobody knew squat
about her, and there was a huge, sucking vacuum demanding such info. Of
COURSE her daughter’s pregnancy was reported when she made a statement
about it. (What I objected to in a previous post what that anyone was
idiotic enough to mistake that for an "issue." Here’s a handy-dandy
guide: Abuse of power as governor, issue. Daughter’s reproductive
status: Not an issue. Think you can keep that straight, folks?)

Or did you mean, Tim, the reaction of the GOP partisans in the room?
They like stuff like that, Tim. Just as the Dems in Denver like shots
at the GOP team. They’re partisans. They cheer. Seems like you could
let them have their moment; it’s the first time anybody in that party
has looked even mildly animated this year. Dems have been cheering themselves
hoarse since about 2006.

The Hug

Hug1

Yes, I know what you were thinking when John McCain and Sarah Palin hugged on stage last night: Does this mean she’s got Bush cooties now?

That’s not what you were thinking? Well, what then? Surely you were thinking something.

You say it didn’t strike you as worth thinking about? Then you’re just not trying. Someone on PBS last night — I forget which of the talking heads — DID see it as fraught with meaning. It was noted that Walter Mondale scrupulously avoided hugging Geraldine Ferraro during the 1984 campaign. The point being, apparently, look how far we’ve come, yadda-yadda…

Here’s what I was thinking: I noted the expression on Gov. Palin’s face. It seemed to say, "Yeah, OK, I’ve got to hug this guy; it’s expected. But I don’t have to like it. And don’t get any ideas, buster…"

Or something along those lines. I admit, my ability to read minds isn’t perfect. But I’m pretty sure she wasn’t delighted.

In any case, it’s an expression I haven’t seen on her face at any other time, so far.

What did you think of Sarah Palin’s speech?

Palinspeak

For my part, not knowing what to expect,
I was impressed. She fought her cornerPalinstand_3
well, if you’ll permit the sports metaphor. If nothing else, she showed she could use a teleprompter more naturally and with greater poise than the guy at the head of the ticket.

She sort of turned my sitcom analogy around. Rather than whipping off her glasses and letting down her hair to reveal the beauty queen, she kept the specs on and unveiled a smart woman, an Earth Mother type from the small-town frontier who is a tough cookie, unintimidated by the condescension of the cosmopolitan types Rudy had mocked so earlier in the evening.

But write in and tell us what y’all thought. I’ll read it in the morning; gotta hit the sack.

Please don’t tell me there are people who think Palin’s daughter is an ‘issue’

A day or so after John McCain announced his choice of Sarah Palin, sometime over that long weekend, I remarked to someone that her great disadvantage was that she was a blank slate, and the Very First Thing she said — that is, the very first thing anyone focused on — would be blown out of all proportion and define her for the rest of the campaign, if not the rest of her life.

Joe Biden — or Joe Lieberman, or McCain, or anyone we’ve known, or think we’ve known, for years — can say something outrageous, and we’ll set it alongside all the other things we know he’s said or done, and it won’t be a make or break thing (and the reason Joe B. came first to mind is that one of the things we know about ol’ Joe, from long experience, is that he has a penchant for saying things that some regard as outrageous).

Not so with Sarah P. The first thing she says or does that makes an impression — which hasn’t happened yet — will fill up the vacuum in her "conventional wisdom" dossier.

Therefore, the stakes for her speech tonight would be extremely high. And so it should be; we don’t have years to get to know her.

Of course, I reckoned without the idiocy of the 24/7 TV "news" spin machine. It has to have something to masticate EVERY SECOND OF EVERY DAY, and whatever it’s chewing at a given moment is by its foolish definition THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD, so it couldn’t possibly wait until her speech Wednesday night.

If she had made the mistake of saying sometime since Friday that she doesn’t like the color blue, THAT would be the object of endless, fascinated conjecture, "analysis" and "judgment" by the talking heads: How could she not like blue? What sort of person is this? Everybody likes blue — all Americans, anyway. And what hypocrisy to be running with a Navy man, not liking blue! Or will she now claim, implausibly, that it’s only SKY blue that she dislikes? Watch for campaign releases claiming that she’s always liked NAVY blue…

And so forth. The cable TV talking heads make me think of Ford Prefect’s theory about Earthlings: "If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working."

So yesterday — or the day before; I get all confused in weeks that contain holidays — we heard that Sarah Palin’s daughter is pregnant. To which I responded — to myself — Uh-huh. Well, I’m sure that’s been hard for them. And then I continued with my life, waiting for someone to say something that actually had any bearing whatsoever on this young woman’s suitability to be vice president.

But, apparently because her speech wasn’t until tonight, the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s daughter, of all absurd things, was dubbed an "issue" worthy of discussion, and even more implausibly, sufficient grist for snap conclusions as to Sarah Palin’s viability as a candidate. And yet it’s not even anything that I had deemed relevant (OR appropriate) to discuss on the blog, and as y’all know, I don’t have a high standard for such things.

Yes, I know; I should have expected this. Yet I was actually surprised when I picked up newspapers this morning and read that the McCain campaign (which had known about the pregnancy, the husband’s DUI, etc., and didn’t think any more of it than I did) was actually having to COPE with this "issue," that it was causing consternation throughout the GOP convention, yadda-yadda.

Oh, come ON, people! Get a freakin’ life!

Get back to me when you have something of substance to say about this woman…

What the locals say about Palin (not much)

As you know, the nation dodged a bullet last week — at least, a rumored bullet — when John McCain didn’t go off his rocker and choose Mark Sanford as his running mate.

Even though his status as a likely choice was the figment of fevered imaginations on the WSJ editorial board and elsewhere on the libertarian fringe, they mentioned him often enough, and their pulpit was bully enough, that I still worried a tiny bit right up to the last. In that corner of my mind, I pictured myself turning into Paul Greenberg, the Arkansas editorialist who has spent years of his life explaining to the country what a mess Bill Clinton is.

I didn’t want that role.

Anyway, having that perspective, I was curious as to what the Alaska press would tell us that we didn’t know about Sarah Palin. Editor & Publisher anticipated that curiosity on my part, but its first offering in that vein is pretty vanilla. The closest thing to a local insight provided by the Daily News-Miner in Fairbanks — going by the E&P excerpt, was this:

There was also some pandering right from the start.
“I told Congress `Thanks but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere,’ ”
Palin reported to the crowd in Dayton, Ohio. “If our state wanted a
bridge, I said, we’d build it ourselves.”


But the state kept the bridge money. That’s because
Alaskans pay federal gas taxes and they expect a good share to come
back, just like people do in every other state. We build very little by
ourselves, and any governor who would turn that tax money down likely
would be turned out of office.

That’s it? The woman’s been governor for two years and that’s all you’ve got to tell us that we didn’t know? That could have been written by somebody in Washington, for Pete’s sake! E&P says that’s the first installment in a series; let’s hope later installments get into some substance. It’s not like I’ve got time to browse Alaskan Web sites.

Anyway, until I read something out of Alaska in the vein of what I wrote about the Sanford rumors, I’ll assume McCain did all right choosing Sarah Palin.

You know who Sarah Palin reminds me of?

Palinbw

Those of you who did not like my referring to Sarah Palin as a "babe" yesterday probably won’t enjoy this post, either. But I am honor-bound to be honest with you, my readers. Also, I have a journalistic duty to tell y’all as much as possible about a candidate about whom so little is known, even if it’s based on nothing but my overactive imagination.

I had never before seen a picture of Sarah Palin, and yet from the first moment I saw her, she looked familiar. Did she to you? If so, you’re dating myself. It’s not so much that Gov. Palin looks like a particular individual. But she’s a dead-ringer for a stock character that frequently appeared in sit-coms back in the ’50s and ’60s. If you’re my age, you’ve seen that character dozens of times.

Here’s a summary of a "Beverly Hillbillies" episode which featured that character (I’ve bold-faced the relevant part):

It’s Spring Tonic time, and Granny hands it around to the family, giving Jed a double dose because he made a mean comment on it. Meanwhile, at the bank, the secretary Gloria Buckles, who has worked on the Clampett account, has said she can take the paper work to Jed. When she gets up there, she transforms herself from a plain secretary to a gorgeous one, with her sights set on Jed’s money. She flirts with Jed, telling him that she needs a mountain man to make her happy. The family is worried about this young gold digger, and the fact that Jed has had a double dose of tonic. They call Drysdale and he rushes over, not recognizing Gloria. She reveals that her and Jed have discussed marriage, and when questioned, Jed says it is true. Gloria asks when they should set the date, and Jed says a few years, because that is when Jethro will be of marrying age. Jethro runs off with Gloria, and Jane runs after them to get her man back. Elly asks her father why he doesn’t want to marry her, and he says you have to start worrying when the bait starts chasing you.

Do you recognize her now? Yes, she’s the frumpy secretary who first appears in a conservative business outfit, wearing glasses, with her hair tied up on top of her head, who, at a critical moment in the plot, suddenly removes her jacket, whips off the glasses and lets her hair come tumbling down, and immediately looks like Miss America.

Of course — and this was the really cheesy thing about this plot device — she looked like Miss America when you first saw her, just Miss America with glasses and her hair done up. I never could decide whether the sitcom writers really thought America was stupid enough to be surprised by this plot device, or whether we were supposed to see through it, and see the transformation-to-glamour coming — you know, so that the folks at home would say, "I know what’s going to happen — watch this!"

That’s what made me realize that’s who Gov. Palin reminded me of. She IS beautiful, obviously so, and the specs and the tied-up hair are simply devices meant to say to us, "I’m serious; I’m not just a babe; you can vote for me."

The bad thing about this is that on some level, deep down, some of us who grew up on 50s and 60s TV are thinking, "This is gonna be good — watch this!" (And subconsciously, we’re expecting a scene in which she suddenly lets her hair down and removes the glasses, and of course, Cindy McCain walks in at that moment and says, "John! Who is THIS?" and a befuddled McCain goes "Hominahominahomina," and the laugh track plays.) Or maybe that’s the GOOD thing, in terms of keeping voters interested in the ticket. I don’t know.

By the way, I couldn’t find a picture to illustrate what I was talking about, but here’s video of the relevant part of the Beverly Hillbillies episode. The transformation of Gloria Buckles occurs toward the end of the first part:


LikeTelevision Embed Movies and TV Shows

Choosing Sarah Palin

Mccain_veepstakes_pal_wart

Folks, I’m absolutely swamped, this being Friday morning, but I thought I’d give those of you with the time a place to discuss McCain’s choice of … let me go check her name again… Sarah Palin to be his running mate. Here are some conversation-starters:

  • One thing’s for sure, I don’t have any video to share with you of Gov. Palin. Never met the woman.
  • For a brief moment this morning, I thought maybe Bobby Jindal was back on the short list, when I saw this piece by him in the WSJ. (I know that’s not logical, but the human mind is susceptible to the suggestion of coincidences.) That would have been cool, because it would have made the two tickets perfectly symmetrical — McCain playing the role of Biden on the GOP ticket, and Jindal (young, charismatic, ethnic) playing Obama.
  • Do you think McCain made a big mistake not beefing up his ticket’s economic cred with Romney?
  • Not that I want to attach a lot of importance to her gender, but it would seem that McCain is really, really serious about going after those disaffected Hillary voters, the ones who took HER gender very, very seriously.
  • Where’s Wayne Campbell when you need him for expert commentary on whether she, if elected, would qualify as the first babe to be a heartbeat from the presidency?

Talk amongst yourselves.